You may or may not have noticed that I take my dog Audi everywhere. Oh, you did notice? Ok, well yes, I take my dog everywhere. My friends and family are accustomed to me showing up with Audi. But last year I got a cat. And while I did take Javi to South Carolina for four months this year, she does not regularly get to go on road trips.

She was an adult rescue who will not come out of hiding for strangers. We’ve tried a few different drop-in cat sitters, all with the same result. “Javi hid under the bed while I filled her bowl, rolled her treats and wiggled toys at her.” And at $20 a visit, we felt the cat sitters might not be the best use of our money.

We instead decided to invest in an automatic feeder. I say invest because if I’m leaving my cat alone for days I want something high-quality and reliable. And this feeder has been a GAME CHANGER. We still have a sitter who comes by to check water, litter and refill her activity box with treats but not daily like we used to.

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I found the LeeKooLuu Automatic Pet Feeder on Amazon and it had the best reviews as far as reliability, set up and quality. This post is not sponsored in any way, I just think that real-life customer reviews that don’t live on a company’s website are super helpful and maybe others will find it helpful too!

You can read about all of the specs and details on the Amazon listing so let’s get into what I think the pros and cons are.

Pros

Holds a lot of dry food. A 50 oz bag of food will almost fill it to the top. We felt comfortable leaving for 10 days and there was still plenty of food left but if you have multiple cats, you’ll need to plan accordingly.

High quality camera. The picture is really clear and there is night-vision!

Secure lid for those extra sneaky animals.

App is pretty easy to use. If you follow the set up instructions exactly, you shouldnt have any issues.

Snapshots and video recording capabilities.

Motion detection. Turn on motion detection when you leave and you can get a notification whenever your pet comes in the frame. Super helpful if you don’t want to sit around waiting for the cat to walk by. Which I have done before haha

Backup battery. If you lose power the back up battery will make sure your cat still gets fed. It also has enough internal memory that if power is lost but comes back on, the schedule will pick up where it left off.

Cost savings of not have a pet sitter.

Cons

No SD card. It doesn’t come with an SD card so you’ll have to add one if you want to go back and review footage.

Audio is loud and startles the cat. I haven’t figured out how to turn the audio down when I’m talking to Javi and the audio is pretty loud. She usually runs away.

Price. $135.99 is way more than I would typically drop on a fancy pet bowl but it’s going to save us so much money and hassle in the long run.

No wet food. I’m aware that there is probably no such thing as an automatic wet food feeder but our cat is typically on an all-wet-food diet. Poor thing doesn’t know the sacrifice she has to make for us to travel!

Bad cell service = no video. There’s no way around it. If you are traveling somewhere with bad reception, you won’t be able to check on your cat.

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Overall I give this automatic pet feeder a 10/10. So far it’s been really reliable and it’s taken away the stress of finding a cat sitter for every short trip we take.