Yes — Cribbit is a baby monitor for iPhone and iPad that charges no monthly fee. Live video, live audio and all alerts are free, and the extras cost a one-time payment rather than a recurring subscription.
Why video monitors tend to have subscriptions
The majority of video baby monitors route footage through the manufacturer's cloud. The camera sends video up to a server; your phone pulls it back down. That infrastructure costs money to run, which is why a product that ships as a physical camera often becomes a recurring service charge once you get home.
The most common subscription features are cloud recordings, remote viewing outside the home and alert history. The core live view is usually kept free to make the hardware sale, but everything around it arrives paywalled at a monthly or annual rate.
Cribbit is built on a different assumption. If both devices are on the same network, there is no reason to involve a server.
Cribbit's onboarding screen. No router, cloud or account to configure.
How the direct connection works
One iPhone or iPad stays in the nursery. The other stays with you. The two devices connect directly using your home Wi-Fi — no traffic goes through a server. Because nothing runs in the cloud, there is nothing to charge for each month.
On iPhone 12 and later running iOS 26, Cribbit can skip the router entirely. The devices connect over Wi-Fi Aware, which is the same radio technology AirDrop uses, so it works in a hotel room or anywhere you cannot trust the local Wi-Fi. On older devices or earlier iOS, it falls back to local home Wi-Fi with no internet connection required.
Pairing takes about a minute. One device generates a six-character code; you type it on the other. No account, no email, nothing to authorise with a third-party service.
Pairing with a six-character code. No account or cloud service involved.
What is free
Live video, live audio and all alerts are free. Cry detection is included at no cost. It runs on the device using a model that ships with iOS 17 and calibrates to the room's own noise level, so it learns to tell a baby's cry from a car passing outside or someone talking in the kitchen.
The sound tuning screen, where the classifier learns the room's ambient noise.
Every frame from the nursery carries a timestamp. If the connection drops or the nursery device locks its screen, Cribbit shows "Stalled" rather than leaving you looking at a still image. A frozen picture that looks identical to a sleeping baby is a known risk with video monitors; the status indicator takes the guesswork out of it.
What the one-time payment adds
There is one optional unlock: a single payment that adds background listening (audio keeps coming in after you lock your phone), Picture in Picture, talk-back and lullabies. It applies to every device your family owns, not per phone, and it is not a subscription.
That covers what most parents want on a long night. With a subscription monitor, you pay for those features every year the nursery is in use. With Cribbit, you pay once.
What you need
Two devices running iOS or iPadOS 17 or later. Most iPhones from 2018 onward — iPhone XR and XS and everything after — can run iOS 17, so a phone that stopped being someone's primary device a few years ago is a reasonable nursery camera.
For the direct Wi-Fi Aware connection — the one that works without any router — both devices need to be iPhone 12 or later on iOS 26. For everything older, the app falls back to local Wi-Fi; either way, no internet connection is required.
The nursery device should be plugged in. Cribbit keeps the screen on to stream video, which draws battery faster than normal use.
What Cribbit does not do
It is not a medical device and does not measure breathing, oxygen levels or heart rate. It is a video and audio monitor that tells you whether it is receiving a live feed from the room.
Coverage depends on the Wi-Fi Aware or local Wi-Fi signal. Through walls and floors the range shrinks, the same as any wireless connection. If the link drops, Cribbit reports it rather than showing a still frame.
Getting started
For parents wondering whether two phones they already own will do the job, the monitoring itself costs nothing. The extras, if you want them, cost a single payment, not a yearly renewal.
The app is in a TestFlight beta at cribbit.xeve.io. Testers who send feedback receive the one-time unlock at no charge when the app ships to the App Store.