This is the stickiest thing I've got by far. It is so nice to have a "front" phone number with SMS (and sometimes MMS) capabilities & voicemail capabilities that can be used from a web browser. If I thought that Google was capable of selling me the service as a valued customer rather than the product, I'd be happy to pay for it.
I've looked around at a few possibilities and narrowed it down to two I intend to try:
https://jmp.chat/ supports both MMS and group texting, so it would give you the full Google Voice feature set. I'm not aware of any other service like this that supports group texting - most other services silently ignore group texts, so just be aware of that.
I've looked around at a few possibilities and narrowed it down to two I intend to try:
* https://jmp.chat/ plus maybe http://getkaiwa.com/ -- on the fiddly side, but with great fiddliness comes great flexibility, maybe?
* https://www.openphone.co/ -- seems more turnkey