How this PETLIBRO Granary feeder review was made: I haven’t used this product, and I don’t have a cat. I read the written customer reviews Amazon surfaces on the Granary listings — about thirty in all, which is a thinner sample than usual for this site, because Amazon showed me far fewer of this product’s low-star reviews than its 10,000-plus ratings would suggest exist — and summarised the patterns in my own words, the same way as every review on this site. Amazon pools reviews across the Granary family (basic, Wi-Fi, camera and dual-bowl), so some of what I read is about a sibling variant; I say which where the reviewer does. Star percentages are Amazon’s published figures. Nothing here is sponsored. The Amazon links on this page are affiliate links: as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
This is the number one best seller in Amazon’s automatic cat feeder category, with 10,249 ratings. It’s also rated 4.1, with 18% of those ratings at one or two stars. That’s the widest gap between “most bought” and “best liked” of anything I’ve covered in this category, and the reviews explain it better than the listing does.
The short version: people who buy the Granary are buying the app, and the app is good. What the app can’t fix is a rotor that meters some kibbles badly and a machine that, for a minority of owners, stops at somewhere between four and eighteen months. This PETLIBRO Granary feeder review is about both halves.
What you’re buying
A 5-litre hopper on a motorised base, a stainless bowl that sits in a plastic tray, and a phone app. Meals are scheduled in the app in units of one-twelfth of a cup, from one to forty-eight units, up to ten times a day. It connects on 2.4 or 5 GHz Wi-Fi, records a ten-second meal call in your voice, and takes three D batteries as backup. A desiccant bag sits in the lid. An infrared sensor at the chute watches for jams. There’s also a low-food alert, a touch panel that comes locked, and a twist-lock lid.
The family has four members that share this listing’s reviews: a basic model with no app, this Wi-Fi model, a camera model and a dual-bowl model for two cats. Prices differ; the Wi-Fi 5 L listing is the one this review is anchored to.
PETLIBRO Granary feeder review, part one: why it’s the best seller
The most-voted review on the whole family, with 690 helpful votes, is a five-star from November 2021 for the basic model. It’s worth reading on the listing because it sets the tone for everything that follows: the panel auto-locks so the cat can’t press anything, a sticker on the lid shows the largest kibble that fits, the schedule survived being unplugged, a portion measured out at about an eighth of a cup, and the one real complaint was a voice recording that sounded terrible and couldn’t be switched off without a reset. That last point is old; the Wi-Fi model’s owners record and manage the call from the app.
On the Wi-Fi model itself, the praise is specific. The 183-vote five-star owner tested portions manually and found the twelfths accurate with their kibble, got alerts when the bowl was too full to dispense and again when it cleared, and calls it the best purchase of their year. A 22-vote owner running two units for two large dogs likes the jam alert and the low-food alert most. A 14-vote owner is coming up on two years, has taken the unit apart many times to clean it with no wear, and says the brand emails everyone when there’s a network-wide problem. A 30-vote owner from June says the app promotes other PETLIBRO products once and then leaves you alone. And a September owner just bought their second Granary because the first one, they say, lasted about six years.
Read together, the happy reviews describe a machine that tells you things: low hopper, jammed chute, bowl too full, unit offline, desiccant due. For owners who leave the house, that’s the product. The timer-only feeders in this category, like the VOLUAS, can’t tell you any of it.
The portion problem, and which kibble it hits
This is the first of the two ways the Granary fails, and it fails in a specific way: not “too much” or “too little”, but inconsistent.
The most-voted low-star review, with 62 votes, is from a household that already owned two PETLIBRO fountains and the smaller Air feeder, and liked all three. On the camera variant of the Granary, they measured what came out against what was requested, in all three units the app offers, across multiple tests. They report it never dispensed more than half the amount set, and that the shortfall wandered between 20% and 50% with no pattern, which is the part that made it unusable: a machine that always gave half could be compensated for. Their kibble fit inside the sizing sticker. They went back to the Air. A three-star owner from this September had the mirror-image problem with dense kibble: 9–12 g at the smallest setting, about double what their cat eats, and switched to a competitor that meters smaller. A four-star owner says it took a few days of trial and error to land on the right number and they had to pour food back.
Against that, the 183-vote owner found the portions accurate, the 22-vote owner’s main discrepancy was the hopper emptying after sixteen meals instead of twenty, and a five-star owner on the camera variant says the two bowls fill a little unevenly but it works out. The app’s screen in the image above shows amounts in cups, ounces, grams or millilitres. That’s a conversion, not a scale. The machine moves a fixed volume per rotor step, and how many grams that is depends on your kibble’s shape and density.
The practical reading, which the high-star owners who mention portions arrived at on their own: dispense a few portions by hand on day one, weigh them, and set the schedule from your number. If your kibble comes out at 20–50% of the request with no pattern, as the 62-vote owner’s did, that’s a return, not a calibration.
