I hope the Airtag solution works out for you! Maybe you can find a used iPhone or iPad to leave around at home to use as a “repeater” for the Airtag when you’re gone?
I’d be very wary of these, like @Pork_Rind. There is probably a non-obvious catch at that price point.
Most likely they’re not actually GPS units (as in the the real US Global Positioning System, or the Russian/Chinese/European equivalents). Those satellites are broadcast-only, meaning you can receive their information for free from any device, but the tracker cannot send a message (its location) back through them to your phone.
If they’re on one of the “find my” Apple/Google networks, the sellers are misusing the term “GPS”… probably deliberately. There’s also a chance they’re counterfeit or unofficial/unlicensed products operating on those networks by pretending to be a real Airtag/Tile/whatever, and there’s a chance they’ll stop working at any time.
Note that several of them, e.g. 1, 2, 3, have the same dead-eyed woman soullessly narrating from some generic marketing script for all the products, and they all have mismatched brandnames on their boxes. It’s probably a paid influencer and review shills.
To actually get live tracking of your pet outside of the “Find My” networks, you really do need some sort of wireless channel from the tracker back to your phone. The most common way is a cellular modem inside the device, almost always with an accompanying subscription plan because they have to pay the carrier (AT&T or Verizon or whoever) that’s actually carrying the messages to you.
It’s not impossible to offer this sort of wireless service without a subscription, just very rare. Amazon used to do it with the earlier Kindles, which included a free 3G subscription. But that was because they were hoping to sell you books on the Kindle store over that subscription, and even then, they eventually discontinued the free 3G anyway.
There are still products like this one that might actually be a real GPS tracker with no-subscription cellular included… but note that it starts at $99, not $30. That price point is more conceivable — they’re basically charging you $80 upfront or so over the cost of a GPS receiver module (which is like $10-$20), so you’re essentially paying for the subscription upfront.
There is another kind of pet tracker used for tracking hunting dogs over larger distances (like up to like maybe 9 miles, e.g. this one), but those operate on radio frequency signals meant for medium-range transmission. Over open ground, they probably work pretty well (I saw a few in Alaska), but in urban areas that signal might be attenuated/weakened by buildings. Cellular would be the far safer bet, usually. This kind of tracker is usually several hundred dollars, are bigger, and have an antenna sticking out of the tracker. A smaller dog would probably find it quite uncomfortable.
Similar to that, we have a tiny Tabcat cat tracker that isn’t GPS and doesn’t need a subscription, but is a short-range radio-locator… it works up to 1-2 city blocks or so, only. Our cat actually ran away once and we found him with this, but it took manually canvassing the neighborhood in several directions before we could acquire a signal to home in on. If the dog’s a runner, this won’t be practical (range too short).
Anyway… just understand the actual technologies at work. Be careful and don’t get scammed by one of the cheapo $30ish trackers claiming to be something they’re probably not.
Speaking of Tractive, though, have you considered their cat trackers? We have one and it looks a little smaller than their dog tracker — only by a bit, though. The GPS tracker doesn’t care what animal it’s on. We put ours on the cat’s leash harness, though, not his collar. He didn’t like it much the first week but got used to it soon enough. Still a subscription service though, like Fi. (We keep the Tabcat on him 24/7/365. Put the bigger Tractive on him only when he goes outside on a leash walk or tethered garden time.)
