Granted, the "nickel and diming" of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today's cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here's a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?
I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs
Yup. But that assistance in retrospect feels like the first time we encountered something alike. It prints faster for you but it needs a constant supervision, so you end up glued to the screen, fixing the results. I recall printing a long word with t9, and it followed me for 6 letters, but completely changed the word at the 7th letter to something else entirely, because it's dictionary didn't have my word in it, or it thought it's not as popular. Less control, more attention, frequent fuck ups. It's close in UX to what I personally getting now.