My SIP provider (Voip.ms (I am unaffiliated to them beside being a customer)) just send them by email, for free. It&#x27;s included in my ~0.70$ USD per monthly plan (pre-paid almost forever on a 25$ payment). So, these day, I find it ridiculous to pay for a carrier voice&#x2F;sms plan. It&#x27;s pointless.<p>The worst thing that can happen is having a use a VPN on top of the SIP stream for carriers that void net neutrality. Tablet data plan + SIP = win<p>* You get your calls on your computer and devices, all of them, for the same price.
* You can script your softphone to pause your music and answer in your music headset
* You can add a SIP server in from of the link to add new features.
* You can inter-operate media stream from Skype&#x2F;(name your IM app) and &quot;real&quot; phones for &quot;free&quot;[1] using pulse audio &#x2F; core audio.
* Usually, multiple line, transfer and conferences are included, you don&#x27;t have to pay extra. If they are not, you can implement them using your own SIP server or some scripts.
* Most softphone have multiple account support, so you can have your business phone and home phone on the same devices, but with different Ringtones.<p>The possibilities are near limitless _and_ it is beyond cheap. The main downside is that you almost have to be an IT person to be able to make it all work :P<p>You don&#x27;t have to pay for Skype _and_ a phone plan, only your phone plan.<p>&#x2F;shameless plug
If your using Ring.cx (I am one of the dev), you can also seamlessly make end-to-end encryptet and decentralized&#x2F;P2P calls if your peer also use Ring.cx (or anything SIPS compatible, minus the decentralized part, so technically risking a MiM).