The price is published. It is just not on the page you are looking at.

We track five kids phone brands and recheck their prices every week. As of 2026-09-07, four of them publish enough to work out what two years costs. But for two of those, at least one of the two figures that decide the bill is not on the product page: it is in a help-centre article, or on a shop subdomain, or quoted only on terms the page does not spell out.

An earlier version of this page said Gabb and Troomi did not publish these figures at all. That was wrong, and it was our error rather than theirs: our pipeline checked one page per vendor and we reported what it found as what existed. Both corrections are dated and logged on the price tracker, and the method that caused it is described on the methodology page.

What each brand publishes, and where

Swipe sideways to see the full table on a phone screen.

The gaps are not all the same kind

Lumping these together would be the same sloppiness that produced our own error, so here is what is actually going on in each case. One of the five brands has no plan price at all and two publish one somewhere other than the product page. Only the first is a gap; the rest are a filing problem, and a filing problem is still a problem when the filing is done by the party you are paying.

Gabb's product page lists Starter, Standard and Advanced with no prices against any of them. The figures are real and public, in a help-centre article: $24.99, $29.99 and $34.99 a month. But every one of those is the two-year contract rate, and the same article says only that the price "may be higher" month-to-month without ever saying by how much. So the number a parent most needs — what this costs if you are not ready to sign for two years — is the one figure genuinely missing, and it is missing from a page that otherwise looks complete.

Troomi is the simpler case and the one we got most wrong. The handset is $249.95 for the Galaxy A17 5G, printed plainly on shop.troomi.com, with the tougher XCover7 Pro at $649.95. No checkout, no account, just a different subdomain from the one the marketing links to. We had recorded it as unpublished for two weeks.

MMGuardian is a different situation and we should not accuse it of the same thing. The phone is sold bring-your-own-carrier, so no complete price exists to publish: you buy the handset from $229, add the monitoring app from $4.99 a month, and bring a plan from whoever you like. What is fair to criticise is the vendor's own comparison table, which advertises a first-year total of roughly $529 built on a 5GB carrier plan it never names. That figure is not verifiable, so we do not republish it.

Pinwheel publishes everything and still cannot be read off the page, for a smaller reason: there is no monthly billing option at all. The Caregiver Portal is $174.99 a year or $49.99 per three months, so the monthly figure in our table is arithmetic rather than a price Pinwheel quotes. Bark is the one brand where the whole ladder is on the page, from $29 a month to the unlimited tier, with the handset financed at a stated rate over 24 months.

Counted by plan tier rather than by brand, 13 of the 14 tiers we track carry a published monthly price.

Why the filing matters

Because the plan is most of the money, and the plan price is the figure most often filed elsewhere. Over two years a $25 monthly plan comes to $600, more than any handset in the table above. A product page that shows you the handset and not the plan has shown you the smaller half of the bill, whatever the reason.

That is why sorting on the sticker misleads. The cheapest published handset is Pinwheel Phone at $119, and the cheapest two-year total is the same phone at $468.92. Those agreeing is luck rather than a rule, and it stops being true the moment one vendor moves its plan price.

None of this means a brand that files its price elsewhere is a worse deal. It means comparing them takes more work than it should, and that the work is not evenly distributed: Bark puts the whole ladder on one page, which is why it is the brand we can take apart most thoroughly — see what its phone costs against its own app. It also means a price comparison that only reads product pages will be wrong, which we can say with some authority, having published one.

The two head-to-heads where this bites hardest: Gabb against Bark, where the cheaper phone changes depending on whether you count a subscription Bark bundles and sells separately, and Troomi against Pinwheel, where one published total contains cellular service and the other does not.

How we know

Everything above is read from the same dataset as the rest of the site, rechecked weekly. Each vendor now carries two source URLs rather than one — where the handset price is published and where the plan prices are — because assuming those were the same page is what produced the correction at the top of this page. A figure we still cannot find anywhere stays null and prints as "—", never an estimate. The full procedure is on the methodology page.

Every figure that moves, and every one we get wrong, is logged with a date and a source on the price tracker, and the counts on this page follow the data rather than being typed in. You can download the underlying dataset as CSV or JSON from there and check the arithmetic yourself.

Comparing options rather than auditing vendors? The cost calculator works out a total for however long you expect the phone to last, and the first phone guide puts the money next to what each device actually lets you monitor.