Sure Petcare Reviews

Poor rating! Since the new update on SurePetcare it never works, or if it does gives me wrong pet that entered. You can’t contact surepet either!

Dear Sure team: obviously you attempted a complex thing with the hardware, hub, wifi etc. And you got some hardware that’s challenging to write software for.

Now if your software developer was good, they would know to work around bugs like the curfew resetting daily on your cat door. Cat door doesn’t remember curfews? Overwrite it daily (or hourly if needed) from the software stack.

If curfew is resetting to 12:01 and 12:02 daily in SurePetcare it will drive your users nuts. Have SurePetcare remember the user selections, at a minimum, and enforce them in the buggy hardware.

And you should let users know that changing the door settings resets the curfew.

And your developer and team should be testing this.

Good luck. I hope you can make things stick so I don’t have to set the curfew daily. Then I might give you more that a one star review.

Oh, and raccoons walk through your “locking” cat door btw. Got the video of it.

Hope your products and tech improve!

Unreliable, difficult to use, designed like SurePetcare was built 10 years ago… There is not a single redeeming quality of SurePetcare. Considering you have to spend $300 for one of their pet doors before you can use SurePetcare, the Sure Petcare app is absolutely nowhere near the level of quality it needs to be. Where is that $300 going?!? It surely is not going towards SurePetcare.

The Sure Petcare app is entirely garbage. I would not recommend any of the company’s connected products. The only thing they do well is create frustration.

Edit 9-sep-24: the recent update fixes none of the usability and reporting problems described below. App is unusable.

Original text: I do not recommend updating to the June 2024 “next gen” app. It’s buggy, has reduced functionality and generally feels untested and unfinished. If you have the prior gen app still installed, my recommendation is to NOT update. The new idea that you can switch between charts for different pets simply by clicking their profile picture is great, except it doesn’t work. Switching pets this way causes the history graph to be grayed out with a label that says “unavailable.”

The previous bar charts have been replaced with a line graph, which is fine except the new graph is very compressed in the Y axis. It takes up maybe 10% of the total screen space on an iPad Pro. This means that variations in the Y axis, that is, the amount of food eaten each day, are also compressed. This blunts the curve and makes it harder to discern differences day over day.

The new graph has no scale on the Y axis, so you can’t tell how much was eaten on any given day. There is a text label over the right-most value on the graph showing that day’s total. But since the current day is in progress, that value is always substantially less than prior days totals and it’s impossible to evaluate how much was eaten on prior days.

The new graph only shows 7 days. No more weekly or monthly views. The top of the screen has buttons for the prior 14 days. Selecting one of those buttons shifts the entire graph, causing the selected day to appear as the right-most entry. The good news is that applies the aforementioned, lone text label over that day. But it causes all days after the selected date to be removed from view. And it still doesn’t show values for any day except the right-most date. In short, you can’t compare daily totals unless you select each day individually manually and record the values manually, outside SurePetcare .

The new graph no longer shows a break down of consumption from the left and right bowls. In the one instance where the graph does show a total, there’s no way to tell which food was consumed.

Meanwhile, the timeline view no longer has any filters. It’s just one long dump of all events from all pets. You can no longer select a specific pet to review their individual events.

To bring SurePetcare to a usable standard, fix the bug preventing switching graphs by tapping the profile picture. Put a scale on the vertical axis (with horizontal bars across the entire graph for reference lines). Convert the simple line graph to a stacked graph showing 3 lines for the left bowl (with its assigned label), the right bowl (with it’s assigned label) and the sum. Remove the 14-day buttons across the top and simply use left/right swipe to switch the graph between weeks. Re-add weekly and monthly summary views. Re-add filters on the timeline view; at the very least allow filtering by pet, but an good additional improvement would be filters for filling, filling left bowl, filling right bowl, consumption, consumption left bowl, consumption right bowl.

After 2 mostly effective years, SurePetcare refuses to launch. The redesign also proved not to be as useful as the previous bar charts that showed daily consumption. Now you can’t easily compare daily to weekly to monthly.
Very very glitchy when cat ear hub is supposed to flash green after each feed at the bowl. It’s inconsistent in tracking the actual number of feeds.

I usually don’t bother with reviews but SurePetcare is trash. Don’t waste your time.

SurePetcare is so infested with bugs it is almost beyond being useful. You can’t even comprehend how much your cats are eating now because the graphs are unreadable and it’s hard to compare day over day consumption. The view is also broken, cannot select a day or understand which day you’re on now. Just terrible!

