Phone line for child/minor?

[Leandra]

Though Visible is a "no contract" service, it appears their current promotion of $20/24mo is somewhat of a contract and I would like to purchase a phone for my child, but from what I understand, children cannot have a contract in their name becasue they are under 18.  Because with Visible you are only allowed to have one phone, per plan, per email address (but can use same payment method), I cannot add my child to my own plan, so how do I go about getting them a phone & service through Visible?

[VisiblyPresent · Accepted solution]

Just use a different email address - you can have two accounts with different profiles. The email address used is only for Visible communications and billing notification which I assume you'll be responsible for. The profile would be your child's info or even yours.

If you've got a gmail email address you can simply add a dot in the name portion to distinguish email address. See:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

Alternately,  establish an Outlook account and you can establish up to 10 email aliases of your own choosing. I do this to manage my wife's visible account and simply forward the account and all aliases to my own email address while everything is billed to my credit card. However the account profile has her name on it.

There are also other free email address/alias options for which you simple forward them to your primary email.

Most families use one of these approaches to simulate a family plan on Visible with billing to a single credit card.

The $20 for 24 months isn't a contract, you can cancel at any time but are guarnteed the $20 for the first 24 months - each is billed and prepaid monthly. As long as Visible gets paid in advance each month, they could not care less who's using the line IMHO.

[DeanKevin64]

Just want to point out to maybe use a credit card or PayPal because I saw an issue mentioned on Visible's Reddit page if you use your bank account to pay and they see 2 charges for Visible they may flag one as fraud since it appears as a double payment.

Hope this helps.

[Leandra]

That is very good information, thank you!

[jo9x92n0]

For what it’s worth, we looked at the options for getting our kids lines and opted to get them Apple watches with cellular connectivity. Apple makes it really easy to set up the watches and the parental controls. We wanted each kid to have their own phone number associated with their watch. I was disappointed that Visible doesn't have an option for that and went with Verizon for watch only plans.