Assuming the average user gets only one burst of three messages per query, uses it only twice a day for 200 days a year and the service gets only 10,000 users signed up, the costs just to send the texts for the next year alone would be $90,000.
Seems like it will be hard to scale but I agree that this is a really cool way to get connectivity! Best of luck.
Seems reasonable to think that you might pay $5-9/mo on a budget for a limited access to internet such as this; now it sounds like potentially economically viable to even have an employee or two after paying for all the texts.
That would be pretty cool for a normal web browser too.
EDIT: I'm also part of the team, that comment looks really strange out of context.
We don't have specific monetization plans yet, but we're probably going to do some sort of donation system, or maybe ads (through wifi). No idea though, it is pretty expensive.
They also aren't entirely free to the operators themselves - once you start counting them and charging for them, there are administrative costs; then there are costs related to interconnections with other operators, and costs related to maintaining their own SMSCs (SMS centers). The only thing in this whole mechanism that the operator gets for free (actually not free since they have to pay for the network and base stations) is the delivery channel which is not insignificant but it is also just one part of many.
However, simply stripping the junk out of web pages for mobile delivery has real promise. Just put all third-party content on "load on user request only", like mail attachments.