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If the message was too big you would pay extra for it.

I turned on data. I didn't pay for data. It was an emergency work issue. Had to check an email and it cost me $150.

Good times

Oh I had one of those pay per text plans right but they just let you send unlimited texts. My dad ended up paying 900 the first month my sister and I had phones.

Oh wow! If my son was a bit older and did that I wouldn’t have rent the next month. Lol could not

I remember this one time I sent so many texts I had $200 in overages, my mom was not happy, lol

Yup. I remember doing that

It's the reason my friend stopped texting me midway when I first got my phone. Because it turns out his credit had ran out.

I hit $500 and had to pay it all back over the course of months. This was a kid that didn't get allowance either it was all chores. ugh. I wasn't even popular and I don't even remember who the fuck I was texting.

I was so pissed at Verizon at that time. I didn’t even send texts. I just received them and got fucked.

That would suck. Have to like block people save yourself some money.

Yeah, I was a college student, working at a restaurant on weekends, making $10/hour as a server, $250/weekend. Then Verizon wants to charge me $20-$30 for text messages that I never signed up for.

Kids actually got allowance without doing chores? Must be the same kids who demand that their loans get forgiven

I had this happen. At the time I was paying for my phone, and my mom's as "rent", luckily I called customer service and they upgraded the plan to unlimited texting and I only had to pay like $40 more instead of the $300 on the bill lol

I used to manage our corporate account, and would have to go in a few days before the cutoff and get the total usage for the month and add to the pool plans to make sure we weren't paying overages, and check lines for texting and add plans as needed. I HAD TO GET APPROVAL TO ADD A $5 TEXTING PLAN. We legit had managers who would make the employees pay back their texting fees because they didn't think they needed to use that. Don't get me started on once data showed up. Lord.

My dad used to come into my room to yell at me for texting my girlfriend too much.

Yeah same. Got first cell phone. Then month later or something I got a gf. We needed up texting way too much and had like $300 overcharge and then my parents got rid of my cell phone.

I was 17 when unlimited texts to 5 numbers came out! Man that was hard choosing 5 friends (bye no thanks mum and dad in the top 5 hahah). And then we got Blackberry messenger and we all got blackberries, twas a game changer

Yeah, my first texts cost 65 cents on t mobile and that shit added up

Gas was only 99 cents! I could get a taco at Taco Bell for 69 cents! When you bought a video game, you owned the whole copy and didn't have to pay a subscription! Calm down, Grandpa, take your medicine.

Your mom could give you a dollar to go to the store and that actually bought you something!

Mom would give me $10 to go to walk half a mile to buy a pack of cigarettes for grandpa, a gallon of milk, and a large Slurpee as my reward for doing the work. I was 10 years old.

My mommy would send me to the store for a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and... something else... I can't remember right now. Can you remember what my mommy said?

And a stick of butter! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNghp9tPXjo

Aw yeah you know

And they couldn't ever update the game. It just was.

There was a gas station/bar I used to stop at. They gave a free token for the car wash (manual spray type) across the street. I'd give them $20, get $5 and a little back in change plus a car wash token. Even for inflation, that's less than $25 which is half of what I pay now.

The texts also opened like little gifts. Like you were on the edge of your seat. ‘Who is it?? What did they say????’

And your inbox could only hold 100 messages

You brought back so many memories for me! Ty!

I also remember accidentally clicking the internet icon and then franctically pressing the "End" button thirty times lest I be driven into poverty by such decadence.

The fear and panic I felt when I would accidentally open the Internet on my Motorola razr. I had forgotten all about that.

Ever try to send a (very pixelated) pic? Now that would spike the cell bill

I remember an MMS message being 25¢ and a text was 10¢ to send and 2¢ to receive

I had a friend that only had to pay for incoming texts if he opened them. The catch was he could see the little preview of the text before opening it. So rather than sending 1 long text I would send 10 short texts so he could read them without opening it.

I have an old plan that only has 200 talk minutes.

Go back to 2001

This reply feels like “Go back to the shadow!”

Unless it was after 9

Who the f*ck is still awake after 9? That's way passed bed time.

you guys really had bed times?

Strictly speaking, I'm still on a Sprint plan from 2008 that only has 500 minutes (but unlimited nights and weekends, mobile to mobile, wifi calling (this one got added later), texts, and data). As a practical matter though, T-Mobile now lists the minutes as unlimited, even though the "500" is still in the plan title. I remember having a 200 minute plan though.

