0.Google voice is only free if your time has zero value.
Federal Minimum wage is $7.25 Your state may be higher. In Arizona it is $10.50. Assuming (probably incorrectly) you make minimum wage, every hour you spend fixing the latest thing that broke google voice cost you $7.25 (likely much more). At minimum wage at 3 hours you could have paid for a service with no stress or down time. Below is sipstation price for 1 did.
If your in Arizona this time reduces to 2 hours.
DOL says junior network admins make between $14.03 - $26.06. So it could be less than an hour if you are a jr admin.
I dont use GV, but I would imagine some have so much time vested in getting it working. Quiting now would be similar to letting your wife win the arguement.
I’m not sure who doesn’t already know this. Time = money. As you get older the value of time seems to increase whereas the value of money stays the same. (depending on circumstances of course)
For those who persevere in chasing GV, I think it’s mostly about the game/hunt. There is some satisfaction in thinking you’re getting something of value that wasn’t offered to you outright.
And now that it’s figured out… IF the config remains stable… then it’s a time commitment of 5 minutes to configure things and a potential for months or years of free calling. The biggest benefit is to the latecomers, not the pioneers. Right now, this is still somewhat new and so the hiccups are to be expected. Either it will stabilize and people will enjoy the service for years (consider the XMPP gateway, which was basically in a stable mode for 5-6 years) or Google will somehow close the gates and it will be gone.
That is a fine and well argument when you are using it as a free home service but when you are a business that is using Google Voice then you are making a bad choice for the wrong reasons. “I will use Google Voice for my business to save money.”
I’ve laid this out before. No support. No guarantee of service. No 9-1-1/Emergency services. Horrible footprint. Its a service that was designed as a call forwarding service and to use the Google platform for making calls.
You can say that the XMPP was stable for “5-6 years” but the fact I’ve given support to not only numerous people but the same people over the past 3-4 years on GV breaking, that statement is just not factual.
Now with this SIP platform and the fact that third party connections are no longer allowed using GV in this manner now (and really probably before) violates their ToS.
So from a business stand point, there is ZERO cost benefits to GV but when you’re business is down because of a change that might take 5 minutes to fix. You have to spend the time figuring out what actually broke. Was is actually GV? Was it my network? Was it my PBX? During all that you’re down, can’t make calls and you’re paying people to sit around and do nothing, while you’re paying someone to go and figure out what the issue is. All that free service you have, just washed away at the end of the day.
Also, in case you haven’t seen GV is actively rotating SIP domains like every 90 days and now there was a report of 503 Service Unavailable happening.
This is just not a valid business solution to lament otherwise is just wrong.
The “cost” is only true if you can bill for every available hour in the day. I bill out at $75 an hour. Lawn service runs about $10 an hour in my neighborhood, domestic help about the same. But I still mow my own lawn on the weekends and I still take out my own trash and do my own dishes and wash my own laundry and wash my own car. Because that time is available to me and the $100 or so a week I save by doing those tasks myself is money in my pocket that I would otherwise not have.
Obviously GV isn’t a solution for a call center, but for a small business it can make sense used with a pay-per minute SIP trunk (Vitelity, Voipstreet) as a failover. I pay $1.49 per month per DID and .009 cents a minute for calls through the Vitelity trunk. We have 4 extensions in my small consulting office and use about 5,000 minutes a month altogether, the vast majority through GV trunks. In a typical month our phone charges are less than $5 total. When GV “breaks” is the only time the Vitelity trunk gets much use, and usually I can fix the problem in 30 minutes or less.
Asserting that GV is even less than worthless is akin to also asserting that installing and maintaining your own FreePBX system is less than worthless since that too requires regular maintenance and technical knowledge. Frankly, I’ve had more downtime in the past after updating FreePBX modules than I’ve had with GV (well, at least until I virtualized the FreePBX distro and created periodic checkpoints).
I don’t think I said that. Google voice it self has plenty of uses. I have a google voice number I use for various purposes. I use it under the ToS and don’t try to hack it in to my PBX. I could forward it to my PBX if that is what I choose to do. I would say my analogy is dumping $500 a month in to repairs on a beater when you could make a $150 car payment and not have to worry about it working tomorrow. Cost vs Benefit. When the cost outweighs the benefit you should choose a different solution.
Your example:
You pay the $1.49 to vitelity regardles so that is a wash. The 30 minutes ($5) as you state above is over 550 minutes or about 9 hours of talking rounded down. I guess it depends on how much traffic you put over your GV line. If it is 9 hours a month you are breaking even without any effort. If it is under 9 hours you are ahead.
