Text Messages a No-Go

One of the key tenants of the Techeap way is to take advantage of the value of what you are using. Now, I’ve always suspected that text messages were a bad deal, but I’ve found an interesting blog entry showing just how disgusting the mark up on text messages really is. Here the calculations are done showing that by using the same mark-up on data phone companies make on text messages on a song download, it would cost nearly $6,000 to download a 1-megabyte song.

Let me have that sink in… $6,000.

A blogger for the New York Times also tells the story of how it is cheaper to send data to space then through a text message. To Space!

Those 20 cents a message can add up very quickly, but not quickly enough for some companies. In today’s New York Times, is a story on how Verizon wants to charge marketers, alert service and social networks an extra three cents a message to send you text messages. While, you might think I would come down hard on Verizon on this, I’m actually glad to see someone else foot the bill for these messages. Now, I don’t realistically expect this to bring down costs to consumers, but if this means less text messages are sent, which the article suggests it will, I’m all for it.

I will mention a couple of sites that will let you send text messages for free from a computer, (Text2Day and TextReminders) but my real suggestion is to break your dependence on them entirely. If you have a smart phone with e-mail use that, if not, well, I suppose you could always call the other person. Your budget will thank you.