A Phonebox Alternative for Phones That Stay On

We checked phonebox.dev and its docs on 10 October 2026. A phone costs $0.06 per minute while it runs, billed per second with a 60-second minimum per session; a parked phone costs nothing and keeps its apps and sign-ins. New accounts get $2 of starter credit with no card, and paid top-ups start at $10.

Setup is genuinely one line: claude mcp add --transport http phonebox https://phonebox.dev/mcp with your API key in a header. There is also a CLI, an SDK and a REST API. An agent reads the screen as a numbered text list, and can create a live view link so a person can take over for a sign-in.

The docs also state the limits: a phone parks itself after a few idle minutes, a session runs for at most three hours, and a project runs two phones at once by default. And Phonebox says plainly that it is “not a phone number or an SMS inbox, and it doesn't make or receive calls.”

The break-even is about eleven hours a month. At $0.06 a minute, $39 buys 650 minutes of a running Phonebox phone. Below that, Phonebox is cheaper, and for a ten-minute build check it is much cheaper. Above it, the meter passes our flat price — and a phone left running around the clock for a 30-day month would be 43,200 minutes, or $2,592. Phonebox is designed so you don't do that: phones park when idle. But a parked phone is not there to receive anything.

An agent that has to be reachable. If your agent's job is to sit in a messaging app and respond when something arrives — or to answer a call — it needs a phone that is up, not one that starts when the agent decides to look. That is the case ERIUS PHONE's flat price is for.

Calls and audio. ERIUS PHONE supports real one-to-one voice and video calls with your agent over WhatsApp and Telegram, and the API can play audio into the phone's microphone for any app that listens. Phonebox's own docs say it doesn't make or receive calls, and we found no microphone or audio input in its API reference.

Where Phonebox wins, plainly. You can be driving a Phonebox phone a few minutes from now; with us you request access and wait for a person. It has a hosted MCP endpoint, a live view link for handing the phone to a human, per-second billing, and settable location, locale and timezone. ERIUS PHONE is in early access: there is no self-serve signup, devices and API keys are issued by hand, and online payment is not live yet. The prices we publish ($39/mo for one phone, $129/mo for three) are preview prices. For short, bursty test runs, Phonebox is the better buy today.

Competitor details on this page were checked on 10 October 2026 against phonebox.dev, phonebox.dev/llms-full.txt, github.com/combined-ai/phonebox-android-mcp. Prices and features change; check the vendor's own site before you decide. Product names belong to their owners, and ERIUS PHONE is not affiliated with them.