Send a lot of texts and looking to get your first iPhone? AT&T just became a less compelling option, as Ma Bell will be eliminating their $10 a month texting plan on August 21st.
The $10 plan allowed you to send and receive up to 1000 text messages a month, which is a pretty extreme amount by anyone’s standards. By mine, that number may as well be infinite… which is why the $20 unlimited plan offering infinite text messages seems like such a worse deal.
What really sticks in my craw about this is that it literally costs AT&T nothing to send and receive text messages. It’s all accomplished in a tiny footprint of the spectrum that is necessary just to have a cellular coverage. Text messages represent practically infinite profit for carriers, so when AT&T does something like eliminate a plan like the $10 one and tries to get everyone to spend twice as much for what is, for most people, effectively the same service in the unlimited plan… man, I see red.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
32 responses to “AT&T Eliminating $10 Texting Plans For All New iPhone Customers”
I take this to be the response to imessage. So now if you want to “text” anyone without an IOS device you have to give 20 bucks to att. They are offsetting all the people that will be cancelling att text plans due to imessages ability to send texts to ios devices for free.
Apple should just license kik and put in extra protocol that will allow for texting to all devices and then virtually everyone would get rid of txt messages in their plans.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
“So now if you want to “text” anyone without an IOS device you have to give 20 bucks to att.”
No, you use Google Voice for your SMS.
I just p a i d $21.87 for an i P a d 2-64GB and my boyfriend loves his Panasonîc Lumîx GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS.I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $657 which only cost me $62.81 to buy.
Here is the website we use to get it all from, http://bit.ly/GrabPenny
well, you can already “text” everyone for free now, if you have a Google voice. I use google voice and I text all the time (for free) to people who have texting plans.
So, I don’t know how they are planning to offset people canceling att text plans due to iMessage. iMessage is good, but only works with iOS devices only, so all the people you know who do not have an iOS device, well you won’t be able to text to them. But with Google voice, you will be able to text (regardless) if they have a smartphone or not, for free. But I don’t think very people know that.My gf family may possibly pick up (all) iPhones, but they would still have pay for texting, because a huge percentage of her friends (and including) I do not have an iOS device, so the only way to “text” us is by using the old normal fashion, text messages.
That being said, my family is probably going to go all android, and we’ll just use Google voice to text. That would save us a good $20+ a month on texting.
iMessage is good, but its really not a replacement for texting because it only works if all of your friends/co-workers/family uses all iOS devices. If not, you’re still going to have to buy texting, so I don’t think this is really a response to iOS. And I think majority of iPhone users still have friends using dumb phones or non iPhones, so I don’t think texting plans will start dropping from iPhone users, unless you could text from iMessage to other phones, and last I checked, I think it was only from iOS to iOS. But I could be wrong. :/
ATT sucks. We all know this. If they weren’t the only game in town for me, I would have let them long ago.
Well, GV cannot send picture messages (I believe).
This is a prime example of why we are severing our AT&T account 15 or so months into it when iPhone 5 comes out this fall and going to Verizon. My wife works in front of HUGE windows at her clinic and still gets cut out constantly. By BY AT&T.
I can’t wait for the spread of alternative texting platforms: Huddle (G+), iMessage, Facebook Messaging. Though AT&T will find ways to make money elsewhere, like data plans.
I tried GV for a few months but MMS wasn’t possible and a good SMS client was hard to find for iOS.
Push notifications were usually achieved through a workaround and tended to be slower than a text message would have been.
The big caveat was that my GV number was separate than my iPhone number. People could call and text me just fine using my GV number but when I dialed out to anyone my iPhone number would show on their caller ID. Explaining that yes, this is still me, just my iPhone number got awfully monotonous.
Regarding 1000 Messages vs Unlimited Messages – I’m on day 11 of 31 and I’ve sent/received 953 messages. SMS is more valuable than Voice minutes.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
I didn’t realize that mobile service providers still offered limited texting plans. I would run through 1000 texts in less then a week. Personally I don’t see the point in offering capped texting plans.
Everyone install Whatsapp on their iPhone. End of the story..no more SMS to pay.
You need to store their “google” version of the number in your contacts, then when you call it, it then routes to them via google voice. Do this, text someone, have them reply, and then save the fake number, then call it. Your google voice number shows up on caller ID
I’d lose the snarky friend with the grammar obsession.
Glad I have the grandfathered $5 plan because this latest move is further lameness from AT&T. I’d cancel the text plan altogether with the advent of iMessage, but for the bizarre fact that I can be charged for incoming texts I have no control over receiving. Anybody know if you can just flat out cancel the ability of your phone to receive texts? I don’t want to pay AT&T 20 cents per spam text I get.
I asked to have the $10 per month option removed this past August 2011, wasn’t texting that much, but friends keep sending messages, so now the 20 cents per message is starting to cost over $10 per month. At that time, they told me I could call back and have it re-instated if I changed my mind. 2 months later I asked to have it reinstated, and they tell me it’s no longer available, now it’s $20 per month for unlimited. That costs even more than the data plan. When this contract expires, I’m definitely going elsewhere, goodbye AT&T, you suck.