What Is the Cheapest Cell Phone for Kids for emergencies...not for Talking Etc.

I got my son a Tracfone. It was on sale for $15.99. You add minutes as you need to. No surprise bills. If they use up their minutes, you add more, but my son never overused.

I'm not sure if they have tracfone in your area, but I've had wonderful experience with it. They have phones that do all kinds of things, but I just got a simple one. He actually could play games on it, but no texting or anything like that. And, I figured with a phone that cheap, if he lost it, it wasn't the end of the world. He didn't lose it.
He's 16 now and has a phone that came with his dad's plan, but the tracfone worked great for us.

Best wishes.

The pay as you go phones are good. We bought our teenager a 'Tracfone' for his 1st cell phone and the phone itself was only like $9.99 and then you can get the cheapest card...if it's for emergencies only?

The cheapest phone and plan is the one that the child next to yours has-children lose their phones , they drop them, they text too much, their phones get stolen, left in cabs, etc.

what carrier do you have? i know on Verizon to add a line is $10.00 a month. tracfones are nice but you have to add minutes every couple of months no matter how many minutes you have used. so you can end up having tons of minutes on the phone. i would look into the phones walmart carries. and you'll have to do some comparing shopping to see what works best for your needs!

I have a Virgin Mobile for my son. It's pay as you go but you need to put some money into the account every 90 days regardless if you have a balance or not. It ends up costing about $7.00 per month.

We have an "emergency phone," that is a Go Phone from AT&T. You can pick up a phone at Target or Walmart for about $20 and then just buy cards or add money online.

Depending on which pay as you go you sign up for, the cost is slightly different. You can choose a per day of use or per minute option, or a combo where you pay some smaller amount each day you use it and then a lower per minute rate each minute during that day.

Anyway, a $20 phone with $15 worth of minutes got us through 6 months of being used for emergency calls from my son (which also included just "I miss you, I want to come home") when he was still spending one night a week at his dad's.

Other carriers have similar set ups. Virgin definitely has something similar. I like having the "Go" phone though, because it will take an AT&T sim card, so I can swap sim cards and take THAT phone instead of my blackberry when we go places I'm worried about losing or breaking my phone.

HTH

I used to have Kajeet for my kids. If this is truly a bare bones, emergency only phone, they have a 4.99/month plan that includes 10 minutes of talk time. That is their lowest plan and they go up from there. I just looked, and their cheapest phone right now is $35. I liked it when my kids were younger because you can pick and choose the plans you want and it had great parental controls.