Forward your VoIP Number to another phone and send text messages to email

Given the recent VOIPO shutdown announcement:and the amount of attention this has gotten on r/voip I figured I would post this to help others who are looking for options. This will require a bit of technical knowledge, but I included every single step required so you could do this yourself. Please make sure you read the entire post before you get started.

What this solution does:

1. If you receive a call on your phone number, it will be forwarded to a secondary number. The forward is completely blind, if you don’t answer the call it will do whatever your secondary number does when it doesn’t answer. There is no transcription or notification of any kind. It could be added, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
2. If you receive an SMS message on your phone number, you will receive an email with the contents of said message. There is no response back to the original sender. There is no other notification other than the email you receive. The email will probably go to SPAM, but that's easy to address.

Products Used:We are going to use Twilio for handling a phone call and SMS message. Think of Twilio as a programming platform for telephony services. You can control your calls and text messages with code. Twilio pricing is pretty excellent because it’s very transparent and you have per use charges. Twilio directly replaces VOIPo for example.We are going to use Mailgun for handling emails. Think of Mailgun as a programming platform for email services. All those promotional emails, news letters, etc. that you get in your inbox come from a provider like Mailgun.Expected costs:

In our case, let’s assume we get a single call that’s 10 minutes long and 2 text messages. The pricing formula would look like this:

incoming minutes*total minutes + outgoing minutes*total minutes+incoming messages*total messages
($0.0085 / min*10)+($0.0140 / min*10)+($0.0083 / msg*2)=$0.2416 or about 2.5 cents USD.

Note that we are charged for the incoming call and the outgoing call, so we're paying double for this. It's important to be aware of this. This is a very common practice on pay as you go platforms.For email: Mailgun has a very generous free tier of 100 emails per day. This means that if you receive more than 100 text messages per day you would have to sign up for their $15/month plan which allows for 10,000 emails/month. Now, there's one more item which will incur costs and this is the phone number. If you buy a new number or port your number to Twilio you will be charge $1.15/month to hold each phone number. So our total charges based on the example above will be around $1.18/month.

Let's start building. Prerequisites:

1. A Mailgun account, you can sign up to a free account via this link.
2. A Twilio account, you can sign up for a free account via this link. Please note that when you first open an account with Twilio you're in Trial Mode. Your account needs to NOT be an trial account in order for this to work.