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Beyond corporate greed, there is none. SMS' are even sent as part of routine packets on the cellular network so they don't even take extra data. Carriers might pay extra for inter carrier routing, but again the cost associated with that is mostly corporate greed.
You compare to the internet but you have to remember, back when SMS' were the only player in terms of cellular messaging, cellular data cost an arm and a leg.
As far as I could understand, North American carriers charged through the nose for mobile data for the longest time, but usually bundled SMS with some plans in some form, be it a set number of messages, or unlimited nights/weekends (oof, I don’t feel younger typing that one out). I was a student working for one of our Canadian carriers the first time I saw more than like a gig of data for less than 70$/month, and that was in the long term contracts, cancellation fees days lol
In most of the rest of the world, data became cheaper faster, but SMS was/is still expensive. This, combined with iPhone’s popularity in NA making people use iMessage, led to a lot of people just sticking to the defaults and use SMS on one side of the Atlantic, while the rest used WhatsApp or similar.
Pretty much, it was still expensive af though. I got my first cellphone in 1999 with Fido. Probably paid something like 50$ month and that came with like 100 texts messages and not very many minutes of local only calling.
My first non-prepaid plan with something that was not the cheapest flip phone possible, must have been around 2006-2007, with a slide phone, and the very minimum plan I could get which was, IIRC, 50 minutes of local calls, unlimited nights and weekends, and exactly zero text messages included, no caller ID nor voicemail 😂 First time I had a data plan was in late 2011, when I got my first smartphone (Galaxy SII), and that was definitely less than 1GB/month…
If you think you're old, I started with a Nokia 5110...
Oh I don’t think I’m particularly old, statistically speaking I’ve got about the same amount or a bit more left to go… We just all have those moments that make you realize time flies, don’t we?
I quit with WhatsApp when Meta acquired it.
There was potential legislation and a lot of congressional probes in the mid-late 2000's in the US that essentially forced cellular carriers to publicly admit that it cost next to nothing on their end to send SMS messages(like 10^-7^¢ per message) yet they charged insane premiums for them of 20¢ per message. This ended up being the catalyst for US carriers dropping most SMS charges to stay competitive while the rest of the world just changed over to alternate messaging services to avoid the fees instead like you said.