Exactly. Texts are either free or extremely cheap for almost all cell phone plans sold in the US.<p>Providers in many other countries are still attempting to engage in rent-seeking behavior by levying absurdly high fees to send texts (relative to what it costs them to send the text). It seems that US providers got over that about 10 years ago.<p>As a result, people in those areas are simply ignoring text messaging and using WhatsApp instead.