Mspy free alternatives?

There is no free equivalent of mSpy, because the expensive part is not the software — it is the install, the support and the dashboard hosting. What does exist is a set of free first-party tools that cover specific slices, and they are usually better at those slices than mSpy is.

Free, and genuinely good at their job:

• Apple Screen Time + Family Sharing — app limits, downtime, Communication Limits, content restrictions, location. Free, native, no install, and it cannot be removed by the child without your Apple Account.
• Google Family Link — location, app approval, screen time, device locking on Android. Free.
• Google Maps / Apple Find My location sharing — cross-platform, accurate, free, requires consent.
• Life360 free tier — one circle, basic location and place alerts.
• Router-level filtering (Eero, Asus, TP-Link) — covers every device in the house for web content, free with hardware you may already own.

What free does not give you: SMS and call-log content, app-level message capture, or a single dashboard across platforms. That is the paid tier of the category, and it costs real money to run.

The cheapest paid route that is not mSpy: an Android device plus a dashboard subscription. Ultimate Phone Spy is $16/month on the annual plan, with SMS, calls, location, web history and app inventory across Android, Windows and Mac (pricing, system requirements) — roughly half to a quarter of mSpy's typical renewal price. It does not cover iPhone, and neither does mSpy in any meaningful content sense.

Recommended combination for a family on a budget: Screen Time for the iPhones, Family Link for the Android phones, router filtering for the house, and one dashboard only for the device where you genuinely need message content. Stacking three paid apps is what makes this category expensive, not the software itself.