Spend tens of thousands of yuan on a cat litter box. Are smart pet-raising devices the new "IQ tax"?

During long holidays, pet owners who go out for a trip always worry about their "furry kids" at home.

Before this year's May Day holiday, Wang Yu, who planned to return to her hometown for five days, specially bought a movable pet camera for her cat staying at home alone. "In previous years, when I came back home after a long holiday, I always found that my cat was listless in the last few days when I was away. It would meow at me for a long time as soon as it saw me. I was really worried," she explained.

This camera just solved her concerns. It can not only remotely control the lens to track the real-time dynamics of the cat, but also support two-way real-time calls and video archiving. It can even interact with the cat through functions like teasing the cat. This allows her to keep an eye on the pet's status at any time even when she is far away in her hometown, successfully relieving her "anxiety about leaving the pet alone".

On the other hand, before Li Zi bought a pet from a pet store, she had prepared a smart feeder, a smart water dispenser, a smart drying box, a smart cat litter box and other equipment in advance. The whole set of equipment cost nearly ten thousand yuan. "I'm usually busy with work and always afraid that I can't take good care of the pet in time. So I just chose smart devices all at once for the sake of convenience," she said.

In her opinion, these devices not only meet the basic needs of the pet's "eating, drinking, excreting and sleeping", but also greatly reduce her care burden. The smart feeder can dispense food quantitatively at preset times, avoiding uneven feeding; the smart water dispenser comes with a filter element, which can continuously filter impurities and keep the water clean; the smart cat litter box can automatically clean up the excrement and record the number of times the cat uses the litter box.

Nowadays, products like smart drying boxes, smart feeders, smart water dispensers, smart cat litter boxes and smart pet monitors have gradually become "must-haves" for many pet owners. According to data from Grand View Research, the global market scale of smart pet hardware has exceeded 7 billion US dollars. It is estimated that this figure is expected to climb to over 10 billion US dollars by 2025.

As the AI wave sweeps across the globe, AI technologies such as large models have also begun to be deeply integrated into the field of smart pet products. From precisely controlling the feeding amount and monitoring the pet's health in real time, to understanding the pet's emotions through behavior recognition and providing anthropomorphic emotional companionship, technological innovation is constantly reshaping the traditional pet-raising scenario.

However, can these high-tech products that seemingly "liberate our hands" really make pet-raising easier? Are they really convenient or just an IQ tax to "rip off" consumers? What market opportunities and challenges are hidden behind them?

Some Praise Their Practicality, While Others Complain About "Falling into Traps"

From a few hundred yuan for a pet smart phone or a smart feeder, to over a thousand yuan for a pet monitor, and even higher prices for a drying box and tens of thousands of yuan for a cat toilet, the price range of smart pet products now covers the middle and high consumption ranges, but the market reviews are becoming increasingly "polarized".

Some people call them "practical" because they solve the pain points of pet-raising, while others complain about "falling into traps" due to malfunctioning functions and poor experiences.

Li Yue, who has two cats, is a "beneficiary" of smart pet products. As early as last year, she bought a smart cat litter box with monitoring function.

"At first, I just wanted to liberate my hands and didn't have to clean the cat litter manually every day. I didn't expect it could also record the number of times and the duration of the cat using the litter box," Chen Yue told Tech Planet. Once, the smart cat litter box suddenly popped up a reminder that the kitten's frequency of using the litter box had increased. She immediately took the cat to the hospital for an examination, and it was finally diagnosed with urinary obstruction.

The doctor said that it was because of the timely discovery that the deterioration of the condition was avoided. This product unexpectedly became a health assistant for the pet in Chen Yue's home.

But not all pet owners have such a good experience. Troubles caused by malfunctioning functions are not uncommon.

Chen Hao, a pet owner, was once so angry with a smart feeder that he was "driven crazy". Last year, when he went on a one-day business trip, he didn't choose to board his dog. Instead, he set the "automatic food dispensing in the morning and evening" mode for his dog. But on the second day after he left, the mobile app popped up a malfunction reminder.

"I was so anxious that I kept making phone calls while I was away. Finally, I had to ask the property management of the community to go to my home to check. They found that the dog food was stuck in the food outlet and the dog had been hungry all day and kept barking at the feeder."

Similar experiences to Chen Hao's are not rare. On social platforms, some users complain that "the so-called fully automatic smart cat litter box always gets the cat litter stuck in the filter screen gap. It's more tiring to disassemble and clean it every week than to scoop the litter manually. There are even flying insects growing in the gap in humid summers."

Some pet owners also complain that smart feeders always have the problem of "food jamming". These feedbacks all point to the fact that the products are "flashy but useless". They seem to solve the pain points, but actually add new troubles.

What's more serious is the potential safety hazards. On social platforms, some users reported that due to the malfunction of the temperature control system of a smart drying box, the pet's hair was slightly scorched during the drying process. There was also a low - cost smart cat toilet that was not polished, with burrs that scratched the paw of their cat.

For pet owners, these problems are far more than just "wasting money". They are willing to spend money on their pets, hoping to make pet - raising more worry - free and their pets more comfortable with the help of smart products. However, frequent malfunctioning functions and potential safety risks turn the "convenience of pet - raising" into "anxiety about pet - raising".

