Troomi vs Pinwheel: one of these prices does not include a phone plan
Compare the cheapest plan on each and Pinwheel looks like less than half the price of Troomi. It is not. Pinwheel's entry price buys the parental-control software and nothing else — you bring a SIM and a plan from a carrier of your own, billed separately. Troomi's price includes the service. Until you put service on both sides of the table, the comparison is meaningless.
The three totals, and which one answers your question
| What you are buying | Handset | Monthly | Two years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Troomi (Samsung Galaxy A17 5G), cheapest plan | $249.95 | $24.95 | $848.75 |
| Pinwheel with Pinwheel Wireless | $119 | $23.75 | $689 |
| Pinwheel, Caregiver Portal only (no service; add your own carrier) | $119 | $14.58 | $468.92 |
Swipe sideways to see the full table on a phone screen.
The middle row is the honest comparison against Troomi: $689 against $848.75, a gap of $159.75 over two years. The bottom row is genuinely cheaper only if you already pay for a line the child can use, in which case Pinwheel is the one phone here that lets you keep it.
Neither of them bills monthly
Pinwheel has no monthly option at all. The Caregiver Portal is $174.99 a year or $49.99 per three months, and Pinwheel Wireless is $284.99 a year or $79.99 per three months — so every "per month" figure above, including ours, is arithmetic rather than a price Pinwheel quotes. Paying quarterly instead of annually costs 12–14% more, which is the closest thing to a penalty for not committing that either vendor charges.
Troomi bills month-to-month with no contract and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so its figure is the one that behaves the way a monthly price looks like it should.
Two different theories of app control
Troomi runs its own OS on a Samsung and curates what can be installed: an approved library of around a thousand apps, a safe-listed browser on the top plan, no social media. Access widens by moving up a plan. Pinwheel curates too, but the sorting is done by therapists and clinicians rather than by tier, and the Caregiver Portal is the same on both plans — you are paying the difference for cellular service, not for more control.
The practical divide is the carrier. Pinwheel works with a SIM from almost anywhere, so it fits a family that already has a plan or wants a cheap prepaid line. Troomi bundles its own service and cannot be moved. If keeping your existing carrier matters, that decides it before any of the figures above do.
What we are not telling you
Neither phone has been in our hands. Everything here is arithmetic on published prices and the control matrices each vendor documents, which is enough to say what things cost and not enough to say how either performs. Where the numbers came from, and what our Verified stamp does and does not claim, is on the methodology page.
Full records with every plan tier and control: the Troomi page and the Pinwheel page. To see how both sit against the other three phones on what a parent can actually monitor, use the monitoring matrix, and for a total over your own timeframe the cost calculator.