Tractive Mini GPS Cat Tracker | Market Leader | Real-Time Location Tracking | Location History | Health Alerts | Activity Monitoring | Collar included | Works With Subscription (Mint)

Our boy isnt allowed out because we have busy roads and also hes a fatty and likes to break into peoples homes and eat their food. This tracker means we know exactly where he is if he does escape and it also tells us how l̶a̶z̶y̶ active he is. Only issue- our boy is a chonk and its still quite bulky on him. I tend to take it off in the evening so he can clean himself a little easier and he needs all the help he can get to reach anyway. Battery lasts a week (without live tracking) and we get a reminder when its low. Easy to charge. Just release it from its rubber cable and click it into the charger. Its quick to charge and youll get a notification when its done. It uses about 1% of battery per minute of live tracking. Worth remembering it if they go awol for a few hours- turn off live tracking and only turn it on via the app when actively looking for them. I think the dog version has a slightly better battery but would be too big for a cat. Geo fence is useful as its saves battery but its location is a little erratic, sometimes saying hes out of the house when he is sleeping next to me. Alarm is too quiet (assume so as not to scare the cat or injure the cats ears) so I have a mini tile on him too which I can trigger the alarm via the tile app (tiles are LOUD!) when im near to him to easily pinpoint him if hes being a d-k and hiding in a bush. The collar it comes with is sturdy and works well. I purchased a years membership- its not much use without a membership unfortunately but I reasoned it was worth the expense because it allows live gps tracking, unlike the tile. The Tile only shows last location and alarm sounding and battery lasts a year+ with no subscription. Having them both on him seems like a lot but hes my precious fat meatball and I want him to be safe.

Picture 1 Before: After 12 days lost away from home, still with her collar and phone tag on but weak and thin, Tilly is rescued from a high tree by cherrypicker.Picture 2 After: Tilly, wearing her newly purchased TRACTIVE TRACKER, recovering at home.We have had cats for 20 years but always thought GPS trackers were expensive and inaccurate and not worth buying a subscription as well as the tracker itself. Having experienced 12 days of gradually losing hope of finding Tilly alive, then getting word she was high up in a tree unable to get herself down, a crew in a passing cherrypicker offered to get her down for us. One very lucky cat and delighted cat parents!We have now had a week's experience of using trackers, one each bought for our two cats.Initially,setting the first tracker up and linking it to the Tractive app on our iphones seemed complex but the second one was a doddle. We had to learn some new terms like Safe Zone and Radar but once you have studied what is available (and there are a lot of options), it is such a relief to be able to find out where your cats are at any time - and interesting to follow where they have been.The tracker comes with its own collar and a choice of two ways to fit the tracker to it, one is a rubber cover and the other a cage which the tracker clips into. The collar has a pull-apart release (no buckle) which can be adjusted depending on how much strength (related to its weight) you want to set, to prevent the cat pulling the tracker off too easily but which it can release if trapped by the collar. The tracker looks quite bulky but is very light and as our cats (4 years old) are used to wearing collars with bells and name tags on them, they accepted the new trackers without any difficulty.I understand that the trackers work with effectively a SIM card in them, like a smart phone, so they can use your wifi at home but then use the battery for GPS tracking when out of range of bluetooth and wifi. Because the tracker must be light for the cat to carry, the battery, although quickly rechargeable, doesn't last many days and I check the battery status every morning before I let the cats out. The more you follow exactly where your cat is going (equivalent to using a mapping app on a smart phone), the quicker the battery will drain. I have set the Safe Zone to be our garden and I get a message on my apple watch/iphone when my cats leave or re-enter that zone, so I am aware if they start to wander further away. Each cat has her own record on the one app on my phone. It is also possible to let cat sitters, etc. (and the public generally, I believe) have access to the app on their phones so that others can temporarily be allowed to track your cats.For each cat I paid upfront about £30 to buy the tracker (30% discount was available on Amazon) and £169 for a two year subscription, which includes two replacements should the tracker get lost. There is a facility to turn a light and sound on using your phone to try and find a lost tracker but that wouldn't work well if the battery has run down, the tracker happens to be upside down so the light doesn't show and the sound is very faint.All in all, just under £200 per cat for peace of mind for 2 years, to look after what we regard as our family members even though they are only ordinary moggies, demonstrates just what these GPS trackers with their up-to-date technology can do so effectively.

