Paying to receive SMS on a smartphone? That is infuriating. It's even more infuriating when you illustrate the fact to a coworker with an iPhone, showing how originating the text via a free email though one of the sms gateways allows you to mount a free financial "Denial of Service" attack on their account.
Its doubly infuriating when you think that SMS originated using free out of band data. Yet it costs more than data from the Hubble Space Telescope
The bits do seem expensive , when compared to TCP/IP from your ISP . The Calling Party Pays model works in Europe & elsewhere