Does anyone selfhost a tracker for a dog or cat? A reputable company charges 5€-13€ per month for it. I’m not sure I want to pay that for more than 10 years
You can’t self host a tracker like that, at least not for free, because the only way for the data to be reported is through a cellular connection which costs money. The subscription fee seems perfectly reasonable
That’s not true at all! I’m using some 1NCE SIM that cost 10€ for 10 years of connectivity with 500MB of data. For my car I’ve calculated that it should last about 6/7 years, but even if it would last 1 year, it’s still less than 1€/month!
OP “just” needs to find the tracker and selfhost something like Traccar.
Not true. Free cellular connections exist in some places. And there are non-cellular solutions like LoRA trackers.
What’s with the space in the nick? I don’t know how to cite you! Have a look at my answer to rbesfe.
https://www.findmycat.io (no personal experience, just aware of it)
That looks fantastic, if only the parts were available rather than needing to find a pcb manufacturer, 3d print the case, etc.
I don’t know any product that matches your requirements.
If I had to deal with that today I’d buy a rasberry pi, a USB sim card dongle and some raspberry hat with GPS receiver.
You can write a small API that listens to the raspberries, who sends periodically their positions, and save it to a database.
But it’s a quite large project. There’s a lot of aspects to consider. The GUI, security, batteries, and a way to attach it to an animal without being lost or destroyed.
Sorry for not giving a useful answer lol. If you come out with an actual solution I’ll be glad to hear it, so I can track my cats in case they get lost.
We used this when we had cats: https://tabcat.com
It’s expensive up front but works pretty well and no hosting fees. Of course it’s not GPS so you kinda gotta know the general area the cat is in. But it was great for getting the cats in out of the yard. They would hide when it was time to come in until we got this. Worked ok for finding them in the neighborhood as well, just walked around pointing the remote everywhere. The collar tags are nice and small as well.
