Tile, the AirTag rival now owned by Life360, today launched a new cat-tracking tag to help pet owners find their furry friends. The new device, “Tile for Cats,” is essentially a modified version of the Tile Sticker with a silicone collar attachment that costs $39.99.
The company says the Tile for Cats’ battery will last for up to three years, and the sticker can be easily replaced. The tracker also has a 250-foot (76.2-meter) range and works with both Android and iOS devices.
The new device not only helps cat owners track down a missing pet, it could also be helpful for those times the cat is just hiding in an “obscure place,” Tiles says.
Like other Tile devices, the product offers integration with voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant so you can easily find your cat using voice commands.
The package includes a Tile Sticker and a collar attachment which is compatible with almost all standard cat collars. The company said that the attachment can stretch up to 1.7x without breaking. Additionally, Tile for Cats is water resistant, so a few droplets of liquid or a cat licking it won’t affect it.
This is the company’s first foray into pet products, as it doesn’t yet offer a Tile for Dogs, for example. But the company had hinted last year following its acquisition by family tracking app Life360 that it considered pets part of the “family.”
The move is also a clever ploy by the company to tweak an existing product in order to offer a low-cost Bluetooth-based tracking solution for a specific niche.
There are plenty of GPS-based trackers on the market starting from the $50 base price, with some offering monthly subscriptions for additional features. However, at roughly $40, Tile’s device is more expensive than Apple’s $29 AirTag with a few additional bucks for a cat collar attachment. Tile’s device also has a smaller “finding network,” as AirTag leverages Apple’s vast network of 2+ billion iPhones and other Apple devices worldwide, while Tile is limited to Life360’s user base.
Still, AirTag doesn’t come with a mechanism to attach it to a pet collar — you’d have to buy another product for that, which would increase the total cost.
Tile for Cats is available now on Tile.com and comes in black and white.