Free phone numbers sound like a better deal than they usually are. Google Voice has been handing out U.S. numbers at no cost for years, and for a while it was one of the more useful things Google made that plenty of people used. The catch is that the rest of Android's phone experience has moved on without it, and the gap between what Google Voice offers and what Google Messages now does has grown so wide that I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's main number.
