For Google Workspace accounts, it's a paid service (I believe $10 or $20 per number and month). The personal version is presumably a loss leader.

> I also have to wonder how Google Voice has survived Google's ax all these years.

The infinite surveillance capacity of an monitored voice line?

Millennia of training data for AI speech synthesis and recognition?

Probably because execs use it.

I’ve lost access to a phone number on Google Voice. After my parents died, I ported their landline to Google Voice. This number was in my family for more than 50 years.

After porting a second number into Google Voice (and involving Google Fi) I lost access to the first. A 50+ year old phone number that everyone important to me already had memorized.

If you call the number now, it’s answered by a Google voice subscriber message. So I know the number is still with Google. I just can’t access it anymore.

After ~15 years with it, starting back in the GrandCentral days, I recently moved from Google Voice to voip.ms, on my path to degoogling. The new service is paid, in a competitive domain, and so needs and has excellent customer service, and a much improved set of features. I'm happy to be the customer instead of the product.

Are you me? Exact same story. How are you making/receiving calls and texts now?

Kinda sounds like you are him. Is this forum better or worse with your product placement tricks?

Top tier consipircacy detective work there Sherlock! Just surprised someone has the identical experience as me and curious what solutions they're using in the interest of sharing and learning together. Who would have thought?

Why don't you just contact Google customer service?

I'll be here all week.

Really? Have you ever tried that?