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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

The color is there because a regular SMS may either take a significant amount of money per message or empty your free SMS plan. That depends on a carrier, but e.g. my SMS costs me 0.7¢ or so, iirc. And more if a message spans a very short character limit (160, or ~80 for unicode). That's what some people would like to pay attention to, because when there was no/bad internet (a regular issue back in the day) iMessage switched to SMS seamlessly.

Edit: or MMS, if that's enabled

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Is this still a commonplace practice? I remember (in the US) this being the case when I was a young teen, with a call time quota too (accidentally made a $400 USD phone bill once...), but now in my mid 20s, all the phone plans I'm aware of have unlimited local + "long distance" calling and unlimited SMS/MMS.

International calls still cost per minute, and IP bandwidth is metered, but I honestly thought metered calls/texts were mostly a thing of the past. Is this a regional thing?

In the US unlimited is common, less so internationally. That’s why WhatsApp caught on.

I live in Japan, and my carrier charges me the equivalent of 3 US cents per domestic SMS, or 40 cents for an international SMS.

On the other hand, I have unlimited data with no throttling.

Everyone here uses the LINE messenger app, or email. Literally all I have in my iOS Messages app is 2FA codes and Pingdom notifications.

This is very similar to what happens in many Latin American Countries, but they use WhatsApp instead of Line.

The phone companies got greedy and priced the individual SMS so high ($0.06 local) that nobody uses them except for 2FA codes and notifications.

If sms where still $0.02 each as they were in the early 2000s I would still use them occasionally.

iPhone users here (10%) are not really aware of iMessage because they use WhatsApp.

Anecdotal data point from Germany. SMS is still 9ct per message if you don't pay for a package with included text messages, MMS is around 39ct/300kb, and as far as I know there are no (and have never been at any price point) packages with included MMS messages.

It's not surprising >90% of people in Germany use WhatsApp (+ other messengers)

Here in Haiti, it was between texting 5 messages or call for one minutes (if you have not activated any special plans). So, when WhatsApp came, everyone switched and SMS is now mostly ads from the provider. Most people only do quick calls and would wait when the internet get better to do longer exchanges. Internet infrastructure is still not good.

Where i live an SMS costs me $0.15. the cheapest internet flat (unmetered) costs me $4 per month.

There are plans with unlimited SMS and domestic calls included, but they are like $50 per month.

Why would i pay that when everyone is on WA/Signal anyways and i can just buy a cheap data sim with unmetered bandwidth?

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