If you own an iPhone, you may have heard of Infinite SMS by Inner Fence. It’s a rather clever little application that allows you to send SMS using Google’s SMS gateway, circumventing service providers. In other words, it allows you to send Free SMSs.

Infinite SMS wasn’t a freeware application though (but at $0.99 it’s not exactly expensive either), but nevertheless the promise of free SMSs brought in masses of people using the services. So many people started using the application that Google was forced to shutdown the service to all third-party applications.

Google later explained that the huge spike in traffic caused costs to rise rapidly, far more than Google was willing to pay for what is essentially an experiment. There are no hard feelings though, the SMS experiment just became too expensive to handle:

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we’ve decided we can’t support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We’re blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we’re not singling out Inner Fence.