This study presents a novel message-driven frequency-hopping (MDFH) scheme leveraging slow frequency-hopping (FH). Since the typical MDFH scheme requires a large amount of detectors to obtain the information that is transmitted through carrier frequency selection, the authors aim at a low-cost MDFH implementation in this study. The basic idea of the proposed FH scheme is to transmit a part of information through the hop rate instead of the carrier frequency selection of an FH signal, which results in reduced hardware cost and better system efficiency. Moreover, a collision-free multi-carrier extension is also introduced in this study. The lower bound on the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is analysed and is verified by numerical results. The numerical results also reveal that the proposed scheme has a better BER and throughput performances than the typical MDFH systems at a low signal-to-noise ratio.