About Tag & Tether

The one question this site exists to answer

Tag & Tether covers GPS trackers and Bluetooth item trackers, and it exists because of a specific gap in how they get written about. Every listing shows you a device price. Almost none shows you the subscription attached to it, and in this category the subscription is usually the larger number by a factor of ten or more.

So every page here answers the same question: what does this cost to own for three years? Device price, plus the brand's own published plan rate multiplied by thirty-six months, plus any activation fee. The arithmetic is trivial. Nobody does it. Doing it reorders the whole category, because a $17.95 magnetic tracker with a $12.95 monthly plan turns out to cost more than $480 to own, while a $34.99 tag with no plan costs about $38.

That is the whole editorial proposition. If you want the single page that holds it, the three-year cost table is here.

Who writes it

Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. He started Tag & Tether after getting tired of tracker listings that bury the monthly fee. Every pick here is chosen on what it costs to own over three years — device price plus whatever the plan actually runs — with the maths shown on the page.

There is one author and one byline. No staff writers, no “expert panel”, no editorial board — because none of those people exist, and inventing them is the first step toward inventing everything else.

What we do not do, said plainly

We do not lab-test these products. There is no test bench, no range testing across a field, no battery endurance runs, no water-resistance checks. We do not have the equipment to do any of that honestly, so we do not claim to.

We state that as a feature rather than confess it, because the convention in this category is the opposite. Search any tracker and you will find a dozen pages claiming “after weeks of testing” on products nobody at those sites has held. We would rather make a smaller claim accurately: read every manufacturer's published specification and cite it with the date, find the real plan price and cite that too, do the thirty-six-month arithmetic, and name the buyer each device is wrong for.

It follows that there are no star ratings on this site, and no Review or Rating structured data either. A score out of ten on a device nobody here has handled is decoration with a number painted on it. The full method is on the methodology page, and the editorial policy sets out what we will and will not claim.

How the site makes money

Amazon commission, and that is all. Tag & Tether participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program: if you buy through a link here, Amazon pays us a small percentage and you pay exactly what you would have paid anyway. No brand has ever paid to appear on this site, there are no sponsored posts, and no placement is for sale.

There is a structural point worth making about that incentive. We recommend no-subscription devices, and those are the lower-commission option in this category — a $25 tag pays less than a $600 collar with a plan attached. So the commercial pressure here points away from the recommendations we actually make, which is a sturdier guarantee than a promise about our character. Full disclosure here.

Publisher and contact

Tag & Tether is published by Iron Mako Media, which owns and operates it.

The only contact address is contact@tagandtether.com. There is deliberately no phone number and no postal address on this site, because neither exists for this business and we are not going to invent one to look larger than we are. If you have found a factual error, that address is the fastest way to get it fixed — see the contact page or the corrections policy.