PETLIBRO Granary feeder review, part two: when it stops
The second failure is the one that decides whether you’d buy this to leave the house.
The timelines in my sample: a motor that seized at six months, in a Canadian owner’s review; dead at six months with Wi-Fi unrecoverable, in a five-vote review from June; dead after a few months, in the 46-vote review from September 2025; a USB port broken after being unplugged for a trip, in a July four-star; and a dual-bowl unit that ran a year and a half with a couple of resets before stopping outright, in an August four-star. Nobody in my sample reports a Granary dying in the first month, though one dual-bowl unit arrived with a motor that barely turned and went straight back. The longest-running units in my sample are at about two years and still going, plus the one owner whose previous unit went six.
What happens next is where the reviews split hardest. The Canadian owner sent a video and received a replacement base. The July owner emailed photos, heard nothing for a week, phoned, and had replacement parts within days; they also note the company’s rating at the Better Business Bureau, which I haven’t checked. The 46-vote owner’s account is the other pole: a month of emails, first with what they took to be an AI agent and then a slower human, each reply asking for one more troubleshooting step, then proof of purchase, then changes to their Wi-Fi, then a video, so that PETLIBRO could send parts for them to fit themselves. That review was five stars for the first two months and one star after. An August one-star simply says the app stopped working properly and support didn’t help.
Two things about the six-month death are worth pulling out. The five-vote owner had backup batteries installed and says they didn’t take over; the pet went without food for a day or two before anyone knew. And a May one-star describes a button lock that re-enables itself and can’t be disabled on battery power, so that a power cut leaves the feeder neither scheduling nor accepting a manual feed. In my sample, nobody describes the battery backup carrying the feeder through an actual outage; two owners doubt it and a few mention it’s there. I wouldn’t count on it without testing it.
Then there’s the outage that wasn’t the machine’s. A four-star owner whose unit had run flawlessly for two years reports it dropping offline every three minutes on August 12 this year and updates the next day: PETLIBRO’s servers had gone down and taken every owner’s connection with them, restored within a day. Two years of reliability and an afternoon where nobody’s Granary could be reached. For a feeder whose selling point is that it tells you things, that’s the one silence to plan for.
The small things owners mention
The desiccant bag. The app reminds you to change it every fourteen days. The 183-vote owner prices a four-pack at $15.99 and suggests a subscription; the 22-vote owner wonders why it can’t last a month; a UK buyer left one star on the desiccant listing itself for the price. This is the Granary’s running cost and the listing doesn’t put a number on it.
The lid. The 30-vote owner says the tabs have to be in a specific position before the lid will drop and lock, which means a lot of spinning. On the other side, in the reviews I read nobody described a cat getting into the hopper, which is more than I can say for the other feeders in this automatic cat feeder problems piece.
The speaker. The 30-vote owner says the meal-call recording sounds scratchy, and quiet even at full volume; the 690-vote 2021 review said the same of the basic model. If your cat comes to the motor noise, as most in these reviews do, it doesn’t matter.
The bowl. The stainless bowl sits inside a plastic one; the 22-vote owner removed the metal bowl because it was loud for one dog and small for the other, and the four-star May owner finds it awkward to slide back without tilting the unit. The dispensing itself is described as a grinding whirr that scared one cat at first.
Kibble size. The sticker on the lid is the spec. An owner on Royal Canin Oral Health, which is large, hears the rotor struggle but has had no jam. The 22-vote owner had one jam across two units in their first weeks, and got an alert for it.
The dimensions. One May owner measured 14.25 inches deep against a listed 12.99, and nearly 15 with the cord. Measure the shelf.
Who it suits
If you want to know from your phone that the hopper’s low, the chute’s clear and the meal went out, and you’ll weigh a portion before you trust it, the Granary does what its 66% of five-star owners say it does. Budget for the desiccant.
If your kibble is unusually dense or unusually shaped, test the portions in the first week, because the two most detailed low-star reviews in my sample are about metering, not electronics. If it’s off by a wandering amount, return it inside the window.
If what you want is a machine that will keep feeding through anything, including its own death, this isn’t that machine and neither is any other feeder I’ve read about. The honest version of that product is a camera pointed at the bowl, whichever feeder sits behind it.
Current listing and price. For how the Granary’s failures compare with the two other feeders I’ve read, the three-feeder problems piece lines them up, and the rest of the pet reviews are here.
