The $100 Phone For Kids With No Screen, No Apps, And No Battery

Meet the Tin Can: a WiFi landline that actually looks like a tin can. It features a curly cord and zero distractions. No texting, no games, and no camera just voice calls to a parent-approved list.

The catch? It has to be plugged into the wall. If kids want to talk, they have to stay in one spot. Since its 2025 launch, every batch has sold out instantly.

The Tin Can was built by 3 dads in Seattle who couldn’t find a phone they trusted their own kids with. Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies were ex-colleagues at a real estate tech company called Far Homes. It started when their kids kept asking for phones so they could make their own playdates, and the dads realized they were still acting as full-time scheduling assistants for every single hangout. They started designing it at a kitchen table.

The product philosophy is printed on the box: “All talk, no smarts.” The tagline in their marketing is “Brand new old phone.” Every feature that exists in a smartphone was deliberately excluded. The only thing it does is place and receive calls.

Parents control the whitelist through a companion app. They can schedule quiet hours so the phone won’t ring during school or bedtime. The child never touches an app or a screen at any point.

The no-battery design is the detail that separates this from every other “kid-safe” device on the market. Most of those devices give kids a stripped-down smartphone and hope parental controls hold. The Tin Can removed the portability entirely. A child using it is standing in their kitchen or their bedroom, anchored to a wall outlet, having a conversation with one person. That’s it.

It runs on your existing home WiFi. No phone jack or landline service required. Plug it in, connect once through the parent app, and it gets its own phone number. Done.

The hardware is $100. Tin Can to Tin Can calls are completely free with no subscription. For $9.99 a month (first month free), the optional Party Line plan lets kids call approved grandparents, aunts, or friends who don’t have a Tin Can yet. 911 is always available on either plan.

The colors are bright pastels (pink, yellow, mint green, white) and the shape has grooves to look like an actual tin can. The curly cord handset is a direct callback to landline phones most of these kids have never seen. Parents report kids twirling in circles while they talk, the same way we did in the ’80s.

One detail from early users: kids are forming “telephone clubs” where they call each other on their Tin Cans and then run to each other’s houses afterward. Parents say their kids have started independently scheduling sleepovers and backyard games, something that never happened when the only option was “ask Mom to text their friend’s mom.” The phone is producing the opposite of what screens produce. It’s starting conversations that end in someone showing up at the door.

It has sold out repeatedly since launch.