After all, the premise of liberating our hands is always the safety of the pet. Once the product can't even guarantee the basic stability and safety, no matter how cool the functions are, they lose their meaning and may even become a hidden danger to harm the pet.

Behind the Influx of Players: Low Thresholds and Homogenization Hide Traps

Although pet owners' attitudes towards smart products are "polarized", the growth potential of the smart pet market has become a consensus in the industry.

As the pet - raising population shifts from "extensive feeding" to "meticulous care" and the emotional need for pets as family members upgrades, more and more enterprises are smelling the opportunity and pouring in from different tracks, launching a fierce competition around "technology, product categories and user experience".

A practitioner in the smart pet industry told Tech Planet that in his opinion, the players pouring in at present can be mainly divided into two categories.

One category is technology companies making cross - border layouts. Internet companies and traditional home appliance enterprises such as Midea, Panasonic, Haier and Xiaomi have all launched smart pet products through cross - border operations. They integrate sensors and AI algorithms into pet products through the ecological chain model.

The other category is start - up enterprises. Some specialize in pet health monitoring, while others focus on scenario - based needs. They try to open up the market with star products and then build a full - category ecosystem, such as PETKIT, HOMY, Catlink and so on.

The above - mentioned practitioner further pointed out that different from other technology or home appliance industries, the threshold for smart pet products is relatively low. This means that whether or not they are backed by giants, it's difficult to firmly occupy the market with a single technology or ecological advantage.

Even if cross - border giants enter the market smoothly with their mature ecological chains and technological foundations, their products often have difficulty in precisely meeting the segmented needs of pet care, resulting in less - than - satisfactory actual development results in the smart pet market.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in Midea. As a traditional home appliance giant, Midea increased its investment in the pet market in 2021 and launched two pet - exclusive brands, "Cat Attraction" and "Fluffy Floppy", trying to enter the track relying on its mature manufacturing capabilities and channel advantages.

But only two years later, in 2023, the official flagship store of its pet brand announced its closure. In 2024, Zhejiang Meixin Pet Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly - owned pet appliance company under Midea Group, even completed a simple cancellation.

In contrast to the difficulties of cross - border giants, start - up enterprises can seize the opportunity by accurately grasping the needs in the early stage and achieve product explosion. However, due to the industry characteristic of "relatively low threshold for smart pet products", this group will also face challenges.

An industry insider took the common smart feeder in the market as an example. Most of them still focus on basic functions such as timing and quantitative feeding, food preservation and monitoring. Even the product shapes lack obvious differences.

This homogenization caused by the low threshold is more intuitively reflected on e - commerce platforms. When searching for smart feeders and water dispensers on e - commerce platforms, the prices of products range from dozens of yuan to nearly a thousand yuan, but the core functions are basically the same. Low - price products only meet the basic needs, and high - price products mostly make minor adjustments to segmented functions such as monitoring, without forming a breakthrough technological barrier.

From Competing on Price to Competing on Technology

In the past, price war was almost the main theme of the industry. Limited by the low - threshold industry characteristics, most enterprises flocked to basic product categories such as smart feeders and water dispensers. They lacked breakthrough technologies and differentiated scenario designs. In the end, they could only seize the market by squeezing profit margins.

The manager of a offline pet supplies store told Tech Planet that since the products of different brands are similar and lack core differences, customers tend to choose the cheaper ones when making a choice.

This consumption logic of "winning by price" is forcing the industry to find a new way out of the disorderly price war.

The above - mentioned industry insider told Tech Planet that as the dividend of the price war is gradually reaching its peak and the demand of the pet - raising population for "meticulous care" is upgrading, more and more smart pet enterprises are now breaking out of the thinking of "increasing sales volume by low prices" and turning to building product matrices and ecological layouts, trying to break through with technological innovation.

On the one hand, many leading enterprises are no longer limited to the research and development of a single product category. Instead, they build a linked scenario covering diet, health, cleaning and companionship around the core needs of pet - raising.

On the other hand, the implementation of technologies such as AI large models and high - precision sensors has made smart pet products no longer just tools, but "smart assistants". Some enterprises are trying to build a pet health management platform, which can automatically generate periodic health reports through comprehensive analysis by integrating the pet's activity tracks.

However, the road of technological transformation is not smooth sailing.

The above - mentioned industry insider said that on the one hand, the implementation of technology needs to adapt to the uncontrollable behavior characteristics of pets. This requires enterprises to continuously invest resources to optimize the durability and stability of products, which cannot be achieved by simple technology transplantation.

On the other hand, technological investment will significantly increase the product cost. If such high - cost products cannot be mass - produced, it will not only be difficult to spread the cost, but also limit the user group to a small number of people. Eventually, it will be difficult to become the mainstream in the market. This has also become an important bottleneck for technological breakthrough in the industry.

The greater challenge is that if the technological investment cannot be transformed into practical value that users can perceive, it will be difficult to truly stimulate the willingness to pay. The so - called "intelligence" will only be an empty talk.

(Note: All names in the article are aliases.)

This article is from the WeChat public account “Tech Planet” (ID: tech618). Author: Ren Xueyun. Republished by 36Kr with permission.