Life360 Pet GPS reviewed: peace of mind

Technology makes it easy keep tabs on your fur-baby, but what if you want to know more about their movements? That’s where the Life360 Pet GPS comes in.

Apple’s AirTag may not have been the first tracker to technically arrive, but it’s certainly the one that caused the most excitement in the industry, and ever since then, the category has been on fire.

Everyone has a tracker these days, or every company that makes Bluetooth gear. Apple has the AirTag, Google has a compatible Find Hub, Samsung has SmartTag trackers, Motorola has one as does Tile and Journey and Laser and so on. There are lots of trackers, and they all do similar things, using the power of background data to keep tabs on things you attach them to.

Your phone and the phones of people you know and don’t know are doing the heavy lifting without anyone being the wiser. Each device tracks these items in the background, making it possible to “find” them, or at least the last location where a nearby phone saw them.

It’s clever, and handy if something needs to be found around people, like a car or even a water bottle.

But what if you needed to keep tabs on an animal, particularly one that has run off during a storm, or even a pet that has gone on a stroll far away from home?

For that, you may need a specific device focused on keeping your fur baby and extended member of the family safe, with a tracker made specifically for this purpose.

What is the Life360 Pet GPS?

A clip on gadget designed to play nicely with a collar, the Life360 Pet GPS is similar to a Tile tracker the company already uses and sells, but with a difference.

While regular Tile trackers provide support for Bluetooth and may cover WiFi, the Life360 Pet GPS includes support for LTE (mobile) and GPS, providing a proper method of tracking beyond what phones will cover with background data on Bluetooth trackers.

That makes the Pet GPS different from a standard tracker, because it can relay its position in close to real time without needing nearby phones to monitor it.

The Pet GPS is small, weighing nearly 34 grams for the tracker sitting in its little casing, which needs to be clipped to a collar of some sort. If your animal hates wearing a collar, you may have a problem here.

A battery sits inside the Life360 Pet GPS, and while it’s not replaceable, it is rechargeable over USB-C, providing a run time of roughly two weeks of active use, but as long as six months depending on how the hardware is used.

What does it do?

If the feature list didn’t given it away, the Life360 Pet GPS is a slightly more advanced approach for a tracker, having more methods of tracking at its disposal, and can communicate more locations to an app.

You can find out where your pet has gone for a walk to and where it has been, and you can even set up a geofence around your home and get notifications when the animal moves beyond this digital fence.

The casing is built for a pet, meaning it’s slightly more chew resistant than say a standard Bluetooth tracker with a removable battery, and you’ll need to charge this all-encased design using USB-C.

But once it’s tied to your Life360 account and matched with the appropriate membership level, the Pet GPS becomes a way to keep tabs on your furry member of the family.

Does it do the job?

In terms of does it work, the answer is a definite “yes”, giving you a way not just to track your animals, but also to give you notifications about when they decide to leave.

For instance, if they’ve gone for a walk and left the place that you set up as your home, Life360 tells you shortly after it happens. Even if your partner has taken the pet for a walk without you, that becomes a notification, while the walk itself becomes a path you can look at in history.

Consider the path a little like a sequence of lines and stops you can track in time, the points of which become markers like waypoints in a game. You can browse through the map and times to see where the pet has gone, and get a gauge of where they’ve been.

In a real time emergency, this might become a great way to track your animal, particularly since they can go anywhere, such as if they run off from the sound of fireworks, a storm, or nearly anything.

Battery life is also quite solid, but depends on the movements of your animal.

With a dog that’s very much a home-body like Daisy the Golden Retriever, the battery life tends to be much longer, possibly because the location has remained largely consistent and the Pet GPS tracker can put itself into a power reserve mode of sorts.

The moment she left the house for a walk, however, and Daisy’s tracker switched back on, consuming battery life and tracking those data points for us to see.

That tells us roughly where the battery life goes: actual tracking, not just simply existing in a home.

Now past the two week mark and heading into week three, Daisy’s use has seen the battery life getting close to the mid-way mark. That gives you an idea of how long the battery could go for; if your pet isn’t moving outside their home and geofence terribly often, your battery life is more likely to be three to four weeks minimum before needing a charge. 

If you have a pet that normally wanders out, the tracker will switch on and consume its battery life faster, while relaying that data for your device to see, either close to real-time or with a historical point of view.

It’s a clever approach for tracking, and one that really affords a peace of mind few devices achieve. Life360’s Pet GPS definitely helps keep the calm with what it’s doing.

What does it need?

