The four-year cost, which nobody puts on the box
Subscription trackers are cheap to buy and not cheap to own. A typical plan runs somewhere in the region of five to ten pounds or dollars a month, so over four years the running cost usually exceeds the hardware several times over. A Bluetooth tag costs its purchase price plus a coin cell about once a year.
That is not an argument against subscriptions — you are paying for a cellular connection, which is a real ongoing cost that cannot be engineered away. It is an argument for doing the arithmetic before you buy rather than after, and for being honest about whether you need live tracking or simply reassurance.
Battery life is the spec that decides whether you use it
A tracker that needs charging every two days will, eventually and inevitably, be flat on the day it matters. This is the most consistently underrated specification in the category.
Bluetooth tags run about a year on a replaceable coin cell. Real GPS trackers range from roughly two or three days at the demanding end to a couple of weeks on the more efficient models, and the published figure always assumes low update frequency — live tracking drains far faster. If you walk somewhere remote on weekends, a tracker that lasts a fortnight in standby is worth more than one with marginally better accuracy.
Coverage, and the honest limit
A cellular tracker needs the network. In rural areas, valleys and woodland, coverage is exactly where it is worst — which is the same place your dog is most likely to disappear. A tracker with no signal stores its last known position and waits.
Before buying, check which network the tracker uses and look at that operator’s coverage map for the places you actually walk, not for your home address. This is the single most useful ten minutes of research in the whole category and almost nobody does it.
Fitting a tracker to a collar
- Attach to a collar, not a harness. The harness comes off; the collar stays on. A tracker on the equipment you remove at the door is a tracker that is not on the dog when it bolts.
- Weight matters below about fifteen pounds. A 30g unit is nothing on a Labrador and a real burden on a Chihuahua’s neck.
- Check the mount, not the tracker. Most losses are the clip failing, not the device. A tracker that threads onto the collar webbing beats one that clips to a D-ring.
- Waterproof rating is not optional. Dogs swim, and a tracker rated only splash-resistant will die in a pond.
What a tracker is not
It is not a containment system and it is not a recall. A tracker tells you where your dog went; it does nothing to stop it going. Guidance on GPS trackers consistently frames them as a recovery aid rather than a substitute for training, secure fencing or a long line — and that is the right framing.
It is also not an ID system. A microchip is permanent, cannot fall off and is what a vet or shelter will actually scan. A tracker helps you find your dog yourself; a chip helps whoever else finds it. They solve different halves of the same problem and you want both.
