The Tin Can phone, a “landline” designed for kids, is having growing pains.
It’s become so popular that its service crashed on Christmas, leaving kids upset that they couldn’t make calls on the gifts they’d just opened under the tree.
Tin Can has emailed customers at least three times since the holiday hiccup with updates on fixes in the works.
“Call volume on Christmas Day increased more than 100x from the start of the month, which impacted people’s abilities to set up their devices or make calls,” Tin Can founder Chet Kittleson told Business Insider. “Despite spending months and months preparing for it, we didn’t get it all right.”
Most services are back up and running, he said. But there are still some issues with call quality and reliability. “This is our biggest priority and the full team is working around the clock to restore service,” he said.
The buzzy phone was launched in the fall of 2024 and spread quickly through word of mouth — especially in Facebook groups focused on parenting. The phones, which are colorful and corded, cost $75. It’s free to call other Tin Can users (or you can pay $10 a month to call outside lines, similar to VoIP), which is what makes the service so popular with parents: They can create a sort of Tin Can closed circuit.
For Maria Pahuja, a parent in Richmond, Virginia, everything was working fine when she installed the Tin Can phone on Christmas Eve morning. “It worked great, the kids were using it,” she said. “Then, Christmas morning, it stopped working.”
“Sometimes you’d pick it up, and there would be a dial tone, you would call, and nothing would happen. Once in a while, a call would go through, and then two minutes later another call wouldn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t consistent.”
Why parents are loving the concept of the Tin Can
Business Insider’s Conz Preti bought a Tin Can for her kids in the fall and is a big fan of it. She was delighted how, on a recent snow day, her kids used it to organize playdates for sledding — all on their own, without the parents having to act as social secretary.
(Full disclosure: I have also ordered one for my own kids. In a nod to what the company said is a paced timeline to make sure it can catch up with any tech issues, mine isn’t scheduled to arrive until February.)
The concept of the Tin Can is appealing to parents like Conz and me, who have kids too young for cellphones but are old enough to want to communicate with friends on their own. Although it’s similar to an actual landline, it’s not one: Tin Can works on WiFi. Parents can set it to make and receive calls only to and from approved contacts. And it can also be programmed to have a time limit and be silent during quiet hours.
The dads who founded Tin Can
The company was founded by Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies based on a desire to create something for their own kids. They’ve raised $3.5 million in funding for the company from investors including Pioneer Square Ventures, Newfund Capital, Mother Ventures, and Solid Foundation.
In late August 2025, Kittleson told Business Insider they had sold “tens of thousands” of the devices so far. The company didn’t have an updated sales figure to share.
Even the disappointment of the tech issues with the phone is a teaching moment, one parent said.
“Part of what we’re trying to teach kids is patience and accountability,” said Joy Engel, a parent of a 5- and 8-year-old who lives outside Portland, Maine. She received the Tin Can she ordered over the summer on the first day of Hannukkah, and her kids have loved it, even with the service outages in late December.
“The company has been so forthright in what they say and how they’ve communicated and stopped charging people. That’s accountability,” she said.
“There’s a patience there that you’re teaching them that you can’t always get what you want right now. ”Your friend’s not there, that stinks. You’re gonna have to wait and call them back. The phone doesn’t work. That stinks. You’re going to have to wait and try again,” she said.
For now, the Tin Can is backordered until April. Not because of manufacturing constraints, Kittleson told Business Insider, but to pace the onboarding of the service.
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