Is a complaint that I hear all the time. It was also a complaint that I had and I griped about it a lot. From where I come from, and international SMS could be as cheap as 0.427EUR. In JP one of the carriers are charging you 0.809EUR/message. That's twice the price. And the purchasing power in the 0.427EUR market is 3 times less than that of people in Japan. Talk about expensive.
There are alternatives for people in JP of course: There are companies that will charge you as low a price as 0.121EUR but there are drawbacks: The covered countries are limited, and all of them are coupled with international calling pre-paid cards.
But if you want really cheap SMS, the best way to go is to get free SMS. Just go to Google and search for "free sms"; You'll get 11 million hits. Even GMail enables you to send SMS for free (albiet only for the US currently). AIM has been doing it since forever. The thing is, even these free SMS solutions didn't solve the problem.
The great thing about SMS (or keitai email in JP) is that they're mobile and ubiquitous: SMS is Anytime and Anywhere. It doesn't cut it to just be able to send SMS if you're in front of the computer. You might as well be sending emails. They're free too.
Another thing is that when you send SMS, someone is footing that cost. Nearly all of the free services will let you send a certain amount for free and block you out if you exceed a certain amount. These setups are not transparent and difficult to understand. They are not designed for everyday use. They are not Anytime or Anywhere.
Most of these services also uses a single number as the origin of the messages they send. It's too expensive for you to have numbers assigned to unique customers which you just can't predict when will come. This means that it'll only be a one-way communication for you: Friends receiving those messages will 1) not know who the message is from 2) can't reply to the message since these services won't know how to route those messages to you, since they don't know to which message a reply was sent in the first place.
So what we wanted was something really like what SMS is, but that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to use. Something easy to understand, transparent and easy to use. And while we're at it, we wanted something that we can also send pictures with. That's why we launched Maritex.
Maritex is not a 100% SMS service (since we're not a mobile carrier), but it's close, if you're sending from JP. All we do is open up the cheapest route and connect them together to enable you to have a cheaper and easy way to send your SMSs or MMSs. All JP mobiles now come with email sending, and using that you can receive and send messages like you always do. Maritex supports sending to 144 countries and if you buy the biggest package for 500 messages, you actually only pay 0.0809EUR per message (plus data charges from your carrier, of course).
But if you want really cheap SMS, the best way to go is to get free SMS. Just go to Google and search for "free sms"; You'll get 11 million hits. Even GMail enables you to send SMS for free (albiet only for the US currently). AIM has been doing it since forever. The thing is, even these free SMS solutions didn't solve the problem.
The great thing about SMS (or keitai email in JP) is that they're mobile and ubiquitous: SMS is Anytime and Anywhere. It doesn't cut it to just be able to send SMS if you're in front of the computer. You might as well be sending emails. They're free too.
Another thing is that when you send SMS, someone is footing that cost. Nearly all of the free services will let you send a certain amount for free and block you out if you exceed a certain amount. These setups are not transparent and difficult to understand. They are not designed for everyday use. They are not Anytime or Anywhere.
Most of these services also uses a single number as the origin of the messages they send. It's too expensive for you to have numbers assigned to unique customers which you just can't predict when will come. This means that it'll only be a one-way communication for you: Friends receiving those messages will 1) not know who the message is from 2) can't reply to the message since these services won't know how to route those messages to you, since they don't know to which message a reply was sent in the first place.
So what we wanted was something really like what SMS is, but that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to use. Something easy to understand, transparent and easy to use. And while we're at it, we wanted something that we can also send pictures with. That's why we launched Maritex.
Maritex is not a 100% SMS service (since we're not a mobile carrier), but it's close, if you're sending from JP. All we do is open up the cheapest route and connect them together to enable you to have a cheaper and easy way to send your SMSs or MMSs. All JP mobiles now come with email sending, and using that you can receive and send messages like you always do. Maritex supports sending to 144 countries and if you buy the biggest package for 500 messages, you actually only pay 0.0809EUR per message (plus data charges from your carrier, of course).
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