You need a plan to have a number because it's difficult/impossible to get a number allocated to you as an individual. If we assume "hundreds" means >=$200/year, then the maximum monthly payment we can have for that not to be true is $16/mo. The absolute cheapest phone plans I could find in the US that weren't for alarm systems were $15/mo on mvnos like mint. In practice, I suspect few people are paying less than $25-$30 a month, or "hundreds" a year for their numbers.
Prepaid phone plans in the USA charge you a monthly rate just like subscription plans do. They may also charge you for usage, though that appears to have fallen off compared to the past.
Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)
1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account
2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data).
3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer
4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data
We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire.
Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.
It's true in the USA if you stick to the big providers... Ring up t-mobile and say 'I'd like a line with 0 minutes and 0 GB of data, just to receive verification texts for Twitter' and they'll probably quote you $200 a year or so...
Tracphone is the company you want for this sort of thing. A SIM costs $0.99 (requires unlocked phone of course) and you add $15 to the account to get 500 texts. (I think you can do this with cash at a place like Walmart.)
It is expensive if you need to keep the plan around, but Twitter doesn't seem to regularly send SMSes to the phone number, so you probably don't need to pay beyond the first month.
Why the arbitrary limitation to the “big providers” - you can get a basic Tello plan with SIM for $5/month prepaid - and they’re a T-mobile MVNO so it’s a T-Mobile number.
Yes, I meant that even if somebody who wants to keep the identity unattached to twitter (& thus not risk doxxing after twitter data leak), in India its not possible at all even if they have money to afford.
No, technically every SIM gets activated only when mobile phone provider gets the user's documents copy & a verification call comes from mobile company's service center to an existing number of yours or family (& you verify your documents details). If you don't have a existing number to reach, they make you to bring documents to official store. There is no pre activated SIM cards.
Mostly, like any other country, this happened because they found bad people were using pre activated sim cards for terrorism.
My exiting phone number is now 14 years old, same provider, prepaid. I have been required to submit updated KYC about 4 times in these years.
Is this a thing? I've never heard of it. Where?