Most tracker buying guides start with a feature table. That is the wrong end. Four questions, asked in this order, will eliminate most of the market before you compare a single specification — and the fourth one is the one nobody asks.
Question 1: do I need to know where it is, or where it was?
This is the line between a Bluetooth tag and a cellular tracker, and it is worth several hundred dollars.
Where it was is the honest answer for keys, a wallet, luggage, tools, a camera bag, a parked car, a dog that gets lost in a suburb. A tag answers that question well, for about $30 over three years.
Where it is is the answer for a stolen vehicle, a dog that works a field, a person at risk of wandering. That needs cellular, and cellular needs a plan.
Be honest here, in both directions. Over-buying wastes $300; under-buying means a device that is silent at the moment it mattered.
Question 2: will it be around other people's phones?
If question one said “where it was”, this one confirms it. A crowd-network tag is only as good as the phones near it.
Airports, cities, suburbs, shopping centers, schools, baggage halls: dense. Fields, woodland, rural lanes, shipping containers, a lock-up at 3am: nothing.
If the honest answer is “no people”, a tag will fail and you are choosing between cellular (if there is signal) and radio (if there is not).
Question 3: if there is a plan, what is the published rate?
Find the number before you look at the hardware, and multiply it by thirty-six.
A brand that publishes its plan price on a page you can read without an account is doing you a courtesy. Spytec publishes $14.95 monthly or $12.95 paid annually. LandAirSea puts $8.95 in a product title. Tractive publishes a full tier table.
AngelSense publishes a $59 activation fee and no monthly rate at all. That tells you something before you have looked at the hardware.
The arithmetic for everything we cover is here.
Question 4: if the company disappears, does my device still work?
The question nobody asks, and the one with the most surprising answer.
A Bluetooth tag keeps working — the network belongs to Apple or Google, not to the tag maker. A radio system keeps working, because there is no company in the loop at all. A cellular tracker stops, because the SIM provisioning, the servers and the app all belonged to the brand.
This is not theoretical. While building this site we checked the HTTP responses ourselves: whistle.com returns a 301 redirect to tractive.com, a competitor, and tryfi.com returns a 301 to fitracking.com.
The secondary questions, once the technology is settled
Which phone do you carry?
For a tag this eliminates most of the field immediately. Find My needs an iPhone. SmartTag2 needs a Galaxy, not merely an Android. Find Hub tags need Android. Tile works on both at the cost of the smallest network. Chipolo and Pebblebee work on either, chosen at setup.
Where will it be lost — inside or outside?
Inside: buy the loudest. Pebblebee states 130 dB and Chipolo about 125 dB, both above an AirTag, and the alarm is what narrows a search indoors where the map cannot.
Outside: network size matters and loudness does not.
Coin cell or rechargeable?
Coin cell for tags you will forget about — luggage, a spare key — because a dead one is a two-minute fix with a supermarket battery anywhere in the world. Rechargeable for tags you handle, because it is tidier and avoids a drawer of dead cells and a toddler hazard.
Will you change phone platform in three years?
If there is a real chance, buy dual-network. Four AirTags and a move to Android means four pieces of plastic; four Chipolos means four tags you reset and re-pair.
The things that do not matter as much as the box suggests
Quoted Bluetooth range. Open-field, line-of-sight figures that collapse through a wall, and largely beside the point: what finds your item is the crowd network, not how far your own phone can hear it.
Precision Finding, mostly. Genuinely useful for an item within a few meters in a cluttered room, and irrelevant for anything lost over distance. Worth the premium for keys and nothing else.
Water ratings beyond IP67. For a keyring or a bag, IP66 versus IP67 will never come up. For a dog collar or anything near water it will.
A worked example
I want to track my dog.
Q1: where it is — she runs. So cellular or radio, not a tag.
Q2: she runs into farmland with patchy signal. Check your own phone there: if it drops out, the collar will too.
Q3: Tractive publishes Basic at $9 a month on a one-year term and $6 on a two-year term — $252 for the cheapest honest route to thirty-six months.
Q4: a cellular collar depends on the brand surviving, and two pet-GPS brands have already changed hands or domains.
Conclusion: if the farmland has signal, Tractive at $252. If it does not, a radio system with no subscription. And a $25 tag on the same collar either way, as the backup for a flat battery.
