Smart Pet Feeder Company and Products Go Offline

Petnet, a company making automated smart pet feeders, has seemingly gone under, leaving all customers with extremely expensive, albeit empty, feeding bowls for pets.

The Internet of Things ecosystem can be used for a lot of things, and Petnet tried to bend it to its will and developed an IoT smart feeder for pets. While it sounds like a great idea, it turns out that connecting a feeding system that ensures the survival of living beings to a startup that might be gone tomorrow was not the best idea.

An Ars Technica report revealed that the company has virtually no presence and that users have reported that their smart feeders are no longer all that smart. In fact, they are now just simple trays that just underline that it used to cost much more.

Some problems cropped out a couple of months ago when the service went offline without notice. The company eventually brought the feeders back online and promised to offer better services in the future. Now, two months later, the company is gone once more, this time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it looks like it’s for good.

“Last week on April 14, 2020, we briefed all of our customers regarding one of our third-party connected vendor’s inability to fully resource their company and stay functionally online” reads an email from the company. “As of this writing, this situation remains unresolved but we are confident it will be overcome soon.”

It turns that that “soon” never arrived, as the latest reports show that Petnet furloughed 100% of our remaining staff, stopped all production of future products, stopped any kind bug fixing activities, turned off all non-infrastructure related expenses, and applied for available CARES stimulus funding.

From what’s apparent until now, the Petnet feeders are pretty much dead, which only goes to show that some combinations of IoT and other life aspects might not go hand in hand.