Find My tracker subscription: what do you actually pay?

The short answer, in four numbers

• £0 a month to locate a certified tag through Apple, anywhere in the world, forever.
• £0 to join, no account with the manufacturer, no sign-up, no email address required.
• One CR2032 every two years or so, which costs roughly the same as a newspaper.
• iOS 14.5 is the only entry requirement, and it arrived in 2021.

Everything else you may have read about ongoing fees belongs to a different product, and the last section explains which one.

What you pay once, and what you never pay

The second row is the one people query most. You need an Apple Account, and you need the device signed in to iCloud, Apple states that plainly as the requirement for the service, but the free iCloud tier covers everything a tag does. Paid iCloud storage buys you space for photos and backups. It buys you nothing extra in the Items tab.

Why the relaying is free

It is reasonable to be suspicious of a worldwide location service with no bill attached, so it is worth saying where the cost actually goes.

Relaying costs Apple almost nothing per tag, because Apple is not doing the work. Your tracker is heard by whatever phones happen to pass it; each of those phones spends a trivial amount of its own battery and data uploading a small encrypted report. The expense is spread across hundreds of millions of devices in fractions of a penny, and none of their owners is aware it happened.

Apple's return is the ecosystem itself. A service that makes an iPhone better at being an iPhone sells iPhones. There is no advertising in it and no data to resell, because the reports are encrypted end to end and Apple cannot read them either, which is also why nobody at a tag company can look up where your tracker is.

The one cost people forget

Batteries. Not because they are expensive, but because a flat one is invisible until you need the tag. A tracker with a dead cell does not warn you loudly; it just quietly stops being in the list of things that can be found.

Buy a strip of cells with the tracker and change them on a date you choose rather than on the day something goes missing.

Where subscriptions genuinely do exist

Search this category and you will meet monthly fees, so here is the honest distinction.

A tracker with its own SIM card and satellite receiver reports its own position on a schedule, from anywhere, with no passing phone required. That capability needs a mobile data plan, and a mobile data plan is a monthly bill. Those devices are larger, need charging rather than a coin cell, and are sold for vehicles, plant and livestock.

A tag is the other kind. No SIM, no receiver, no bill, and in exchange, it only knows where it is when somebody walks past it. Neither design is a rip-off; they answer different questions, and the fee is the honest price of the difference.

How Orbit Tag helps

Orbit Tag is the no-bill kind, and there is no asterisk on that. It registers as an Other Item in Apple's own app through the certified accessory programme, so the software doing the finding is software you already own, and the shop you bought it from never appears in the chain again.

That leaves the running cost at one coin cell. The CR2032 is rated around two years; the back twists off by hand and a replacement drops in the same way up, so the tracker outlives its battery instead of being binned with it. The case is 36.3 mm on a side and 9 mm through, roughly 10 g, IP67 against dust and rain, and the key ring hole is part of the moulding with two rings in the box, so there is nothing else to buy.

Ringing carries 80 to 100 dB over a Bluetooth link quoted at 60 m; beyond it the relay network works for nothing, encrypted by Apple.

The limits are equally free of asterisks: iOS 14.5 upward on Apple hardware, no Android support, no ultra-wideband and so no Precision Finding.

Two trackers, under £15 a box, delivered free anywhere in the UK. see exactly what is included.

Frequently asked

Do I need paid iCloud storage for a tag to work? No. The free tier is enough. What the tag needs is an Apple Account and a device signed in to iCloud, not storage space, and a tracker's location reports do not count against any quota.

Will a fee appear later once enough people have bought in? Nothing in the design would make that easy. There is no account with the tracker's maker to bill, and Apple's side of it costs almost nothing per device because the work is done by passing phones. A charge would have to be invented rather than passed on.

Is anything limited compared with a paid tracker? Yes, honestly. A tag cannot report from an empty moor because nothing is there to hear it, and it draws no direction arrow without an ultra-wideband radio. Our comparison sets out the trade properly.