$50/month, these days, if I'm not mistaken. (You can only use it abroad for two months at a time, but you can update your location as as far as I'm aware, and it's $/€ 50 in most places.)

Price wise, it's no comparison, but the two don't directly compete yet – power usage and antenna size of Iridium and Starlink are orders of magnitude apart (largely due to the L-band spectrum available to Iridium globally).

The higher rate gets you oceanic use, which is a big benefit of iridium.

You are correct that it can be $50, but AFAIK that’s a different plan that is land or near-land only.

Ah yes, good point.

I believe the $50 plan used to have a pay-per-GB option for offshore use – $2 or so per GB, compared to $5 and more per MB for the competitors. But even at 300 or so, it’s orders of magnitude better for high-bandwidth use cases.

> Depending on how you look at it, Starlink can be incredibly cheap compared to Iridium.

They don't have sat-to-sat communications deployed yet, so they can work only near the ground stations.

Hmm? Starlink has had sat-to-sat active for a while now. They've been making a killing selling services to ships and planes lately.

The laser interlinks have been turned on.

They have sat-to-sat now. I was on a cruise ship this past summer that used starlink. I was able to get a consistent 3-5 mbps up/down in the middle of the ocean with nearest land at least several hundred miles away.