SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble

It doesn't just cost consumers either. If you're a developer who wants to implement SMS in an app, you're looking at probably $.05 per message, maybe shaving a bit off with a volume buy.<p>I had a fun app that I have largely given up on once I realized it was just too cost prohibitive to offer the service for free and allow SMS messaging.<p>(This was using Clickatell btw.)

As a customer, I hate getting gouged by text messaging.<p>As an entrepreneur, it gives me hope that there are useful services which people are willing to pay for directly. The social/viral distribution of sms is impressive: it costs me to send a message to my friends, and I'm encouraging them to spend money with their provider in order to respond.

I really don't see that "dollars per byte" is a sensible way to measure the price of transferring data.<p>If it makes you feel any better, think of the SMS fee it as a five pence fee for establishing the connection, and then a negligible per-byte cost which gets rounded down to zero cents. Happy now? Is five pence really all that unreasonable a price for sending a message?<p>Don't get me wrong: phone companies do all sorts of things which are annoying, overpriced and/or unethical, but I don't see this as one of them.

this kind of gouging has to turn off consumers. I know when I heard a gallon of inkjet ink was $4,000 I immediately started looking for better solutions

Talk about comparing apples to oranges. I could send a few terabytes (or 100 32GB SD cards) from one location to another for about $20 and compare the costs of sending data on the Internet unfavorably to it. Like this, however, such a comparison would make no sense.

Talk to someone in the mobile industry and they'll brush this off as "not being afraid to charge for value", or at least that's how someone like Russell Beattie describes it.