Tagg-The Pet Tracker Master Kit, White

Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program I also have a Garmin GTU 10 pet tracker so I have the opportunity to take both for a spin on my cats and dogs.

This Tagg unit is smaller than Garmin. The design is nice looking and more hidden than Garmin while it's attached to the collar. So this Tagg is better for small pets such as cats or tiny breed dogs. What I don't like about the Tagg mounting is that it can snap off the collar if there is pulling on the latch, so I'm afraid I may lose it someday. The Garmin is in a secure fabric pouch but it's larger. If you have a tiny pet then this Tagg tracker is better.

The Tagg tracker communicates with the base unit to determine when the pet is close to home, unlike the Garmin which always uses GPS. Because the Tagg doesn't have to activate its GPS unless it is outside the home zone, the Tagg has better battery life. My Garmin lasts about 5 days before the battery runs out so I frequently have to take it out of the pouch to charge it. I haven't used the Tagg long enough to know how long the battery lasts, but after several days the indicator still shows full charge.

I like the actual tracking of the Garmin much better, however. When I want to know precisely where my pet is and the history of its tracks, I can see all the location updates on the map and it is really interesting to see where the pet has roamed the neighborhood when it escapes. The Garmin web and iPhone software is nicer and has more features than the Tagg software. The Tagg tracking history feature is pretty weak in comparison because it will only save a little bit of history only when you click the button, whereas Garmin keeps the track history all the time. Garmin has smoother email notifications -when I use the Tagg email notifications sometimes I get repeating emails with the exact same info. I prefer the Garmin web tracking map; it can be expanded to large size, but the Tagg web map cannot be resized.

The Tagg tracker is limited to a circular home zone, while the Garmin can use an irregular user-defined geofence. The Garmin is better if you have a large property that has a rectangular or odd shape (not circular or square).

If you have a tiny pet and just want to know it's safe or when to chase after it, and want long battery life, then I recommend this Tagg tracker.

If you have a larger pet and you want precision track history to know exactly which neighbor is secretly feeding it yummier food, and don't mind having to charge more frequently, then I recommend the Garmin GTU 10 instead.

I have had this product for about two weeks now, and would like to write a review for those who are thinking of getting one.

A few months ago, my Simba (a Shiba Inu) managed to get himself off-leash to chase a rabbit while I was walking him. He ended up in a juggle with full of woods and long grasses. He did not come back home that night. My wife did not get any sleep that night. Obviously she blamed all these to me, and I even heard divorce (I know...it sounds crazy). To make the story short, I was able to get him back from the woods the next morning after 2 hours of tree by tree searching. From this experience, I have been looking for a GPS tracking device for Simba. I want something small and light, and work with iPhone app. Nothing on the market comes close to what I was looking, until I found Tagg. Immediately I knew that this is what I have been looking for.

The product works perfect. It is very light and compact, and has a long battery life up to 30 days. You can attach it to the collar, and won't affect the dog's mobility (He is about 22 LB). With this product attached to him, I have released Simba to the woods in my backyard a few times for testing. I was able to know exactly where he was, and I could track him down if I needed to. The accuracy of tracking is amazing: within a circle of 3 yards. One time, the tracking device got lost while Simba was running in the woods. I was able to track down and find the device very easily.

So why did not I give a 5 star rating for this product? Here are a few things that you might need to be aware:

The tracking is static, not continue like a GPS navigation system. You have to activate it by pressing "Locate" in the App. It takes about 1-2 min to locate the device on the map. If your dog is running, you won't be able to see him moving on the map. Essentially, the GPS tracking function is performed on demand. While this is a drawback, but it is also probably the reason why it can have such a long battery life on such a small device. I think they can improve the product by adding a continue tracking mode.

What I dislike most about the product is its pricing scheme. The product kit (hardware) itself costs $98 from Amazon, very reasonable. But you have to pay additional $7.99 monthly service fee (Note that first 3-month is free) to use it. What comes with the service charge is email, text message notifications. You define a perimeter around your house when you setup the device. Every time when the dog goes out of the range, you will get a notification. While this is a nice service/feature to have, I don't find it is something I would pay $7.99 a month for. For a dog to get lost is an accident. It would not happen more than a few times a year. I would not want to pay a monthly fee for a few times of use each year. In fact, I would be willing to pay one time price of $200 for this product to avoid a monthly service fee.

