Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We bought this for our active cat. My goal was to monitor where he goes and how often he crosses a busy street, so we can decide whether to let him out in the future. I like this tracker enough that we might consider using permanently going forward, which was not the original plan. Things that work well: - You can set a very precise digital fence. I live on a normal sized lot, and it was important to me to know exactly when he crosses a street on our block (I care less where he goes on our property). I was surprised I could drag the fence lines so precisely up to the sidewalk vs the edge of our yard, etc. And the shape doesn't have to be a square - you can set any shape along any road/property line you need. - You can view a heat map of everywhere he went during the last 24 hours, and see where he spent more/less time based on color coding. It's hilarious. I use this to determine how often he's getting into areas that are more/less safe. See picture. - You get notifications when he enters/exits the digital fence -Live tracking (you can see in real time where he's moving around to) works well, unless he's in a wooded area. This helps me if I'm trying to bring him inside and need to know where to look for him and which direction he's heading at that moment. - The physical tracker has a secure connection piece to his collar, I don't worry about it coming off. Charging it is easy, and I find the charge lasts a few days at least. Note, I let my cat in and out (he doesn't come and go on his own). So it's easy to check the battery life before I let him out. If your cat has a door to come and go, I could see the battery life being a little annoying to monitor. However the app sends a notification if the charge is low, so overall I think battery life and charging work well here - I like the design and usability of the app on my phone. It's not clunky and gives me the info I want. Things that work less well: - Sometimes his position doesn't update for 30-40 minutes or more. So if I check on where he is and his last position updated 40 mins ago, I have to turn on Live Tracking to get a more current read. I don't know if the app would have known if he crossed our digital fence during that time, either. So I worry I might be missing times where he's crossing the road and could call him back. However, when I look at his historical heat map, the app doesn't seem to have gaps on his position. - The physical tracker is big for a cat. I eventually got comfortable connecting it to his collar only (not his harness), but at first I was worried it was too heavy for his neck. He doesn't seem bothered by it now. My cat is a normal size, about 12 pounds. See picture. - The activity/exercise tracking features seem unnecessary for an animal. I only use the digital fence, live tracking, and historical heat map features. Personal preference though - I lost signal once for about 45 mins when he went into a treed area. The app didn't tell me a signal had been lost, it just didn't update as normal, so it took me until an hour went by with no position update to realize he was off the grid. Live tracking wouldn't work, and I panicked something had happened to him/the tracker, since that hadn't happened before. Typical cat fashion, after I walked the block calling for him he popped out again on the app close to home after selectively ignoring my calls. I have a lot of evergreen trees and more mature landscaping on the block, but wouldn't call that area "heavily wooded." So just be wary if you live among a lot of trees, you could lose signal often. This time, I did notice a gap in his historical heat map tracking for that period of time. - I really don't like paying for the gps tracking as a subscription. However, the app works well enough and I get a precise enough GPS location on him to solve what I need, so I'm willing to pay it in this case. I also felt the up front cost of the tracker was low enough to offset the ongoing cost.