Automatic pet feeders are useful for anyone who works uncertain hours, travels, or simply wants to make sure their pets are fed consistently without much fuss on their part. The Gosh! EasyFeed is a Wi-Fi-connected pet feeder originally launched on Kickstarter and now readily available online. It’s quite pricey at $249.95, but it’s packed with features including a built-in camera and speaker so you can see and speak to your cat or dog. It also tracks your pet’s nutrition based on what it’s eating, and has a water dispenser to make sure it’s well hydrated. If you can do without the camera, however, you can save $100 on our Editors’ Choice, the Petnet Smartfeeder.

Design

The EasyFeed is a big, unassuming white box that measures 18.4 by 16.1 by 17.3 inches (HWD), with a shallow drawer that sticks out of the bottom and holds orange food and water trays. It uses a hopper-style feeder, like the Petnet Smartfeeder, and can hold up to 20 cups or 5.5 pounds of dry food, depending on the size of the food.

The top of the EasyFeed is covered by a latched lid that lifts completely off to reveal the food hopper on the left and a 1.6-gallon water jug on the right. The hopper, trays, and water jug can all be lifted out for cleaning (and for filling the jug). The water dispenser isn’t automated; when it’s full and loaded correctly over the water tray, a valve dispenses water until it reaches a high enough level in the tray to close the valve.

A narrow gray strip running up the middle of the front panel holds most of the EasyFeed’s electronics, including colored indicator LEDs for power and connection status, two red numeric LED readouts to show how much food (by weight) is in the hopper and food tray, and a black dome covering the built-in camera. Two small white buttons sit on the left side of the base, and put the device into setup mode and calibrate the hopper and tray scales.

The EasyFeed runs off of power from the included wall adapter, but you can also install four C batteries as a backup in case the power runs out. Gosh! estimates the backup batteries to last up to five days on a 10-feed-per-day schedule, so they’re really only there as a precaution in case power goes out while you’re traveling. Don’t worry about keeping your home Wi-Fi network going out in such a situation; while you need to connect the EasyFeed to your network to set up feeding times with the Android or iOS app, feeding schedules are kept in its memory and will keep going regardless of its connection status.

Setup and Scheduling

Getting started is an easy process that involves setting up a free account through the app, pressing the Wi-Fi button on the side of the EasyFeed, and following a few instructions in the app to connect the feeder to your home network. After that, you can program the EasyFeed to start feeding your pet.

On a very basic level, you can simply tell EasyFeed to dispense dry food in the amounts (in increments of 0.04 cups up to four cups) and at the times you wish. The app lets you go into much more detail by adding information about your pet and the type of food used, so you can track nutrition and consumption levels. Pet information includes whether it’s a dog or a cat, its weight, and one of three daily activity levels. You can also enter its name and add a photo to the profile. Like the Petnet, it only supports one pet profile.

Pet food information gets more granular, with fields for calorie content, crude nutrients, minerals, moisture, and vitamins. The app is loaded with over a dozen Purina pet food profiles, but if you don’t use Purina you’ll have to manually enter the information yourself. It wasn’t too difficult to add all of the information the app wanted about Blue Indoor Health Adult Cat Food, my current choice. You can use any dry pet food, with Gosh! recommending kibble sizes of 0.4 inches or smaller. Putting all of the information you can into the app lets you track your pet’s calorie consumption and needs with daily, weekly, and monthly charts.

The app doesn’t support mixed feeding. I feed my cat Pixel a combination of dry and wet food, so I had to adjust the amount of dry food for each feeding and mentally add the caloric content of wet food to the totals shown by the app. An option to manually add a certain amount of calories on a daily basis to account for wet food would really help. It’s a fairly minor complaint, however, and as long as you set the feedings with the wet food in mind, you only have to deal with the inconvenience of inaccurate calorie tracking; it won’t get in the way of how your pet gets fed.

Camera

Like the Feed and Go Automatic Pet Feeder , the EasyFeed is equipped with a video camera so you can check in on your pet. It isn’t quite as effective as a dedicated camera like the Petcube Play because it can only offer a floor-level view from the feeder itself, but it’s a useful extra feature that helps justify the EasyFeed’s price.

You can use the 720p camera to capture video or still photos through the app, and a speaker and microphone let you hear your pet and speak to it. The camera even detects when your pet is eating and sends you a push notification so you can watch remotely, but these notifications were sporadic in testing and seemed to miss most of the times Pixel was at the feeder.

The video feed is a nice feature for checking in on your pet, but its quality even in good lighting is pretty fuzzy. The camera also doesn’t have night vision, so you can’t monitor night feedings if the lights are off. If you want to keep an eye on your pets when they aren’t eating or at least near the food dish, the Petcube Play ($85.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is a better choice because you can position it anywhere, use it when it’s dark, and even play with your pets with a laser pointer.

Performance

I set the EasyFeed to dispense approximately a quarter cup of dry food at three different times each day. The feedings occurred reliably at each time I set, and were accompanied with a helpful sound effect to draw Pixel’s attention. There’s even the option to record your own voice message to play during feedings, which is a nice touch. And you can trigger manual feedings from your phone whenever you want, whether it’s a full meal or just a few pieces of food as a treat.

Because of his partial wet food diet, Pixel tends to graze on dry food more than eat all of it at any one time, so I was concerned that regular food dispensing might overflow the EasyFeed. Fortunately, a scale under the food tray monitors how much food is present, and doesn’t let more than four cups (or the approximate equivalent, by weight) of food fill the tray at any given time. The scale also helped me track how much dry food Pixel ate.

The water dispenser is a very nice feature, and the valve made sure Pixel’s water dish was full for whenever he wanted to drink. The EasyFeed doesn’t track water levels or consumption like food, so you need to manually check on the dish to make sure it’s staying filled, and you can’t monitor how much your pet is drinking. Water tracking is a feature we haven’t seen on any smart pet product so far, so it’s omission here isn’t really a problem. Perhaps a future device will track both food and water consumption, but for now, just having a water dispenser in the same package as the food dispenser is a welcome addition that both the Feed and Go and Smartfeeder lack.

Conclusions

Yes, it’s expensive, but the Gosh! EasyFeed helps make sure your pet stays fed and healthy, whether you’re home or not. It reliably dispenses as much food as you want whenever you want, and the built-in water jug keeps your pet hydrated in the process. The extensive food details and weight tracking in the feeder lets you know if your pet is eating too much or too little, and the camera lets you check in and even talk to your pet with each feeding. That said, if you already have a home security camera, or if the camera feature simply doesn’t appeal to you, you can save $100 and get the Petnet Smartfeeder, our Editors’ Choice.