Gobo Studios · a DBA of Monterey Skates LLC · Monterey, CA · (831) 264-8797 · gobostudios.com
GoboPhone for families
A phone that is only a phone
It rings. It has buttons. It takes calls from people you approve and nobody else, and it dials 911. There is no screen, no apps, no browser, and nothing to install on it.
A single phone is free on our end. You will hold your own account with voip.ms, who charge about $2.60 a month for the number plus usage, which runs less than a penny a minute.
Seven is young for a smartphone and old enough to call Grandma
The gap between those two things is where most families end up improvising — an old phone with the SIM taken out, a tablet on wifi, a smartwatch with a subscription. Each one is a compromise, and each one puts a screen in front of a child whose actual need was to talk to someone.
A phone on the kitchen wall solves it the way it always did. The child can reach the people who matter. The people who matter can reach the child. Nothing else gets through, and there is nothing on the device to wander into, because there is nothing on the device.
What changed is that the copper line behind that phone is going away. California has authorized AT&T to retire it, so for a growing number of households the old answer is no longer available at any price. GoboPhone is the same phone on the internet instead of copper.
The Fanvil H2U, in white and black. No screen, and nothing on it to wander into.
How the safety works
Two things we will not put behind a paywall
Both of these are on every plan, including the free one. Paid plans buy you more phones and more numbers. They never buy safety.
Only approved people can ring
You choose who is allowed to call. Everyone else is stopped by the phone company, before the call ever reaches your house — not by an app on the handset.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Because the blocking happens upstream, it still works when the phone is unplugged, when the power is out, or when a child has been experimenting with the buttons. There is no setting on the handset that can undo it.
Mark a number as spam once and it is blocked across every number on your account.
Emergency calling that cannot be switched off
Every number that a handset can dial from needs a registered street address, and the dashboard keeps telling you so until it has one. It is free on every plan and there is no way to turn it off.
We are strict about this for a specific reason: an internet phone number without a registered address does not fail with an error. It returns a busy signal — which a child hears as try again, and tries again, while nothing is happening.
And quiet hours, because a phone in a hallway rings at 11pm
Set the hours the phone stays silent. It is on every plan too. The point of a phone a child can use is that it is predictable — and part of being predictable is being quiet at night.
The handset
We suggest a hotel phone, on purpose
The model we point most families at, the Fanvil H2U, is sold by Fanvil as a hotel phone. It goes in guest rooms and hospitals, in buildings where somebody maintains hundreds of them and cannot afford any of them to be temperamental.
It has ten physical speed-dial buttons on the front and no screen. Ten approved people become ten labeled buttons — press the one marked Grandma. There is no list to scroll and no menu to get lost in, so the protection is built into the shape of the object rather than into a setting you have to remember.
You buy the handset yourself, from whoever sells it cheapest. We do not sell phones and earn nothing on them. Plug it into power and your network and it configures itself from us — you will never log into it, and there is no admin password for anyone to find.
We charge for the software. The phone line itself comes from your own voip.ms account, billed to you by them at around $2.60 a month per number, plus usage at less than a penny a minute. That means the line is yours, not ours, and you can leave whenever you like.
Approved callers, emergency calling and quiet hours are included on both. Each voip.ms line is about $2.60 a month plus usage, which runs less than a penny a minute.
Plan
What you get
Per month
Home
One number, one handset
Free, plus about $2.60 for the line
Family
Three numbers, three handsets
$10, plus about $2.60 a line
Three handsets on Family works out around $17.80 a month all in. The nearest comparable service charges $9.99 per device, and the other one keeps its approved-caller list behind a paid tier. The full comparison, with their prices.
Before you rely on it
One limitation worth knowing about
A copper landline drew its power from the telephone exchange, so it kept working when your house went dark. That is exactly why it was the phone you kept for emergencies. An internet phone does not do this.
It needs the handset powered, your modem and router powered, and your internet provider’s equipment powered — and that last one is not yours to control. This is true of every internet phone service, ours included, and it is worth planning for rather than discovering.
We would rather tell you now than have you find out at the wrong moment. There is a whole section on what to do about it, including what we run at home.
One number and one handset, free, with the approved-caller list and emergency calling on from the first day. Buy a phone wherever it is cheapest, plug it in, and never log into it.
