Tin Can launches program to help schools and neighborhoods go smartphone-free together

Tin Can, the Seattle startup behind the screenless, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone for kids, is launching a new feature aimed at the groups that have been driving its rapid growth: schools, neighborhoods, and parent organizations looking to ditch smartphones together.

The company is calling it Tin Can Communities — a program that lets larger groups adopt the device all at once, with bulk pricing, onboarding support, and early access to features built specifically for group use.

Groups can order a minimum of 50 phones or more than 1,000 by reaching out to Tin Can directly with details about their organization.

“If you want to help kids build real connection, it works best when people come on together,” Tin Can CEO Chet Kittleson said. “The value multiplies quickly because kids have more people to call, and parents feel less pressure to move to a smartphone because their whole network is already on Tin Can.”

Tin Can has been riding a wave of momentum since co-founders Kittleson, Graeme Davies and Max Blumen — all veterans of Seattle real estate startup Far Homes — launched the company in 2024. The colorful $100 phone connects to home Wi-Fi, letting kids make and receive calls from contacts approved by parents through a companion app. The company has raised $15.5 million to date, including a $12 million seed round last December.

The startup has grown to 30 employees and sold hundreds of thousands of phones since launching its flagship product in 2025 — now on its sixth production batch, shipping in June.

The momentum has extended beyond the parenting world: last month, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel gave the brand an unprompted shoutout during his monologue, suggesting someone get President Trump “one of those Tin Can phones like the kids have that are not on the internet.”

Wednesday’s launch comes as parents across the country have been organizing collective efforts to delay smartphone adoption — a movement built on the idea that individual decisions only go so far. Tin Can has found itself at the center of that shift, with PTAs, school administrators, and other groups asking how to get entire communities on board at once.

On San Juan Island in Washington, Alexandra and John Iarussi co-founded a nonprofit called the Mythic Farms Foundation with the sole purpose of putting a Tin Can in the hands of every kid in Friday Harbor. The first 300 families to sign up received a phone free of charge — and after one week the group had logged more than 1,500 calls and 75 hours of talk time, nearly double the typical first-week numbers for a new network, according to the company.

“Between ages 10 and 16, every child has approximately 8,760 hours that smartphones typically displace,” Alexandra Iarussi, mother of four boys, told the San Juan Journal. “Four hours a day, six years, one childhood.”

In Kansas City, a mom named Tracy Foster — director of the nonprofit Screen Sanity — partnered with local businesses to fundraise the purchase of nearly 200 Tin Cans for Nativity Parish School, then threw a party at a local skating rink to hand them out. Tin Can says kids from the school have called each other on 29 of the last 30 days, and the average child in the community now has nearly 30 Tin Can contacts.

Tin Can’s new initiative also comes as Seattle Public Schools this week enacted its first-ever districtwide cellphone policy, requiring K-8 students to keep phones off and stored away for the entire school day, and restricting high schoolers to phones only during lunch and passing periods.

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