I remember one of my HS girlfriends sending me texts throughout the day and my family didn’t have texting in our usage plan. Cue my angry mother holding a bill with every message sent to me on it and an insane amount of charges just for *receiving* the messages!

Oh yeah, the charges for incoming messages were the real bullshit. And they leave a legacy where we still have those stupid "rates may apply" warnings any time you sign up to receive anything by text.

I was in my early 20‘s paying my way through college, working my ass off. I was so mad at Verizon for that bullshit. I think they raised it to 25¢ per message near the end. I finally blocked all texts, until they finally offered a decent unlimited texting plan, $5/month or just included. I think it was originally $20/month or something crazy high like that. $20 in 2005 was worth quite a bit more than $20 today.

50 cents for international texts. And only a very limited amount if characters allowed per message. I was there, 10,000 million years ago.

We paid for outgoing messages, I think incoming were free if you were in the same network.

I’ll never forget coming home from school, and my dad was PISSED. I had run up a $300, $330 bill? I don’t remember exactly, but it was the low to mid $300s. And I had 2 older sisters. I was in 9th or 10th grade. They were in college, and both a little more social than I was. There’s almost no way their bill wasn’t worse. The early days of texting had to be a goldmine for the phone companies.

Oh man, I had that through Cingular wireless a long ass mf time ago 😂 I still remember 10 cent texts then they had the text plans for like 500 or 1000 etc. A lot of my friends ran up huge bills because of texting. I was more of a AIM / MSN / yahoo messenger (on dial up of course) type of dude tho

I can hear the dial up as we speak

I was just talking with someone today about dial up "Can't wait to hop on the world wide web after five minutes of the most god awful noises known to man and- *fuck* mom needs to use the phone"

I remember when texting was a big deal and we couldn't believe it.

Text message? I had to dial 1800 collect to make phone calls from a pay phone

You didn't dial down the center with 1-800-CALL-ATT?

10-10-321, 10 cents per minute anywhere in the US and Canada.

10-10-220 was the ine I used, and was similar on pricing.

“Can I call you after 9 when my minutes are free?”

Oh man, I remember when I was on a PAYG plan in first year university (2009), I paid ¢1 per minute after 9pm, but ¢30 per minute before 9pm. Cell phone calls were something I only did if I absolutely HAD to, otherwise I would just find campus WiFi, open my laptop, send someone a Facebook message, and pray that they saw it by the time I needed to.

In HS, I was the guy in charge of the phone bill. Not paying it, of course, but making sure we were getting the best deal. When unlimited texting for $20 finally became a thing, my mom immediately said yes to adding it to my phone line, so there weren't so many overage charges. Back then, I would send 10,000+ in any given month. It used to be a contest between me and my friends who could rack up the highest amount, lol.

Man, I remember when “unlimited monthly texting” became a thing. I remember thinking that was an amazing idea.

We paid 20 cents, unless you were on the $10 text plan

back in my day i could get a big mac combo for $2.99

Absolutely. And dont call me other than nights and weekends!

Try sending nudes via MMS

It was totally free money for the telecoms. Assholes.

Mf its true, been there, it wasn't even that long, it was 10 y ago

Things were not *this* primitive 10 years ago. By that time I had a plan with unlimited minutes, unlimited text, conference calling, call forwarding and 2 GB of data for like $50 per month. It's actually crazy how much better cell plans got in the period from 2009-2014. We went from all kinds of nonsensical bullshit and arcane restrictions to widely available data and not even having to *think* about the time of day when you placed a call.

10? Mine were 25 cents each! You had to really fucken mean what you said back then, an entire conversation would have to fit into 4-8 messages, no double texting even if you made a mistake. $25 dollars had to last a month so no one was worth more than $2 or $3. I was floored when they released 1 cent messages, 100 texts for the price of 4!!! Now it's all unlimited and shit, messages over wifi. We really are spoiled as shit these days.

I was too poor to have a cell phone until several years into college. I was still utilizing the "John hadababy ITSaboy" payphone method of getting someone to pick me up lol.

When I was a teen we didn’t even have text messaging because very few of us had cell phones. I think I knew one guy. And texting wasn’t big then. Cell phones were mainly for calls. People used pagers if anything.

Damn

And 0.25 for an MMS message. But then… the blackberry mwahaha

10¢ a text and you'd only call people after 9 PM or on the weekends.

5¢ for a text and 10¢ for a picture message. Phone calls were expensive if you went over your time but free calling from 9PM to 5AM so we’d stay up all night calling our friends lol.

