Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr more than 20 years ago. Now, 10 years after creating Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are asking for a foldable phone.

“We’ve been interviewing young people who use foldable phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept coming across: Gen Z users love their foldable phones but say the build quality is poor. “They describe foldable phones in negative language, but they stand their ground and are proud.”

Then Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touchscreen phones and put it in a foldable phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device Light has ever released.

“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK development program, all the tools that we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar…” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s exactly the same experience, only one is completely touch, without a touch screen, and [the other] one is a full touchscreen experience.”

Price has always been the most difficult issue for Light as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a phone with “less” for a price people will actually pay, when all the talk is about fewer features? Its previous version, the unlocked Light Phone III, sells for $799. But the Light Flip cuts the cost to $299 by eliminating a touchscreen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made from plastic, rather than stronger aluminium, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a variety of colours: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue and light grey.

“I thought it was completely QWERTY, but I was having fun with predictive texting T9 [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number]so I see myself using a flip phone also because of the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone makes me really excited.”

Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing strategy. It recently tested phone contracts with Noble Mobile, Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling operator. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month during the same time period.

The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen inside and no screen on the outside, as users requested. However, there will be a small light on the front of the phone so you can see if you have notifications without opening the device. With 5G and 4GLTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download online podcasts and play music you upload to your phone, which you can listen to through a 3.5mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with physical eSIM and 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 pre-order customers interested (and, in practice, prevent them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, which includes biweekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment that comes with ditching a smartphone. It’s as much a community-building movement as it is a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes to make the transition to using its products less jarring and stick.

While Light believes its phones can help people recapture time they may regret spending on meaningless commutes, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to give up 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 that it doesn’t come from a place of 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 against big technology in all these ways, but we’ve always tried to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”