What this is

MyTrackers is a small GPS tracker -- cellular + GPS, battery-powered, about the size of a chunky phone charger (12 x 3 x 3 cm) -- built to sit inside a bag, backpack, or vehicle rather than clip onto a collar or ride in a pocket. It's paired with a small dedicated device -- included with your purchase, not something you have to supply yourself -- that runs at home, not in someone else's cloud.

You buy the device once. There's no monthly fee, no app account tied to a company that can raise prices or shut down, and no third party holding a permanent log of where you or your family have been. The tracker reports its position, that home device stores it, and you're the only one who can ever see it.

Why it's built this way

Most tracker products work by renting you access to their servers forever -- the hardware itself is cheap, the subscription is the actual product. That model means your location history, one of the most sensitive kinds of data there is, lives on infrastructure you don't control, governed by a privacy policy you didn't write, for as long as the company decides to keep it (or as long as the company exists at all -- plenty of tracker startups have shut down and turned devices into paperweights, data and all).

MyTrackers is different in the part that actually matters: your tracker reports straight to a small home server you own, on your own home network, and your location history lives there -- never on our servers, never something a shutdown could take with it. Reaching that server from outside your house does currently rely on infrastructure we operate (routing your address home safely, without exposing your router) -- we're not pretending otherwise. But if that piece ever went away, your tracker and its data would keep working fine on your own network; you'd just lose the outside-the-house link until it's replaced. One-time hardware cost either way, and your data was always yours, not ours to lose.

How it works, in short

• Unbox. Your tracker and home server arrive together as one set -- nothing sold separately to go hunt down.
• Pair it once. A short guided step links your tracker to your own home server, for good. No password to remember, no app store, no cloud subscription -- just a one-time email link to claim your own address.
• Forget about it -- almost. It quietly checks in on its own schedule, finding its way home through whatever's available at the time, and shows up on a map that only you can open. The one thing it'll still ask of you: recharging it.

Who it's for

At roughly 12 x 3 x 3 cm, it's built to sit inside a bag, backpack, glovebox, or storage compartment -- not to clip onto a collar or ride in a pocket. That makes it a good fit for a child or elderly parent's school bag or daily bag, a bike or vehicle, checked luggage, or any bag or compartment holding something you'd rather not pay a subscription just to keep an eye on.