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I mean...that's how SMS used to work? Or still works?

Once upon a time it was expensive to send messages and now it's cheap.

Yeah. Iirc, I used to have to pay $0.20 per SMS message, sent and received, before unlimited plans became a thing. Also had a limited amount of minutes for phone calls.

I remember Verizon wireless at the time had a plan with unlimited nights and weekends for calls and texts, so my friends and I would message each other like crazy on the weekends when it was free. Got grounded when I got my first girlfriend in high school for racking up the phone bill from text messages and promptly got my phone taken away.

You had to pay for receiving SMS?

Yeah, in the early days, at least in the US, carriers used to charge for both incoming and outgoing SMS unless you had a plan that included it, usually with a limited amount of messages and they were quite expensive for the time.

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