alt Hacker NewsI left WA in 2019, while the business api program was still very early, but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good. SMS pricing varies wildly by destination country, sometimes by destination network.
Skimming the page, also note that the quoted prices are for marketting messages, other types of messages are much less expensive.
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For SMS, the access to a specific consumer is often gated by a monopoly (that user’s telco provider) so they get to charge whatever they like. Therefore you see the variance (the greediness of individual telco). When WhatsApp join in the business messaging game, they want to maintain good relationship with the telcos and they also like the sweet margins they see they are making there.
> but that looks pretty close to pricing for SMS. Which makes market sense (imho) because it's a substitute good
People switched to whatsapp because:
1. It was free unlike SMS 2. It was ubiquitously available like SMS (unlike BBM) 3. It was genuinely a good product.
This feels like Whatsapp (Meta) is rug pulling the users once everyone has moved to Whatsapp, almost analogous to what Uber did. Drive Taxis out of business with predatory pricing, and then increase the prices.