zlacker

> spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want.

This is not how SMS pricing works in many, if not, most countries.

>>lxgr+(OP)
Is that true at scale? If I tell the telecoms that I want to send a billion messages per year it seems like they might be willing to take a lump sum instead of setting up the systems to bill based on usage.

I have no experience directly with foreign telecoms, so I was simply explaining how something with no marginal cost could still be a very expensive system.

>>lxgr+(OP)
I don't know of countries that mandate a minimum price. If you are doing high volume you are free to work directly with carriers. If you are drawing as much billable traffic as you are sending, then that could even be a wash.

>>nerdbe+nW
It’s not countries mandating a minimum price (although regulators often impose a maximum), but the carriers themselves.

> If you are drawing as much billable traffic as you are sending

SMS verification traffic is usually unidirectional, so that’s very unlikely to be the case.

>>dghlsa+B4
> Is that true at scale? If I tell the telecoms that I want to send a billion messages per year it seems like they might be willing to take a lump sum instead of setting up the systems to bill based on usage.

In most of the world, SMS is billed per-message, so it's basically no extra effort on the Telecoms side at all. In fact, Telecoms' online charging systems are fast enough to calculate users' data usage by seconds in real time, so they don't even blink at counting SMS.

>>lxgr+vf1
Yes but in this case we are describing old-school Twitter, in which people made their tweets via SMS. That's why it was easier for them to make these deals.