[paxys]

In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.

[Felz]

You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.

[fasteo]

>>> Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS

Not my knowledge.

SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents).

From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS.

Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.

[Felz]

It sounds like Amazon is adding quite a surcharge onto their SMS, then.

https://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/

[ncallaway]

> In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else

This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up.

I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim "In _all_ such cases".