

The service includes free battery replacements shipped to you each year (for the Tile Mate and the Tile Pro), an extended warranty (from one year to three), and SMS-based support. Tile offers Tile Premium, an optional, $3-per-month (or $30-per-year) subscription plan that covers as many Tiles as you own. If they do so, that would expand Tile’s crowd-finding network by up to 10x. In fall 2022, Tile opened its network up to parent company Life360’s 42 million smartphone users, who can choose to opt in to help Tile members find their trackers. According to the company’s figures, however, “millions of items” are found daily, and of those marked as lost, Tile says 90% are found. So the total number of Tile units that make up its crowd-finding network is a tiny fraction of Apple’s.

That doesn’t mean all of them are currently active, and a big portion likely aren’t early Tile trackers didn’t have replaceable batteries, which meant the entire device had to be replaced annually. Tile tells us it has sold more than 50 million trackers. If your phone is no longer at that location-or if you’re worried that it won’t be-you can mark the item as lost, which invokes Tile’s crowd-finding feature.

If your Tile is out of Bluetooth range, you can view a map displaying its location the last time your phone made contact with it. An app that is easy to navigate and updates location information quickly is important too. We also prefer trackers that can trigger an alarm on your phone.