The reviews behind this
Rating, month and helpful-vote count, so you can find them on the listing yourself. No names and no quoted text — these are summaries in my own words. Where the reviewer names a variant other than the Wi-Fi 5 L, it’s noted.
| Rating | Posted | Votes | What it reports |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 star | Nov 2021 | 690 | Basic model: panel auto-locks; kibble-size sticker accurate; portion about 1/8 cup; recording poor and can’t be turned off; 12-month warranty mentioned by support |
| 5 star | May 2024 | 183 | Twelfths accurate on manual test; bowl-full and clear alerts; desiccant $15.99 for four every two weeks |
| 1 star | Nov 2024 | 62 | Camera variant: dispensed 20–50% of the requested amount with no pattern; slow, pauses between portions; returned |
| 1 star | Sep 2025 | 46 | Five stars for two months, then dead after a few months; a month of support ending in an offer of parts |
| 5 star | Jan 2026 | 35 | Camera variant: run outdoors for weeks in winter to recover a lost kitten; worked |
| 5 star | Jun 2026 | 30 | Lid needs a specific position to lock; app promotes other products once; speaker scratchy; would buy again |
| 5 star | Aug 2024 | 22 | Two units for two 50 lb dogs; jam and low-food alerts; hopper emptied after 16 meals not 20; removed the metal bowl |
| 5 star | Aug 2024 | 14 | Nearly two years; disassembled for cleaning many times, no wear; brand emails about network-wide issues; no subscription needed |
| 5 star | May 2026 | 13 | Camera dual-bowl: app reliable; two bowls fill a little unevenly |
| 5 star | Nov 2025 | 10 | Large Royal Canin kibble; rotor audibly struggles, no jam yet; filter reminder in app |
| 1 star | Jun 2026 | 5 | Dead at six months, Wi-Fi unrecoverable, batteries didn’t take over; pet unfed a day or two |
| 4 star | Aug 2026 | 3 | Two years flawless; offline every three minutes on Aug 12 during a server outage; fixed next day |
| 4 star | May 2026 | 3 | No sensor in the bowl; ads at setup; paid tracking optional; a few days to get portions right; bowl awkward to reseat |
| 5 star | Jul 2026 | 2 | Cat on a schedule; would buy again |
| 5 star | Jul 2026 | 2 | Camera variant: night vision; alerts when a cat approaches |
| 3 star | Sep 2026 | 1 | Dense kibble gave 9–12 g at the smallest setting; app cluttered with promotions; switched brands |
| 4 star | Jul 2026 | 1 | USB port broke after a trip; a week with no reply, then a phone call and parts shipped quickly |
| 4 star | Aug 2026 | 1 | Dual-bowl: eighteen months with a couple of resets, then stopped completely |
| 3 star | Aug 2026 | 1 | Dual-bowl: motor barely turned with correctly sized kibble; returned |
| 5 star | Sep 2026 | 0 | Second Granary; the first lasted about six years |
| 5 star | Sep 2026 | 0 | Camera variant: two months, never lost connection; firmware updates easy |
| 5 star | Sep 2026 | 0 | Basic model: reliable, easy to restock |
| 1 star | Aug 2026 | 0 | App not working properly; support unhelpful; can’t trust it |
| 2 star | Aug 2026 | 0 | Camera variant: firmware bouncing for three days; skipped the first meal; “Requested Time Out” |
| 1 star | May 2026 | 0 | Button lock re-enables itself; can’t feed by hand on battery; depth 14.25 in against 12.99 listed |
| 5 star | Feb 2025 | — | Canada: motor seized at six months; replacement base after a video; rating raised for the service |
| 1 star | May 2023 | — | UK, desiccant listing: six bags for nearly £20, replaced every two weeks |
Common questions
How much is one portion?
One-twelfth of a cup by the app, which is a volume, not a weight. Owners who weighed it got anything from accurate to double to half, depending on kibble. Weigh yours on day one.
Does it need a subscription?
No, according to a two-year owner and a four-star owner who was offered a paid tracking tier and declined. The recurring cost is the desiccant bag, roughly every two weeks.
Does it work in a power cut?
With three D batteries, it’s meant to. Nobody in my sample describes it actually carrying a unit through an outage; one owner reports the batteries not taking over when the unit died, and another describes a button lock that blocks manual feeding on battery. Test it before you rely on it.
Will it tell me if it misses a meal?
It will tell you about a jam, a low hopper, a full bowl and a lost connection. It can’t tell you it’s died, and on August 12 this year it couldn’t tell anyone anything for a day. A camera on the bowl is the backstop.
Can a cat get into it?
Nobody in the reviews I read reported one; a 2021 owner watched a cat try the chute and fail. The lid twist-locks and the touch panel comes locked. That’s a thinner sample than I’d like, so watch yours for the first week.
Star percentages are Amazon’s published figures at the time of writing and will drift as new ratings arrive. Patterns above are summarised in my own words from a sample of the written reviews Amazon surfaces on this listing family, which is smaller than the listing’s full review count and much smaller than its total ratings. Product images are from the manufacturer’s listing. Specifications, pricing and availability change; check the listing for current details.