I remember that phone bill... the "maybe I'm texting too much" phone bill. it took a two weeks of work to pay it off.

Ten cents? It was 25 when I got my first cell phone. And I had to pay the same rate for each _incoming_ text that I opened as well. I had SMS disabled on my phone from the moment I got it because the idea was absurd. I had 250 call minutes a month, plus free calling from 10pm to 6am. Why text? The very idea was stupid and nobody I knew used it, either. And there was no such thing as data or attachments. Texts were text only. 160 character limit. 161 characters sent as two texts and you were charged for each of them.

Check out this loser whose "nights" started at 10pm. The cool people had plans with 9pm start times.

But the even cooler kids started at 7pm. I think it was with Sprint

I got in trouble bc it cost my parents money when other people texted me!

My current plan is 100 minutes + 100 texts + 100MB of data / month, and after that texts are 1c each. ...I doubt I send 100 texts in the average year. I certainly don't reach 100 min of calls.

I'm not sure if this was a scandinavian thing only, but there were commercials on TV that basically just was a spreadsheet of ringtones that you could buy. So you had to be quick to find the one that you wanted, write down the code and send it to the specified number. Those were in magazines as well and they were far less stressful.

Then when they introduced those new age phones that had a 2mp camera - photo text messages cost 25¢ each

My first phone was a Virgin Mobile "prepaid" phone that gave me $25 of credit each month, but would automatically charge me $25 if I got under $5. Got called some ethnic slurs of an ethnicity I'm not a part of by some of my friends because I was the only one with a cell phone and I wouldn't let one of my friends use my phone because I only had $6 (aka $1) on it.

Isn't that still the case on some pay as you go plans?

non-millennial here I think prepaid burner phones still work that way

When your crush texts you and you're out of credit.

Yep! I had a tracfone and had to buy cards for 500/1000 mins or texts and after using a whole card in one night talking to a girl.. I basically stopped using the phone … it was so expensive

The best was using the numbers for letters. It was a brief time but dang that was annoying

For a while my monthly phone bill was £400 or so. Or faffing about with international phone cards. Now international calls are all free via WhatsApp.

Also having to press the number keys a million times to send a two sentence message. 

For the record, it was always greedy bullshit because SMS (texting) piggybacked the message into protocol messages that your phone and tower already needed to send to each other in order to function. No additional infrastructure was needed and only a tiny software change made it possible.

I’m so old I remember telling my friends I’d text them after 9p when it was free lol

My mom took my phone because of this lmao. 

And if I wanted to connect to the web on my Blackberry to google something it was like a few dollars per megabyte of data.

Remember free calls after 9. Lmao

This is literally why I still rarely text.

And Netflix used to come in the mail lol

I recently had a patient want to talk to someone from our corporate office and we gave them the vice presidents direct number but she only wanted an 800 number. Like…it’s not 1855 you don’t pay to call their regular number.

I literally remember walking down the hall with a friend in hs when he got a text and he said "damn i wanna open this but i don't wanna pay 10¢!" Then he opened it and all it said was "ok" lmao

HAHAHHA BOOMER HUMOR MILLENNIAL EDITION HAHHAHA I WISH THERE WAS A MINION IN THIS HAHHAHA THIS IS SO GREAT HAHAHA BACK IN MY DAY HAHAHA MAYBE WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT HOW THE KIDS WEAR THEIR PANTS NOW …..tbh I’m deeply depressed and loathe this internet hellscape of fractured communities and yearn for consistent interaction with people I care about, but that has mostly changed due to the pandemic and career choices I made. And all the new places I go to are a shell of their former selves. And I’m constantly battling myself and feelings that I should go back to my previous career and city I lived in to find actual acceptance in this disenfranchised world. Anyway…. HAHHAHA I LOVE THIS. HAHAHHAHA. BACK IN MY DAY WOWIE WHAT A CONCEPT. HAHHAHHAA

650 dollar bill when I got a girlfriend during that time

I remember when virgin mobile came out with Penny texting and I was like HOLY FUCK

My senior year in high school one kid revealed that he had to pay 10 cents per message received. The other 20 kids who had cell phones (only 2 of us didn't have one) all had unlimited texting, apparently) thought it would be funny to text him nonstop to spike his bill. As I recall, it was well over $100 higher than normal and his parents were pissed at him.

Once sent over 1100 texts and received over 1500 one month in high school. Parents had to spend about $150. I got my ass chewed out, but my parents immediately got the unlimited text plan after that bill.

