Here's a solution for $60/year, plus the cost of whatever budget Android device you want or have on hand: A year of unlimited talk/text from Liberty Wireless (

Here's a solution for $60/year, plus the cost of whatever budget Android device you want or have on hand: A year of unlimited talk/text from Liberty Wireless (a T-Mobile MVNO) costs $60.^1 Then, use call barring/do not disturb to disable incoming calls and USSD codes^2 to turn off call forwarding. You now have a phone number that effectively only supports SMS. I'd also recommend going with this plan if you are addicted to the Internet and just want a phone, but don't want to pay through the nose for something like the Punkt^3. As far as only using SMS, sending/forwarding emails through SMS is doable (for now), so if your people's comms can be converted to email, you can use SMS for those as well. Unfortunately, the naive solution of sending outgoing mail requires MMS (and therefore data), but you can send SMS to a Google Voice number, for example, which can be set up to forward a copy of the message to an email, which can then be used for triggering control events locally. YMMV. --- 1 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/174582899616 https://www.ebay.com/itm/174582899616 2 - https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/self-service-short-codes https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/self-service... 3 - https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/ https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/