[blister]

Text messages are largely free, and Google has been operating as a carrier through Google Voice for years.

I don't think they're deprecating SMS because of cost issues, I think they just want to move forward with richer notifications and don't want to spend any time working with a legacy system.

[geogriffin]

They're definitely not free for businesses, especially worldwide. Thus why twilio is a business. Expect to pay maybe $0.03 a message. I'm not sure how that compares to advertising revenue..