A Newark-based phone company known for serving small businesses has a new pitch aimed at a very different customer: parents who aren’t ready to hand their 8-year-old a smartphone.
The product is called MyPhone.com — a physical home phone built specifically for kids too young for a cellphone.
“It takes the concept of an old landline,” Phone.com CEO Ari Rabban, whose team helped bring the product to market, said. “It’s a home phone, but it’s all geared for kids.”
The device looks roughly like an old-fashioned handset — Rabban compared it to “half a banana” — and connects through a home’s Wi-Fi or Ethernet router rather than a cellular network or old copper phone lines.
It arrives pre-provisioned with a phone number, and parents manage everything else — including who the phone can call and who can call it — through an online portal, not the device itself.
“You tell it who to call and who can call you, so you make sure it’s a closed group, and you as a parent can monitor it all,” Rabban said.
The product, which launched this spring, is aimed squarely at children not yet old enough for a mobile phone of their own. Rabban put the target range at roughly ages 8-10.
“The 13-year-old who’s already out on their own — they won’t use it at home, and it defeats the purpose of you needing to connect with them,” he said.
Rabban said the pitch leans heavily on the broader cultural anxiety around children and screen time.
“There’s all the write-ups and all the professors and academia and psychologists that talk about delaying screens as much as you can,” he said. “You can’t put the genie back in the box, but this reduces screen time at home.”
While the product is new, the company making it isn’t. Phone.com has spent nearly two decades building cloud-based phone service for tens of thousands of small businesses and was acquired by California-based Ooma in late 2025 for $23.2 million, with Rabban and his team staying on to keep running the platform.
MyPhone.com is marketed under its own name and distributed through major retailers’ online stores, including Walmart and Best Buy. Rabban said Walmart has already committed to purchasing thousands of units, a sign of retailer confidence even though the product hasn’t yet reached physical store shelves.
Pricing is set at roughly $10 a month for service, plus a one-time hardware fee of about $79 for the phone itself.
MyPhone.com runs on Ooma’s broader consumer telephony technology, brought together with Phone.com’s development work — though Rabban said Phone.com itself does not sell directly to consumers.
“We worked with them on the development, but they have the physical phones and the market to sell,” he said.
Looking ahead, Rabban said the team is exploring a natural next step: a version of the product built for slightly older kids that could eventually carry a phone number onto a mobile device as children age into needing real cellphones — though he said that capability doesn’t exist yet.
“There’s a limit to how far back we can go,” he said. “At some point, you want an iPhone or at least an Android phone. That’s outside of our control. But we do have the ability to transition the number when that time comes.”
