[sprice]

Quite a few people asking about my experience porting my number to Twilio.

A few years ago I was frustrated about paying CA$100/month for my phone plan in Canada for unlimited talk/text and a few gigs of data a month. I realized I only needed the data.

I wrote an app that directs phone calls straight to voicemail and then emails the missed calls and voicemail transcription and mp3s. SMS messages are sent to email and email replies get sent back as SMS. I made this a product at https://ringer.io.

I also picked up two CA$15/month data only SIMs (3GB each) from Fido.

So now I could only receive voicemail and I would use Google Hangouts Dialer to make traditional phone calls, which was very rare. I have to admit it was awesome not having the ability to receive a phone call.

I used WhatsApp day-to-day for texting and video calls.

Eventually the need to receive calls kicked up a notch so I switched my number over to https://openphone.co for US$10/month. They are on Twilio as well so it was a painless port (ie: one API call).

The OpenPhone app is "good enough" for me. If I had to talk a lot using traditional phone calls I would pay for a dedicated talk/text plan.

But I'm happy paying CA$30/month for 6GB of data and US$10/month for the phone/text line.