Who knows if it will still be around but I have my 12 year old on a FreedomPop plan. They are a Sprint MVNO and mostly offer low to mid grade Android phones although I think you can bring your own Sprint compatible phone. Anyway as a first cell phone I got her one of the cheap Androids, and the great thing about FreedomPop is their basic plan is free. She gets something like 300 min of voice, 300 SMS, messages, and 1GB of data each month for free (I forget the exact amounts). She only really needs to use it if she is at school and needs to stay late or something like that or sometimes she calls her friends. When she's at home and on wifi she just uses her iPad with iMessage, FaceTime, Skype etc. she's hadn't since mid-July and so far so good. She'd rather have an Apple device, so if she continues to do well with it (no drops, losing it, etc), then maybe next year we pick up a used Sprint iPhone 5S or something like that.