I get it. You're looking to optimize your phone (and in this case, VoIP) experience as cheaply as possible.
No, you clearly
do not get it. Otherwise, you wouldn't post this wall of flimsy excuses to defend being a cheap and stingy person paying the absolute minimum for a hammer that you yourself readily admit isn't good enough for your task at hand at times.
The guide is built upon the (modified) engineer's iron triangle of easy/cheap/good, and I am all about the cheap and good. I don't actually advocate ridiculously complicated methods, I recommend choosing higher quality, reliable services and paying for what you actually need. I don't actually recommend, as you put it, "a system of various moving parts". I advocate ignoring the piddly minor differences and choosing the best and most solid providers to do the job you need, that provides that service at the technical skill you're comfortable at, and to spend the money necessary to get it done well and reliably. Republic fails this criteria because the service is
not good or reliable, and it's not easy to keep operational as many others in this very thread have pointed out.
Instead of following the steps referenced in your blog, and keeping current with the changing tech required to keep the balancing act stable, I simply pay my monthly bill of $10. And it works. So instead of spending my time researching and keeping current on phone tech, I instead can go out and do what is productive in my eyes. I recognize that people have had issues with the service.
Again, this is not what
the guide is about, and you're clearly confused about what I actually stand for. I recommend mature, stable providers and technology, and not sweating the minuscule differences in price point between the recommended, mature, and robust providers for your usage needs so it's set up once and forget it. The only difference is, I teach people the basics of how their technology works so they can see through the voodoo black box technology marketing BS that companies like your recommended carrier use to sucker people into thinking they're getting a good deal on the services being provided. As for the post you read specifically, did you fail to catch the part where I didn't actually recommend these sorts of set-ups and that the post was for cheapskates unwilling to pay for the services they actually needed?
Now, you actively chose to be stingy and cheap over being frugal with your spending choices. You have consciously chosen to spend
only $10 a month for a low quality provider who actively screws their customers over the alternative of an unlocked smartphone with any number of solid MVNOs and maybe one pre-configured VoIP app that takes zero effort to configure or keep up to date with alternative providers where the price gap is
maybe an extra $10 a month at most (at the high end) to get that no-fuss reliability and just as much flexibility (if not more). They offer
nothing unique, and that's the point I try to reinforce. The fact of the matter is, even if you
want to veer cheap and easy (as Republic clearly is), the post I linked on how to replicate their services is there to illustrate how overpriced it really is when you put in that extra thirty minutes of effort on education on how your phone actually works and are still willing to cut corners.
You want to keep telling yourself you made a wise investment with your money? Go for it, but stop trying to convince myself and others
here - we know there's better for the money. FULL STOP. I have done and shared the research to make those options accessible and easy to use, and the reason why this forum is filled with so many Republic Wireless complaints these days is because of your type of mindset defending peddling a low-quality provider by choosing the bottom line (both monthly cost and referral kickbacks) over recommending a reliable provider. Eventually, this choice is going to burn you like it does others, because lousy providers always burn you in the end. I try to keep people from getting burned in the first place and having to learn first hand what others in this thread and elsewhere have discovered.
I don't have a problem with you personally, but there is a mountain of evidence showing that Republic deserve neither your loyalty or your money. You don't need to give them either.