I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as well. I decided that I wanted to ditch using any cell carrier in favor of a VoIP provider. I made a post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26192657.
The two recommendations that came up the most were voip.ms and jmp.chat. Both require at least $15 to get started but you can port your old number over to both services too. From there jmp.chat is $5 a month, which comes with unlimited texts and 120 min a month.
With voip.ms the call and messaging is subtracted from your balance at a predetermined rate (per min and per text) which I haven’t worked out the math on how much mileage $15 will get you initially.
From what I could see jmp.chat looked like it was the easier option to setup, with the Cheogram app for your phone and a Jabber app for the computer. Here’s a wiki entry detailing how to setup jmp.chat: https://kb.above.im/jmp-chat/
I settled on discontinuing my mint service and setting up jmp.chat on my phone and computer, and then supplementing the limited minutes via Signal for calling. Seems like a pretty good alternative to me. I still have a week left on my phone plan, and then I’ll be taking the plunge. I’d been using my phone less and less lately so it wont be too much of a shock, and I’ll save myself an extra $20/month going from the $25 mint plan to $5/month jmp.chat plan.
Call me crazy, but this is why I have been thinking about getting into hobbies where I can make my own tools. I like to journal, and have a fountain pen with ink, but it occurred to me that I could just make my own ink and paper. So much of what we do nowadays for enjoyment is via manufactured things. It’s an unfortunate by-product of a consumer society that even the hobbies that we partake in are themselves a consumptive act. That’s not to say that we should all forgo any kind of external products and just make everything ourselves, I too like a good book, piece of vinyl or comic like anyone else. But it is definitely something to consider the degree to which our lives revolve around some type of product consumption. I think that we’d all benefit from taking some time to consider finding hobbies that don’t rely on buying some type of product.