We make QR pet tags that get pets home.

Why we built it

Roughly one in three pets goes missing in their lifetime, by various rescue charities’ published estimates. Microchipping is compulsory in the UK and widely adopted in the US, and it’s essential — but a microchip needs a vet or rescue with a scanner. The neighbour who finds your dog at 9pm doesn’t have one. The cat-loving stranger who spots your cat under their car doesn’t have one. The person who picks up your bunny in their garden doesn’t have one.

A printed phone number on a paper tag does the opposite — identifies the owner but only if the finder bothers to dial, navigates voicemail, and the owner picks up an unknown number. We wanted the simplest possible bridge between “a stranger has my pet” and “the pet is on its way back”. Scan a QR, tap a button, the owner gets a text. That’s the whole product.

Snifftag launched in 2026. Sister product BagBeacon is the same service for luggage — built on the same platform with the same SMS infrastructure and what3words pinpoint accuracy.

How the service actually runs

When somebody scans a Snifftag, they land on a page hosted on snifftag.com— not an app, not a redirect. They see your pet’s photo, name, description and any safety notes you’ve published, and a single button: “I’ve found this pet”. Tapping it grabs the device’s GPS reading (with the finder’s explicit browser permission) and converts it to a what3words address accurate to about 10 metres. We send up to five contacts you specified an SMS plus an email. The finder’s phone number is never shown to you unless they choose to leave a message.

Behind the scenes we use Stripe for billing (UK and US accounts), Twilio for SMS delivery, Microsoft Graph for transactional email from hello@snifftag.com, what3words for the human-readable coordinates, and Printify (UK) plus Prodigi (US) for the printed tags. The application is a Next.js app deployed on Railway with a Postgres data tier.

What we don’t do

We don’t track your pet. The QR is passive — nothing happens until someone scans it. There’s no broadcasting Bluetooth signal, no cellular ping, no battery to die.

We don’t sell or share your data. The finder’s shared location goes to you. The contact list you set up stays private to your account. We do not run third-party advertising trackers on the marketing site beyond a privacy-first analytics tag, and we don’t feed anything to data brokers. See our privacy policy for the boring detail.

We don’t lock you in. 14-day free trial, no card required during trial, cancel anytime from your billing page.

Where we’re based

Snifftag operates from the United Kingdom with US-side fulfilment via Prodigi. Stripe billing is split across our UK and US entities so customers see prices in their local currency without cross-border fees. Customer support is hello@snifftag.com — replied to by a human, usually within one working day.

The honest pitch

A QR pet tag won’t stop your pet escaping. It can’t. Where Snifftag earns its keep is the moment a stranger picks your pet up and wants to help. From that moment, you’re minutes away from getting them back instead of hours of phone calls and Facebook posts.

From £2.50 / $2.99 a month for the first pet, with a 14-day free trial. Cancel anytime.