We have a kitten who has literally just reached a year old. She was a rescue and didn't get spayed until January 2024, and she was then allowed out with an Apple Air Tag on a collar. £5 collar and a £25 Air Tag.Whilst this didn't allow real time tracking, on the very odd occasions she failed to return home we managed to find here or have her turn up whilst we were looking for her, and on the solitary occasion over the course of 6 months where she came home without the collar, we managed to find the collar within 30 minutes.In search of something that would provide real-time tracking and also educate us as to how far she goes, whether she goes anywhere dangerous etc. we bought this tracker.Issue number 1 and it's a big problem - you literally cannot use the tracker without a subscription which we knew, but we did assume that as the pricing for a subscription was shown as "per month" that it would be just that. Did we not read properly? Quite possibly, but ultimately it came down to having to pay for a whole year up front no matter what. So essentially over and above the cost of the initial tracker, you also have to folk out almost double again just to use it to see if it is actually any good.Assuming that the reviews were real and genuine, we took the plunge and bought the 2-year premium plan with loss coverage for £162. Didn't have too much choice really, as 1 year was considerably more expensive than 2 years divided by 2, and again we were naive enough to think it would be a good tracker.The collar included is probably the only good point about this tracker. The Rogz cat collar is excellent, and you can set how easily the collar will come apart, we put it on the lowest setting as the cat is quite small and we would sooner lose a tracker and collar than have a dead cat!Massive problem 2 is the two different attachments for the collar to hold the tracker are absolutely rubbish. One is a black plastic clip and the other a dark blue thin rubber/latex holder. We tried the clip first, and the tracker never really felt as secure as it should be.Setting up the app was relatively straight forward although in use it isn't the most intuitive and a little clumsy at times, but it does its job.The tracker for me is huge (especially compared to an Air Tag) and hangs under the cat’s neck. The cat didn't seem overly put off though and away she went.Problem 3 - the battery barely lasts 2 days without doing any live tracking and if you are brave enough to not charge it after 2 days, on the third day if your cat loses her collar or the tracker, it's a battle against the battery running out to find it. All this despite it having power saving features like using wi-fi only when she is in the house.The battery life is literally garbage. It does charge in under 30 minutes, but you literally have to charge it every other day without fail otherwise by the end of day three it is likely to be lost if the cat doesn't bring it home (or come home).Problem 4 - So in week 1 the tracker and collar got pulled off the cat in a thorn bush. At the time I guessed just one of those things, but it has become so regular it must relate to the size of the tracker. Cat came home without collar, we waited until next morning to retrieve it with 50 percent battery remaining due to it having been charged overnight.When we got to the area where live tracking said it was, we switched on audio. Couldn't hear a thing, switched on the light, couldn't see a thing. When we found it using the bluetooth finder in the app, it was maybe 5 feet from us on the floor. The sound is barely audible and on this and every occasion the tracker has gone missing, the light is facing the floor so completely useless.Since the first loss, we have had another couple of losses of the collar and tracker and then a couple of weeks ago we managed to find the collar, but no sign of the black plastic clip. At this point I read online reviews only to realise that the clip is clearly not fit for purpose. There is no way it should be breaking just under the strength of our cat.Rather than order a replacement, we tried to use the rubber/latex holder instead on the same collar. The problem with this is that this caused the tracker to dangle quite low around the cat's neck and on several occasions, it has come back along with the cat covered in mud or marks suggesting it is scraping the floor when she crawls under fences/bushes etc.Speed up to last night, cat comes home with a collar and the rubber holder, but no tracker due to a rip in the holder. For the second time ever (first time was a freshly charged battery earlier in the week and the cat left the wi-fi zone of the house to go out and about) when I looked for the location of the tracker on the app, there was no GPS signal (despite it having network signal) so only an approximate location for the tracker in a nearby field nearly 5 hours ago.I have been to look for it today and the tracker wasn't in the area of the last location and hasn't been found. There is no location that I am aware of where the cat has ever been with the tracker that doesn't have GPS signal, and exactly where the tracker was last seen has great GPS signal on a phone. So, I am guessing that at the same time as the holder getting ripped, the device has suffered damage or has eventually come out of the holder somewhere very out of the way. The last location updates about every 2 to 3 minutes so the cat couldn't have gotten far with it - but far enough for us to have zero chance of finding it.That's OK I hear you say, you have the premium plan with loss coverage you can get another one. Yes, you would think so, but then you can only claim for loss twice in the 2 year period as far as I know, and had it not been for our dogged perseverance wading through bushes and all sorts and getting cut to bits, we would have lost 5 by now.Had we not spent a fortune on an annual monitoring plan, the tracker would have already been in the bin after the second loss. But here we are less than 3 months since its purchase and it has been lost 6 times at least now, and on each occasion, we have had to be adventurous to rescue it. On 2 occasions in that time this has been due to the failure of the holder's materials.So to summarise: Battery life is dire, sound is so low volume it's pointless (and it’s an annoying tune instead of a good beep like Air Tag), the light on every occasions has been hidden as the tracker always lands light side down (due to its design), the holders are literally not fit for purpose, the GPS seems unreliable and you are tied in to a year as a minimum but could easily find yourself needing a 3rd replacement within weeks due to the holders being rubbish, GPS failing or the collar and tag clearly being very susceptible to getting snagged in a bush and not retrievable due to the size of the thing.Incidentally a friend who has two of these for two cats (who we didn't speak to before buying), literally uses gaffa tape every time she charges the batteries and puts the tracker back on the collar due to the number of times their trackers have gone missing due to broken holders.Based on the negative Amazon reviews, the manufacturers must know of all of these problems.My suggestions to fix it all?1. Give a free trial for the actual tracking after initial purchase. If you are too tight to do this at least allow a month’s paid trial.2. Remove the light completely or put it on a surface where it can be seen.3. Sort the volume out - we can hear an Airtag from 10-15 feet easily, why does this thing play a rubbish tune instead of using something more penetrating of a noise, and why is it so quiet?4. Use a better battery AND allow in settings for the location updates to take place up to an hour apart (3 minutes average it seems at the moment which I could definitely live without), and all the lifestyle monitoring stuff be able to be disabled so the tracker isn't so active.5. Sort out the holders, they are absolute garbage and not fit for anything. Literally some rubber rings that reinforce the holders would be a start.6. Change the number of claims for a lost tracker one can make.In the meantime, despite the waste of the subscription, we are going back to relying on an Air Tag with the Rogz collar.TRACTIVE IS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE unless you live somewhere where your cat really cannot adventure much beyond a garden and tarmac with close to zero risk of your cat ever catching its neck area on anything.