Painful but useful while it worked
When I first signed up with textPlus, the upsides significantly outweighed the downsides. Free texting to US numbers, including MMS. I put a few dollars of credit on my account and earned another few from watching lousy ads. It was enough credit for the last 7 years. The service declined. The mandatory ads, for which you don't get paid, got longer and longer, and I many times had to close and reload the app to use it. Six months ago in China, to make it work, I had to use a VPN. Then i had to use a VPN everywhere. Oh, guess what? Using a VPN is against their terms of service I found out later. They terminated me in a generic message telling me how they were trying to keep their sacred service free of spam. That is rich! I constantly received unsolicited messages and calls from these clowns. To be fair, a ton of these virtual telco operators are terrible. The textPlus numbers actually work for calls and messages but NOT for receiving one time codes. Very spotty there. I wasn't expecting the sky from textPlus. For how much I used it, textPlus worked until it didn't. If you need a service you can trust and rely on, don't sign up.
By Dougie