Skinny suddenly charging per SMS despite active plan

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Skinny suddenly charging per SMS despite active plan

SiliconAudio

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#299449 8-Sep-2022 20:54

Just checking in for a sanity check to see if it's just me. I have the Skinny $16 plan, which I religiously keep active and have never failed to keep credited.

This evening I got a message from Skinny to say I only had a few cents of credit left, so I checked my transactions from the Skinny app (more\transaction history). For some reason, even though my plan with unlimited messages shows as active, I'm being charged 50c per message. Based on Skinny's published rates, I guess they are MMS messages? Is anyone else seeing this? Only started today and I don't believe I've ever had this happen before.

Or, it could be I'm too dumb to own a phone - I wouldn't rule that out ;)

cokemaster

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#2964850 8-Sep-2022 21:07

My bet is an offnet (eg. Skinny to Spark, Skinny to 2 Degrees, Skinny to Vodafone etc) photo message/MMS or there is a shortcode that charges 50c a message (it won't look like a 02x xxx xxx number... instead it could be something like 12345).

Have you attached any media, photos etc to any outbound messages?

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SiliconAudio

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#2964853 8-Sep-2022 21:24

Just checked - they don't have images, but the original message I was replying to was MMS and from/to Spark (so, same network?). I just don't ever remember being charged for this in the past and I have definitely sent MMS messages to this particular recipient in the before. And this is to a regular 027 number.

cokemaster

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#2964861 8-Sep-2022 22:12

I think you've probably been billed for outbound MMS in the past.

Even though they're on the same physical network, I believe they're billed as offnet... the 20c price applies to the same provider eg. Skinny to Skinny, VF to VF, 2D to 2D.

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SiliconAudio

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#2964880 9-Sep-2022 00:31

Thanks for the info. I appreciate you taking the time to comment.