After noticing yesterday that the balance of my 3 mobile account had dropped by several pounds, I spent the best part of an hour trying to figure out where the money could be going. My contract plan includes 75 minutes of talk time and 600 texts, and I hadn’t come close to using up either of those.
Finally, after checking the balance, trying different things and then checking again to see if it had changed, I found the culprit - Twitter. Every single tweet sent from my phone has been costing £0.25!
I’m pretty certain that when I started using Twitter I made quite sure the messages were free to send, so I’m guessing this is down to the new UK number they introduced last week.
The Twitter site has this to say on phone charges:
How Twitter will affect your phone bill depends on your phone plan, and text messaging allowance. Some people pay a per-message charge of ten cents or more. Some people have an allotted number of text messages monthly. Some (lucky!) people have unlimited text plans. Twitter can be addicting, so check your plan to make sure you don’t get a huge bill.
A special word of caution for International folks: some carriers (such as Orange) don’t charge an international fee to use the Twitter UK number. Others consider it an international number and charge up to .15 per message. Remember to check your phone plan for international rates; be aware that standard messaging rates vary by carrier, and do apply.
So I’m guessing they’ve switched from a number that 3 consider to be UK to one they have down as international. I’ll email the folks at Twitter and see whether they have any suggestions, in the meantime I won’t be sending many tweets when I’m out and about!
Update: I just dug out a bill, and yes, tweets to the old number are listed as free, so it’s definitely down to the new number.
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