Can I ask where?

I'm in the US and any of the big carriers offer unlimited texting as a baseline, and we have pretty crappy carriers compared to a lot of the world.

Maybe on prepaid plans? Been a while since I've heard of SMS costing anything on subscription plan, outside of roaming charges. Mobile Internet effectively cannibalized that income stream for the phone companies.

yea, it's prepaid in Poland. But to be fair, I pay $12 a year for 50GB of data and don't call/text much

It costs me around 3 cents to send a domestic SMS and 40 cents to send an international one, on an unlimited data 5G plan in Japan.

That said, I don't care, since I literally can not remember the last time I sent an SMS. It must have been years ago.

That makes sense, I guess I forgot that lots of the world effectively moved on from SMS to other messaging/apps.

In Germany the standard price for an SMS is 9 cent, of which somewhere around 2-3 cents are paid to the recipient's carrier. Unlimited plans are common, but only because nobody texts anymore (same applies for phone calls).

You’re talking about the fee your carrier charges for normal texts. These are “premium” charges, meaning the user is charged an extra fee on their bill regardless of their SMS billing plan.