I called their customer service about this month service charge. I was told that once the service is activated, I cannot deactivate the service. Otherwise, I would have to buy a new unit to activate the service again. In other words, to keep the device functioning, I need to have the service on all the time. If I deactivate the device after one year of use for example, I won't be able to use this device again by reactivating the service. This is totally crazy!!!

I am now on the fence as whether to keep it or return it. I hope the company will seriously consider changing the pricing scheme. I could see that they would lose a lot of customers with the current pricing strategy.

Buy Tagg-The Pet Tracker Master Kit, White Now

I dont usually review products because they rarely live up to their promise but this product is definitely as good as it claims. This product is well designed, simple to use and works flawlessly.

How it works:

So if you arent aware of how this things works here's a summary (some of this information is available on their website, and being an engineer some of it I just inferred myself). It comes with 2 peices a base station and a collar. The collar has a cellphone chip in it and a gps receiver. It can detect that it's near the base station and in this situation it wont activate the GPS (GPS burns battery power so this functionality is key to its excellent battery life). If the collar loses the connection with the base station (your pet is outside a preset Tagg zone) it will activate the gps and send a signal through the cell chip to Tagg and they will email or text message you with a low quality map indicating where your pet is. If you activate 'tracking' it will email/text you every 3 minutes with a new map. The emailed map is quite poor but you can also track your pet on an iphone or ipad. And because it uses a cell phone singal to transmit its coordinates there's no range limitations so your pet could run off to texas from washington and you could still track it. This service costs about $8/month for the first pet and $1 for each additional pet. That might seem a little expensive but most other products costs hundreds of dollars and require you recharge the battery daily and and are not nearly as simple to use and lack many of the features like notifications or alerts.

Now the Tagg zone is an area you setup on their website to indicate where your dog is allowed to go without setting off the alerts (emails/texts). It's quite large and must be circular in shape (i would guess the radius is about 250 feet) so if you hoped to get an alert as soon as your dog ducked under the fence that's not going to happen. Now if your dog is within the Tagg Zone you normally can't locate it using the 'locate' feature, however there is a button on the base station that if pressed will ask the collar to transmit your pets GPS coordintes to Tagg and you will get a notification.

My Experience:

On a single charge the tracker lasted 3 weeks and this included my dog being outside the Tagg zone about 6 times for a combined total of about 2 hours. Each time he left i got a notification about 3 minutes after i noticed he was gone. I would grab my ipad and jump in the car and setup the 'start tracking' feature which would update his location on the ipad app map every 3 minutes. Most of the time i was able to find him within 1-2 more updates and every time he was exactly where it indicated. 3 minutes might seem like a long time and it is if your tracking a car downtown but for a dog that's just wandering up the street it's more than enough.

When the trackers battery was low, Tagg emailed me and told me to recharge it on the base station, and when it was done charging it emailed me and told me to put it back on him. It's a bit bossy, but then again so is my wife.

Pros:

*long battery life even in tracking mode

*very accurate

*inexpensive

*works anywhere you have cell phone reception

*alerts for outside Tagg zone, low battery, etc.

Cons:

*tagg zone is quite large

*emailed map is poor quality

Notes:

*only transmits coordinates when u try to locate it or in tracking mode

*tracking mode only sends coordinates every 3 minutes

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I have been using the Tagg pet tracker for a little over two months now on my cats. I will start out by reminding you that this product is made for dogs, however cat CAN use it with a little extra effort on the pet owners part.

I choose this rating because this product has changed my life for the better. I love my cats like my children. I work from home and am with them all the time however I can't watch them at every single moment. With the Tagg pet tracker I know where my babies are at all times even when I can't go look for them.

