Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now, 10 years into building Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a flip phone.
“We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones but say the build quality is bad. “They’re describing the flip phones in negative language, but they stick with it, and they feel proud.”
So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touch screen phones and put it into a flip phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device that Light has ever released.
“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK developer program, all of the tools we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar,” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of the exact same experience, just one is fully tactile, no touch screen, and [the other] one is a complete touch screen experience.”
Pricing has always been Light’s hardest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “less” phone for a price people will actually pay, when the whole pitch is fewer features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, retails at $799. But the Light Flip brings the cost down to $299 by foregoing a touch screen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue, and light gray.
“I thought I was fully QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive texting [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number], so I can see myself going flip phone also for the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone gets me so jazzed.”
Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing play. It recently piloted phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling carrier Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get the Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month over the same time frame.
The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as requested by users. There will be a small light on the front of the phone, however, so that you can see if you have notifications without flipping open the device. With 5G and 4G LTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music that you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5 mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.
The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep preorder customers engaged (and, practically, to keep them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, including bi-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community-building move as much as a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less jarring and that it sticks.
While Light believes that its phones can help people reclaim the time they may regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the flip phone-curious to make this transition when they’re not going through it alone.
“I think something that’s so inspiring about this movement is it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hatred … It’s a movement of optimism, as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti Big Tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”
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