There’s the Basic plan, which has GPS location tracking, unlimited live tracking, and activity and sleep monitoring, for $6 per month on a $144 bill every two years, or $9 per month on a $108 bill annually. The Premium plan includes Family Sharing, worldwide coverage (2G or LTE cellular coverage from over 500 cell networks), 365-day historical location history, and the ability to export GPS data, for $5 per month on a $300 bill every five years, $7 per month on a $168 bill every two years, or $10 per month on a $120 bill annually.
The tracker weighs only 1 ounce and can be used with any cat above 7 pounds. It needs to be charged on the dock before use, and it takes about two hours to fully charge. (The charger sticks and locks into place, and it’s not the easiest to pull out when finished charging.) If you have an indoor cat, a charge lasts about five days, but if your pet wanders outside, it needs to be charged almost daily.
Once your pet’s profile is created, you’ll set your home location so the device can enter power-saving mode when you’re home, and you’ll also set an activity goal to make sure your pet stays active. Tractive compared Basil with cats of similar age and weight to create personalized daily activity goals. Through the app, you can also view other users’ pets and compare their goals to your own.
I walked up to Basil’s activity goal (120 to 230 minutes per day is the default set for Basil), and the app reported that he was consistently more active than 70 percent of similar cats, giving me peace of mind knowing that I was playing with him enough and keeping him as active as possible in my tiny Brooklyn apartment. Through the app, you can view activity daily (by hour) and historically, and it compares active minutes for an individual cat and others. Basil’s daily activity averaged 375 minutes per day, and he burned an average of 450 calories per day (a measurement that is estimated based on factors such as the pet’s type, weight, and size).
Tractive via Molly Higgins
Tractive via Molly Higgins
The sleep feature functions similarly, monitoring sleep duration and dividing it into categories of night sleep, day sleep and calm (when your pet is just chilling). It tracks sleep based on lack of activity and time of day, so it’s a good estimate but not highly accurate. Like Activity, it compared Basil to similar cats and contained data as well as useful information about how much sleep is normal; He was on the lower end of normal for average naps of 43 minutes. I was able to see historically that he sleeps about 14 to 18 hours per day (of which about eight hours are during the day), and each day I log his night and day sleep along with his quiet time, and compare it with the pet’s average.
It also shows sleep stages, meaning how much sleep the cat has had so far throughout the day, over time. It was interesting to watch his sleep patterns, as he often sleeps through the night when I sleep, but wakes up around 4:45 a.m. when the feeder goes off and then wakes up again around 6:15 a.m. when my roommate goes to work, and is awake for the first few hours of my workday, but typically naps from 12 to 3 a.m. daily. I love this feature as a tool to know when Basil might be sick due to increased sleepiness.