Our only major quibble with the Life360 Pet GPS is that it needs you to spend up on a service plan, which feels more like a cash grab by Life360 than anything else.

We’re actually not against the requirement that you might need to pay for a service in order to use the tracker; paying for services you use is a good thing, and there’s a little more going on here than simply background tracking, so this GPS is clearly not your standard everyday tracker.

However, Life360’s services start at free for two days of location history and two alerts for top spots (place alerts) before becoming $100 per year for its “Silver” plan which offers seven days of history and five place alerts. Neither of these are the 30 days of history and unlimited places offered by the $160 per year “Gold” plan and higher, also including roadside assistance, driver features, and stolen funds and phone reimbursement on trips.

The problem is that it seems, at least on first glance, that there’s little reason why neither the free plan nor its less expensive silver option couldn’t be used with the Pet GPS tracker.

It just reads as a bit of a forced upgrade of sorts, even though the tracker should be able to work with one of the lesser plans, but just won’t. If anything, it could be Life360 forcing a point: use the service for more than just pets, and you might see the value better.

Is it worth your money?

And that leads us to one of the only obvious problems with Life 360’s Pet GPS: the price, which can feel worse depending on your needs.

For the purposes of this review, Life360 supplied Pickr’s reviewer with a Platinum account, an extra point we’re citing here because it goes beyond the mere “supplying of a gadget” we normally note in our editorial guidelines, and it’s a rather pertinent one.

While we’re not reviewing the Life360 service in this review, you need a Life360 plan of at least Gold or higher in order to use the Pet GPS. Which means to say that once you buy the Life360 Pet GPS, you also need to match it with a yearly cost of at least $160 to keep the Pet GPS functional.

It’s worth noting that you also can’t just spend a month on it, but need to spend for the whole year; Life360 is very specific about plans, noting you need a “Life360 Gold or Platinum annual membership- billed monthly”.

That can be a bit of an issue, largely because an extra $160 per year is a reasonable amount of money more when pets are already expensive enough. Between pet insurance, vet bills, telehealth vets (if you use them), accessories, and grooming, having a pet in your life isn’t cheap.

Provided you’re okay with that, Life360’s annual payment is fine in a way, because it’s just like any other regular pet payment. In fact, it might make a lot more sense if you have several pets that you’re tracking.

The cost of $160 per year plus the $90 cost of one tracker can seem like a lot for one animal, but make at $160 per year for several trackers on several pets, and it starts to make a lot more sense logistically.

As such, weighing the “value” of a pet tracker is complex because while it can feel costly for one animal, the value might be fair. However, if you track multiple animals, the value is even better.

Life360 Pet GPS vs Apple AirTag

The counter to Life360’s Pet GPS will likely come from people thinking of just going for the Apple AirTag with a collar, and that’s a totally valid option. It’s also much less expensive, because you don’t need to pay for a service at all. With an AirTag or the like, you simply buy the gadget, buy the accessory, and let the tracking do its thing, replacing the battery usually a year later.

However, there’s a different set of risks: not only is an AirTag powered by a CR2032 battery, but the casing of the collar mightn’t be any more resistant, and might make it possible for your pets to chew through, exposing them to harmful chemicals.

Plus there’s the risk that if they go walkabout, the crowd-tracking technology might be worthless for where the pet is.

Remember, for AirTags and other similar devices to work, phones need to be around it. They’re not a GPS in the pure sense of what a GPS tracker is, so if your pet runs to the bush, the AirTag tracking mightn’t be useful at all.

Yay or nay?

Beyond the question of price, it’s difficult to argue against the Life360 Pet GPS. Several weeks in, even with an animal that mostly stays at home, the peace of mind it offers is seriously evident.

Yes, an AirTag or the like will offer some of what Life360 is doing here, but it’s clearly not the same. Even Life360’s Tile trackers aren’t in the same league, operating on the same principle as an AirTag.

You only have to realise the simple problem that if no one is around — or even if people are, but they use a different phone or tracker — your pet’s tracker could be useless. The Apple AirTag and Samsung SmartTag and everything like it isn’t really made for real-time tracking of animals or people in random places.

But the Pet GPS gets around this by making it a little more complex, and that’s a good thing. The complexities aren’t anything you need to worry about, because all the cool stuff is under the surface working for you, keeping tabs on your animal.

The only other problem is convincing your pet to leave its collar on, typically easier with a dog than a cat, but that’s a different issue altogether.

If money isn’t a concern and keeping your fur-baby safe is, Life360’s Pet GPS is a clear choice. Recommended.