Prices and policies

Small Talk is a home phone service for children in New Zealand. We sell one physical product, the Small Talk phone, and optional monthly calling plans. A parent manages the phone in the Small Talk parent app.

All prices are in New Zealand dollars (NZD). Small Talk NZ Limited is not registered for GST, so no GST is added. Your first month of Quick Yarn or Long Yarn is free, from the day the phone is set up. No card needed. Each call to a mobile or landline ends at 30 minutes; ring back to keep chatting. On Quick Yarn, once the 60 minutes are used, the person your child rings hears a short message asking them to call back (Phone Tag). Fair use: the Long Yarn plan is for normal family calls, not for call centres, auto-diallers or reselling.

We take payment by card through Stripe. Your card details go straight to Stripe and never reach our servers. Our site runs on HTTPS.

We accept Visa and Mastercard, plus Apple Pay and Link.

The charge shows on your statement as SMALL TALK. A monthly plan is charged on the same date each month until you cancel it.

Free shipping nationwide. We deliver in New Zealand only. Phones are posted from Auckland by NZ Post courier, with tracking. We aim to post within 3 working days of your order.

For a pre-order, we show the ship date before you pay. You can cancel a pre-order any time before it ships, for a full refund.

Your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986 come first. Nothing on this page reduces them.

• Change of mind: return the phone within 30 days of delivery, in good condition with all its parts and the box. You pay the return postage. We refund to your original payment method within 10 working days of getting it back.
• Faulty phone: we repair, replace or refund it at no cost to you, and we pay the return postage. Small Talk also gives a 12-month warranty from delivery, on top of your legal rights.
• Charged by mistake: we refund it in full.

To start a return, email warren@smalltalk.nz with your order email. Please talk to us before you ask your bank for a chargeback. We can usually fix it faster.

Cancel a monthly plan any time with one button in the parent app. No reason needed and no fee. Calls to mobiles and landlines keep working until the end of the month you have paid for, then the phone moves to the Free plan. We do not refund part of a month. Switching between Quick Yarn and Long Yarn is charged or credited for the days left in the month. Calls between Small Talk phones and 111 keep working.

While your account is open, a Small Talk phone can always dial 111, even outside phone hours. It needs power and a working Wi-Fi connection, like any internet phone. We give the phone's home address to our carrier for 111 calls, so tell us if the phone moves home: in the parent app, open Help, then Moved house?, and type the new address. We update it with the carrier, usually within a day. The address goes to the operator only as the address we hold for the number, not where the phone is. Until you have set up the phone and given us its home address, a 111 call reaches the operator with no address. Teach your child to say their address, and keep a mobile phone for emergencies.

We collect what we need to run the phone: parent names and emails, the delivery address, the contacts you approve, and call records. Card details are held by Stripe, not by us (we see only the last 4 digits). If you buy a phone as a gift, we keep your name, email and the delivery address with the order.

• We never sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising.
• Call records are kept for 12 months, then deleted. This also applies after you close your account.
• Voicemail is deleted after 30 days. For Story Time, the recordings of your child's answers are deleted as soon as they are turned into text, and the answers and story are deleted after 30 days.
• When you close your account, we delete your data after 90 days, except call records (above) and records the law makes us keep (invoices, order and tax records, 7 years).
• You can ask to see or correct your information at any time under the Privacy Act 2020. Email our privacy officer, Warren Durling, at warren@smalltalk.nz.

To run the service we use other companies: server hosting (Australia), our phone carrier (New Zealand), email delivery, card payments (Stripe), courier delivery (NZ Post), address lookup, phone management (Grandstream), and, only if a parent turns on Story Time, AI story writing and voice (USA). Each gets only what it needs for its job. Some are overseas, including in the USA.

The launch email signup keeps your email address. We use it only to tell you when the shop opens, and we delete it if you ask. To stop abuse we also note the IP address of each signup for one day.

We count visits to this website with Cloudflare Web Analytics and PostHog (data kept in the EU). Neither sets cookies or follows you to other sites. PostHog keeps a random ID in your browser's storage so it can tell a return visit from a new one; clear your browser data to remove it. It records how the page is used (scrolling, clicks, time on each part) and whether you signed up or bought a phone, so we can improve the site. It never records what you type, and we do not link visits to your name or email.

Small Talk NZ Limited
Company number 9468562 · NZBN 9429054052437
St Heliers, Auckland, New Zealand

Email warren@smalltalk.nz or call 021 919 568 for help, returns, complaints and privacy. We reply within 2 working days and aim to resolve complaints within 20 working days. If we can't resolve a complaint, you can take it to the Disputes Tribunal (disputestribunal.govt.nz), or for a privacy complaint, the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz).