Comment by dghlsakjg
2 years ago
Not who you are responding to, but my guess is that it was all fixed costs. They spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want.
So sending 1 costs the same as sending a 10 million. It isn't that they are free to send, its that they are charged for access to the system, but aren't charged per message.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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