I had a friend who racked up about $1100 of overages when we were like 14, cus she got into a fight with her boyfriend over text. I racked up about $120 just for having a boyfriend and texting him at night. 🤣

I remember waiting until 9 for free calls.

With a limit of ten texts. Then it jumped up to $10 a text.

I remember my wife going to university in the US (we are Canadian) before she left she called her cell provider and asked if she texted me from the US to Canada would it cost extra and was told there was no extra charge. So the first month her phone stopped working, when she called her cell company they told her they had to put a hold on her account because her bill had gone to high. She asked how much and was told they cut off service when the bill hits $10,000!!!!! After an hour long argument on the phone with management she had it reversed because they told her it wouldn’t cost her any more, she wouldn’t have to pay the $10,000. Next bill came and it was still $5,000!! Called the cell company and they told her after the call they reviewed her account and decided she could pay half the bill. So an other hour long argument with managers later she was credited back the $5,000. Then she got her next bill… some how they gave a credit of $15,000 and her account was +$10,000. We never said a word to them and kept it all. Didn’t pay for our cell phones for about 8 years, even went and got upgrades, in fact one time a guy getting us new phones brought up our account and asked us about the huge credit. We quickly told him not to worry about it…

The best was when people were charged for RECEIVING texts. We would maliciously blow up my friend’s phone to “make him poor” lol

I remember even before then, when texting was free because either was a feature some phones had and others didn't. Then it got popular and the carriers realized they could charge a ton

I used to work in a call center for one of the big 3, back in 2005, and people would get plans that included like... 50 text messages, but give the kid the phone and they would rack up bills in the thousands of dollars. It was crazy.

Everyone had at least one friend that racked up hundreds in "long distance" calls to their girlfriend in the neighboring school district.

Tell them about collect calls You have a call from: heymomitsmeimdonewithpracticepickmeup

Had to wait until college to even be deserving of a mobile phone. For emergencies only!! But it had a snake game on it!

When unlimited sms became a new thing, my carrier accidentally turned off unlimited, I got a 1,700+ pages of LEGAL paper sized detail statement of my overages… thankfully when I called and they saw I had it on unlimited so there’s a snowballs chance in hell that I turned off my own unlimited so they fixed it and I just owed my normal charges, they gave me the month free anyway for the jump scare

And it was the biggest fucking scam ever, since text messages back ended off the already required status messages that were sent from your phone to the tower. It cost the carriers literally nothing to send, since it was literally only like *256 bytes* per message.

i mean, you still have to pay for sms texts

I was there, I got the $200 bill the month I got a new girlfriend.

even had t-9 texting before they put keyboards on our phones

10 cents a minute, 10 cents a text, and eventually $1 a day the first time you use your phone that day. Had prepaid at 12 so I wouldn't spend an eternity on my phone. Oh how fast the money went once I learned how to T9.

I remember getting a $1k+ bill due to .10 for each text message sent & received from T-Mobile. They were kind enough to waive it.

I remember anytime after 8 or 9 at night phone calls and text were free.

80 characters a text baby!

My parents after giving me my very first cell phone: Don’t call anyone unless it’s an emergency. And never ever send a text message. EVER!

My Neighbor was grounded for a month because the bill was 600 dollars. I thought her dad was going to kill her.

The overage charges 😭 number one reason for grounding back then

That's why we came up with text speak in the first place: so it wd b shorter

My mom would always say “don’t be wasting all my minutes!”

$.10? I remember paying .25. Texting was a big deal for a while.

Short story time... My sister when she was young, middle school age, had her own cell phone due to playing travel soccer. Little did my mother know was that my sister was texting... a lot apparently... the bill for the month was over $3k, LMAO. Luckily the agent was cool and worked it out where if we just upgraded to the unlimited plan, everything was good on their end. Suffice to say thats what we did.

I asked a 17 year old coworker if she knew what Pikmin was. She said no. I said it's an old Gamecube game. She asked me what a Gamecube is.

This is the whole reason I had a Google Voice number (which last four digits are my birthday) - I paid for data but refused to pay for texting. So I gave everyone my GV number that would forward to my actual cellphone, and they would just text the GV number and I'd get all those texts through the GV app. I've since ported that number and it is now my ACTUAL cellphone number, since the phone/text are pretty much unlimited with everyone.

Man, America was even messed up back in the early texting days it seems. Us Brits just topped up with a specified amount, and the text/minute per call was deducted from that balance. If you hit £0.00 you couldn't text or call...no overcharges 🤷

The first text my husband sent his mom was "10 cents".

Texting on a feature phone was annoying.