Less than “unlimited” isn’t meaningfully cheaper to provide. It’s $144/year and not thousands per use exactly and exclusively because you can’t buy it when you need it.
If you could buy it on demand, 99.999% of revenue disappears because there’s no reason to pay for a subscription, and you have to massively raise the price per use for the service to break even.
They’re probably not paying per incident, because that model doesn’t work. They’re paying per authorized device.
A dedicated satellite device like inReach is $144/year for unlimited SOS and 10 standard text messages
I think you’re overestimating the cost of data
Less than “unlimited” isn’t meaningfully cheaper to provide. It’s $144/year and not thousands per use exactly and exclusively because you can’t buy it when you need it.
If you could buy it on demand, 99.999% of revenue disappears because there’s no reason to pay for a subscription, and you have to massively raise the price per use for the service to break even.