A few months ago one of my cats when into my neighbors garage and was unknowingly locked in the storage closet for 10 full days before he was discovered. Those ten days where some of the worst of my life. I took and entire week off of work, spent hundreds of dollars making and distributing flyers, walked over 30 miles on foot, and spent hundred of hours in a frantic search for him. I covered miles on foot and turned an entire city upside reaching 1000s of people. I went into debt trying to find this cat. All of that time, money, and all of the tears I cried over those days were a waste because the cat was next door to me the entire time. With the Tagg tracker I know that this will not happen to my family again.

Yes my cats are going to run off, they are going to go into garages again. I live in a subdivision my cats have a cat door and stay in my yard and garage for most parts of the day. After using my tracker for only a few weeks I know where my cats go when they do sneak off. I know their hiding places, I know that every morning one of my cats walks over the next block and sits in the forrest for about 2 hours. She does this every day. Simple things like that are what makes this such and amazing tool for pet owners.

I have only used this product on cats. I am a cat lady to the core. The program and product is designed for dogs. As a cat user you will have a few issues with this system however you can easily over come the issues.

The tracking device is a little too large for the average cat, and cat collar. My cats do not seem to be bothered by it, however on a cat it hangs low, so the cat will drag it on things, it was getting hung up on stuff, and caused a problem when the cats would drink water because it would be in the water while they tried to drink. THE SOLUTION I purchased a simple inexpensive cat harness. The type you would put on them if you were going to talk them on a leash. I attached the Tagg tracker to the back part so that it is like they are wearing a little back pack. It was a little awkward at first however the cats adjusted after about a week of wearing it. The cats look super cute in their new harnesses, and if someone does see them walking about they tracker is easily seen so they know that the cat they are looking at is very important and loved by someone. Also if you do ever need to go into the dark and search for your cat the Tagg blinks bright blue and red while in tracking mode. With the unit on their back it is like a beacon and I can see it from blocks away.

I know this is a long review. I probably write a book about this product and how great it is and how much I love it. I suggest you purchase one and try it out. Each system comes with a 3 month trail of the service. If you don't like it return it.

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I have four Labradors and live in the hill country of central Texas. After one of our pets ran away for a day, we decided to try the Tagg product. At first all was well, for about a week or two. Then we noticed that the batteries in the trackers would only last a day or so(24 30 hours). We went through months of trial and error, working with support, trying to troubleshoot this issue, and eventually replacing three of the four trackers we had, to no avail. My suspicion is that the charging/base station had some sort of problem and could not easily 'see' the trackers, even though all of my dogs stay within about 10 to 30 feet of it 98% of the time. What would seem to confirm my base station diagnosis was that when we had a tracker become detached from a collar one day, the iPhone app worked like a champ and led me directly to the tracker out in the woods. It had become detached while the dog was rolling in the remains of something dead... oh joy. So the cellular system had no problems keeping up with that tracker that day, but can rarely keep up with the base station.

The batteries would fail and we would never get a "low battery" warning as we should, so we would not know it until a day or two later unless we were regularly checking them. Tracking them online was equally frustrating because the system could not really keep track of them properly; most of the time the online icons showing location would be a couple of days old or would show them being out and about when in fact they were sleeping next to the base station. This does not give you a sense of security when you know you might have to track a dog down...

Eventually(after approximately 2 to 3 months...)the Tagg support people basically gave up. They simply said that it is a cell coverage issue and we will not be able to do anything about that, so your batteries will always run down very fast. The escalation support person even acknowledged that it sounded to her like the base station was bad, but that they "had a process they had to follow..." and would not be able to replace the base station. She then said that she could offer me a full refund on all of our trackers, even though we bought them 7 or 8 months ago.

So basically (it sounds like to me...), they gave up and are getting us out of their hair so they no longer have to deal with us.

I think the product is a very good idea and is something I desperately want to use because of where I live. I spent months working with their support trying to get the devices to work as advertised, but failed.

Buyer Beware! YOU ARE NOT TOLD EVERYTHING ABOUT THESE UNITS BEFORE YOU BUY THEM. Tagg is owned by Qualcom, a huge soul-less corporation which is populated by drones who will follow their process to the letter, even if it costs them money or failure. If you live in a big city, you will probably have few problems. If you are out in the country where they can blame the cellular company for their failure, you may be out of luck. I hope you have better results than I did.

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