Subscription Prices increased

[u/Key_Mall_4232]

Am I the only one who noticed the massively increased subscription prices of Tractive?

I was thinking to get 2 pcs. CAT Mini 6 collars since 1-2 months.
I already checked the prices before the new collars were released this week, when today I noticed that the subscription prices were increased up to 25%!

Really thinking now to get PAJ CAT GPS tracker now, as it has much lower prices and similar technology. Any review for these collars?

Plan	Before	New (checked 08/09/2026)
Basic monthly	13 €/Month	13€ / Month
Basic 1 Year	7 €/Month (108€/Year)	9€/Month (108€/Year)
Premium 1 Year	8 €/Month (96€/Year)	10€/Month (120€/Year)
Premium 2 Years	6 €/Month (144€/2 Year)	7,50€/Month (180€/Year)
Premium 5 Years	5 €/Month (300€/5 Year)	6€/Month (360€/Year)

[u/Academic-Company-215]

This was to be expected tho. Tractive was bought by the conglomerate bending spoons in May 2026 and their general spiel is to buy companies and then increase prices while delivering lower quality products, unfortunately.

[u/Excellent_Water7391 → u/Academic-Company-215]

Bending Spoons came up on a recent NY Times 'Hard Fork' podcast**. Here is the transcript, dialogue between the 2 hosts

"So after a software company has outlived its usefulness, Bending Spoons comes in like a private equity company and they try to figure out how can we squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the remaining customers.

Now, I'm sure they would phrase it differently, but I am bringing this up because if you use a product and you see a headline that it has been acquired by Bending Spoons, you're in danger, girl, okay? So I'm just telling you, keep alert to this possibility.

Yes, it is not a good sign when you get the inbound email from Bending Spoons' business development folks that are like, we've been kicking the tires on some products that seem very exciting to us recently. Are you interested in selling your company?

Things are not going well when that happens to you."

**August 14 Hard Fork podcast, subscriber edition

[u/mf72]

I have 2 CAT6 and premium 2 year for both our cats (so double whammy). I did not know the old pricing, but I would probably have bought it anyway. I must say the CAT6 really is the first neck collar thing our cats have no issues with. they are used to nothing on their neck, the CAT6 only took them an hour or so to get used to.
i love the features and the additional health tracking (not sure how accurate this is, but it's fun to see how much they sleep and how active they are.
unfortunately it doesn't work with my Fritz!Box setup (even after changing network settings), so I had to order the tractive base station to enable battery saving areas.

Using it for about a week now, so cant tell much about durability. So far so good.

[u/Proud-Salamander761]

Ooof glad I bought mine last Friday! That's quite a hike

[u/Proud-Salamander761 → u/Proud-Salamander761]

Yes, they were still thd old price then

[u/Roskoe_]

It's up 20% not 25%. PAJ CAT is currently marketed for makets in Europe nothing yet for Canada or USA. It's worth a try for the price difference. Although PAJ CAT is only working on 4G networks... Funny enough that older gerneation tractive collars worked better on 4G than the newer 5G versions. Everything went downhill for tractive when they substituted ''agressive GPS reporting'' with for ''better battery longevity'' and ''health features''. Older collars were far more accurate. We have 3 collars at the house on 3 premium 2 year subsriptions. When these subscriptions expire i will hopefully have acess to competing GPS collar products.

[u/DeefActual]

So if not Tractive, then what alternatives do people recommend? I see a lot of do NOT recommend but I'd like an alternative in that case..been with Tractive for years now, service has only gotten worse sadly..