Comment by dikei

> 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.