I tried using Twilio Wireless, but note it is NOT a good replacement for cellular service.
You can't receive texts from other Twilio numbers, which doesn't sound that bad, until you realize that virtually every verification SMS from most services also use Twilio. I wouldn't get 90% of my 2FA SMS codes anymore after trying to use it.
Also, data is super expensive on Twilio Wireless. After one day of just background data (no browsing or streaming) I was charged ~$15 (for the 100MBish of data I used off of Wi-Fi).
There are all kinds of other problems with it too as a cell service.
There are some really good reasons to use Twilio Wireless though, but not for mobile phone service. It's great for IoT hobby projects.
Been a bit since I last looked into the problem, but I was mistaken. You can't receive texts from shortcode numbers (though the majority of those use twilio), but that has the same effect - no 2FA codes many places.
I think it's intentional. I use Google Voice as my primary phone number, and there are various services that won't let me use it for 2FA, etc. I opened a support ticket with Discord to ask why, and after many emails back in forth they told me they have a database of what type of phone number every phone number is, and mine is "VoIP" which they claim cannot receive SMSes. (Everyone else, including my bank, has no trouble, of course... because they check by sending the SMS, not asking some outdated database if it's possible to send the SMS.)
What they didn't tell me, but I assume, is that some popular discord servers require phone verification to limit spam... and if anyone could just use a VoIP number as that phone verification, then that wouldn't work. (It still doesn't work, of course, but they think it does.) I, of course, just want to have an account recovery phone number, but they conflate the two uses of the phone number (person identifier, versus arbitrary second factor).
TL;DR, a lot of places are dumb and intentionally prevent you from using any sort of "recyclable" phone number. It helps them keep up the illusion that a phone number uniquely identifies exactly one person. Maybe that's true in South Korea, but it isn't here. So it just screws legitimate users for no reason.
You absolutely can receive texts from other Twilio numbers. It's shortcodes you can't receive from (which is definitely a problem).
Your data would be cheaper if you set the billing mode to "individual" (and not "pooled"), which will charge you for blocks of 1GB at a time. Having said that, data will still probably not be cheaper than a normal retail cell plan.
Aside from that, another issue is lack of MMS support. Twilio Wireless is designed for IoT use cases, so general cell phone use isn't something it's optimized for.
(Source/Disclosure: I'm the engineer who built the first version of Twilio Wireless.)
MMS is useless anyway so I see that as a non-issue, if anything it removes useless complexity. Social networks, email and WhatsApp/Telegram replaced MMS long ago, and as a bonus they don’t re-compress your images to make them look even more awful.
You can't receive texts from other Twilio numbers, which doesn't sound that bad, until you realize that virtually every verification SMS from most services also use Twilio. I wouldn't get 90% of my 2FA SMS codes anymore after trying to use it.
Also, data is super expensive on Twilio Wireless. After one day of just background data (no browsing or streaming) I was charged ~$15 (for the 100MBish of data I used off of Wi-Fi).
There are all kinds of other problems with it too as a cell service.
There are some really good reasons to use Twilio Wireless though, but not for mobile phone service. It's great for IoT hobby projects.