Always lending money to a friend? Get it back on the spot with TextPayMe TextPayMe works much like PayPal -- users create an online account and link it to a credit card or bank account. They can use SMS to send up to $500 a month. The service is now free, but the company might eventually charge fees for certain transactions, Yuen said. Beta adopters might have permanent free use, he said. Combining text messaging and payment sounds like a pretty good idea when you consider 203 million people in the United States use cell phones, according to the CTIA, and 96 million people use PayPal. Russ Jones, a payment industry consultant with Glenbrook Partners, said the move toward using cell phones for payment is inevitable. He noticed, however, that TextPayMe's user agreement explicitly gives the company permission to pull users' credit report. That might scare some people away, and it's a deterrent TextPayMe doesn't need with PayPal potentially nipping at its heels. So far, about 900 people are signed up and about a third have completed transactions, according to Yuen. Mark Toews, a technical recruiter in Seattle, said he signed up for TextPayMe about a month ago, but only used it once because his friends won't sign up. They're not willing to give up bank information to a new company. Toews hopes TextPayMe will become more popular. "I think it's a great service," he said, "it just needs more time to mature and more people to get signed up with it before it will really blossom." wired