[calyhre]

I don’t know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here in France it’s been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.

We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.

[nitwit005]

Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being free to this day.

The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.

[jorvi]

Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not for consumers.

One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.