And this is why you use local only devices fools.

Get yourself a Zigbee Pet Feeder and pair it with Home Assistant and you’re good to go.

Which do you recommend?

I have someone coming for check-ins, but they can’t come in 5 times every day to give food,” a Reddit user said.

You can pamper your cat however you want, but your cat is not going to die if they don’t have someone portioning out food five times a day.

There is always a switchbot.
It literally presses or releases a button at given times. You program it with BT and no wifi needed.

They almost died because you are a shitty owner

Its not hard to just put some food in a bowl. Not every damn thing needs automation.

i don't have one yet, but we're planning to get one so we can go on overnight or even maybe 2-3 day trips without having to rely on someone coming around to feed the pets

I think that he means just put 2-3 days of food out.

If the cat eats wet food, that’d have spoiling problems, but I suppose that it’d probably be okay with dry kibble.

The cheaper non smart ones work all by themselves, no cloud needed. They don’t have an app to control it unfortunately though.

overnight is fine but for 2,3 days still have someone drop by to check if things are fine at least once. i read horror stories of cats being cats and landing badly from a sleeping spot and breaking a leg, or cats in a freak accident turning on the hair dryer which proceeded to blow warm air into the apartment for the whole night. and of course insanse stuff like that will happen when nobody is there to check in.

It doesn’t need it, no, but it makes life a little easier. And in this world of constant demands on our attention and time, making our lives a little easier is a vast blessing.

There are situations in which this device helps a lot:

• Portion control
• Preventing other cats from stealing food
• Keeping the kibbles dry with silica gel packs
• Automating food when the owner is away for some days

Some cats are psycho about food. Mine definitely, and screams at me for hours a day even though he knows when feeding time is and he still has food from breakfast. People recommend an automatic feeder because the cat stops associating the person with feeding time and bothers the feeder instead. I haven’t tried it yet, but it makes sense to me and would probably work on the fat cunt

automatically dispense food

Okay

use an app to set it up

Makes sense

cloud outage caused missed feedings

wtf? Doesn’t the thing have an internal clock? Doesn’t it just set a cron job? Seriously, if you want to farm data all day long, do that and just send it back. But if having to be online to do its core function is required, that’s extremely poor design.

They can’t charge a subscription for an internal clock

There's no reason these need to be "smart". I had a pet feeder with a timer over a decade ago. It just needed batteries.

WTF does it need to be on the cloud to operate? More why is it on the cloud in the first place?

And all these spyware apps, enough is enough.

Oh for the love of god… If you’re too busy to feed your companions you don’t need a companion.

We have some and in our case it isn’t about the timer function but the RFID tags on the cat collars because one will steal from the other two.

I can’t speak for anyone else but they kept working for us. Only possible difference I can think of is that we did make sure to put in the optional D cell batteries.

“So we create an unnecessary dependency to force them to upgrade whenever shareholders demand it. There’s a slight chance a malfunction will starve cats to death buuuuuut….”

To everyone criticizing the people who bought the device: It is sold as being capable of running without internet, and it often does. The problem is that some update along the way broke this functionality ( maybe on purpose ).

The device has 3 D batteries to survive even power outages.

I’m not defending the company, I absolute despise them, they lied to consumers and should suffer a class action lawsuit.