The microchip feeders are a really decent product, however SurePetcare is horrible. It was bad before and now they updated it and made it worse. It makes no logical sense. I recommend the non-smart version of the feeder because SurePetcare and the hub are the worst products I’ve ever dealt with.

SurePetcare is basic (which is all that’s needed), yet it’s not easy to navigate.
All you need is
1. add/edit pets and their info
2. feeders settings
But finding where to do what isn’t obvious, or where you would expect it to be.

Just purchased a feeder and tried installing SurePetcare . When I hit the continue icon after all the legal mumbo jumbo on the first page nothing happens. So I can’t go past the first page. Useless

The update has broken my doggy door and made it unusable. I used SurePetcare to lock the door and the unlock feature does not work. SurePetcare design resembles a child’s computer program from 2005.

App continually logs me out, even though I’ve uninstalled & reinstalled it multiple times. Used to stay logged in but since last update, now it doesn’t.
Very buggy, and the food dishes won’t register a pet is eating unless you zero them out every time which makes things difficult when you’re on vacation and have a pet sitter.

The good: we can (usually) control the cat door and see who has gone in and out.
The not-so-great: app crashes, disconnects from hub, and isn’t super user-friendly. Can’t set different”rules” for different pets.

We thought this system because there weren’t others that did the same thing any better.

Might have to reinstall SurePetcare cause right now it just hangs when launching SurePetcare

Only reason I give three stars is because while the door works very well, SurePetcare and ability to customize is absolute garbage. The only problem I have with the door is that one of my cats microchip must be located further back from its head which results in it having to squish itself against the door before it unlocks. For my other cat it unlocks as soon as he puts his head in the tunnel. As for SurePetcare , I want to be able to set a curfew schedule that still allows pets to enter the house. There is a feature to set the door to indoor only which allows pets to enter but you cannot do this using the curfew feature. Because SurePetcare is so spotty I never want to try to turn off the curfew and update to indoor only when away for the house because there is like a 30% chance the signal goes through. And also there is another 30% chance the receiver (which is right next to the door) is actually connected and will tell me if my pet entered (I have 1 gb wifi ). I’d feel much more safe knowing my pet can get inside after the curfew even if I’m home about an hour or two afterwords instead of trying to turn the curfew on and off.

This clunky app has one of the most unnecessarily involved setup procedures I’ve seen in a while. First of all, keep in mind that this controls pet doors and feeders (I have a door only), not nuclear submarines. There is no justifiable reason for insisting on a password including a mix of upper case, AND lower case, AND a number, AND a special character. That level of security-theatre complexity accomplishes nothing other than to make a user’s life a tiny bit more difficult.

To add a pet, you need to supply the pet’s name (ok, that much makes sense) but other MANDATORY fields include their d.o.b. (Do you even know what day your cat was born?), their weight (most cats lie about that anyway), and their exact breed, which I had to guess to get past this useless requirement. Also required is your pet’s “dietary restrictions” even if you are just using it to control a door. Again, these are all -required- fields that serve no purpose whatsoever in terms of the product’s operation with a door. In general, the user experience and navigation is a chore. Oh, and don’t even get me started about their website!

On the bright side, so far it seems to work as promised.

In SurePetcare the toggle for curfew can not be reenabled once it has been switched to disable. The workaround I found is that if you add a new schedule to the curfew and hit save, then re-edit the schedule times by rechecking ✅ the box next to your original time(s) and unchecking the unneeded ones, the curfew is now toggled on and at the time you originally had.
Please fix!

SurePetcare has a misspelled word to say enter.

To enter in Spanish is “Entrar” and you mis spelled it in your App and wrote “Dentrar” which is not accepted by the Real Academy of Español, that is the entity that regullatea the Spanish language.

Please fix it

I have just installed the Sure Petcare cat connect with HUB and SurePetcare. This system & App works well for my cat with a microchip tag under wifi. It tell me when my cat enters and leaves the door and even when the cat looked through the door. I am happy for those feathers. However, the curfew mode is very limited to only one mode, i.e, allow pets enter but keep pets in. We want to have more option modes for schedule the Curfew mode, e.g., keep pets out but allow to exit or keep both locked. You have those in manual mode but please provide them in Curfew mode so we can program and schedule the options when we are on travel. Thanks!

I bought the sureflap connect pet door before getting SurePetcare , and after seeing all these negative reviews, I was really worried I made a bad purchase. Thankfully, I haven’t had any issues, and SurePetcare works perfectly fine for me, especially with the curfew setting which is the main reason I upgraded from the standard microchip door to the sureflap connect. I can’t speak for everyone else’s negative experience but it seems like they’ve worked all the bugs out!