Editorial policy

How picks are chosen

In this order, every time:

1. Total cost of ownership over three years. Device price plus the published plan rate multiplied by thirty-six months plus any activation fee. This is the primary criterion and it is unusual — most sites rank by device price, which in this category is close to meaningless.
2. Fitness for the stated purpose. A Bluetooth tag and a cellular tracker are not competitors, so a roundup only ranks devices that can actually do the job its title describes. We would rather recommend the cheap thing and say why than pretend an expensive device is the upgrade.
3. Published specifications. Battery, range, IP rating, platform support — each cited to the manufacturer with the date read.

Ordering it that way reverses the usual ranking roughly half the time, and that reversal is the site's reason for existing. The arithmetic is worked through here.

We do not test products first-hand

Stated plainly because it is load-bearing: Tag & Tether has no test lab. We have not measured the range of any tracker, run any battery down, submerged anything, or used any of these devices on a dog, a car or a suitcase. No page on this site will claim otherwise, and if one ever does it is an error we want reported.

What we do instead, on every commercial page:

• Read the manufacturer's published specifications and cite each with an access date
• Find the real subscription price, cite it, and state clearly when a brand does not publish one
• Do the thirty-six-month arithmetic and show it
• Name at least one buyer for whom each pick is the wrong purchase

This is a smaller claim than the category norm. Search any tracker and you will find pages asserting “after weeks of testing” on products nobody at those sites has handled. We think a modest accurate claim is worth more than an impressive false one, and we would rather you judge us on the cost tables than on a sentence about a test bench.

What follows from it

No star ratings, no scores. A score implies a measurement we did not take.

No Review, Rating or AggregateRating structured data. Marking an editorial judgment up as a review rating of a product would tell search engines we rated something we never handled. We emit Product and Offer markup — real facts and a real live price — and leave the opinion as prose.

No invented experience vocabulary. No “in our testing”, no “we measured”, no first-person anecdotes about using a device.

No testimonials. There is no reader-review section on this site, because we have no verified reader reviews to publish and fabricating them is the fastest way to destroy everything else here.

Nobody can pay for placement

No brand has ever paid to appear on Tag & Tether, to be ranked higher, to have a negative line removed, or to sponsor a page. There are no sponsored posts, no paid reviews and no commercial relationships beyond the affiliate programs disclosed on the disclosure page. If that ever changes, it will be labeled on the page itself, not buried here.

Why commission cannot bend a recommendation

Every site says commission does not affect its rankings. Here is the structural reason it cannot, which is worth more than the assurance:

We recommend the low-commission option. This site's whole thesis is that no-subscription devices are usually the better buy — a $25 Bluetooth tag rather than a $600 collar with a plan attached, a prepaid OBD unit rather than one with a monthly fee. Amazon commission is a percentage of the sale price, so the devices we push hardest pay us the least. A commission-maximizing version of this site would look almost exactly like our competitors.

We also hold two rules that cost money. Buyer-first ordering: if Amazon is cheaper than a higher-commission alternative, Amazon is the link. And we name the problem with every pick, including the winner, which measurably reduces clicks.

Prices are live and never hand-typed

Device prices come from the Amazon product API, refresh daily, and carry the date they were checked. The content files behind this site have no price field at all, so a price cannot be written into a page by hand even by mistake. Anything older than 48 hours disappears automatically and the button reverts to “Check price on Amazon”. A gap is honest; a stale number is not.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, email contact@tagandtether.com with a link to the page and the figure you think is incorrect. We check it against the manufacturer's own documentation.

When we are wrong, the correction is made on the page and the “last updated” date is changed so the revision is visible. We do not silently edit a figure and leave the date untouched, and we do not delete a page to make an error go away. Where a correction changes a recommendation, the page says what changed.

The contact form is here if you would rather not use email.

Scope: what this site will not help with

Tag & Tether covers choosing and costing trackers, and the defensive side of the subject — how to find a device someone else has placed on you, and what the law says.

It does not and will not provide guidance on covertly tracking a person. That includes partners, adult family members and employees. Our detection pages exist for the person being tracked, and our legal explainers name the statutes rather than route around them. Nothing on this site is legal advice.