I was looking into pet monitor to aid our crate training. We’d like to be able to take a peek at what our puppy is doing without opening the door to the room the crate is in and waking her up, if she’s asleep.

There are plenty of options on Amazon, pretty affordable, too. But my husband and I are rather resistant to adding another device at home that can monitor our home (and receive images and sounds from the home).

We decided to use a device we already have, an older iPad. We downloaded this app called “Pet Monitor Vigi“, that costs $7 for through the Apple App Store on the iPad, no repeating costs/subscription fee. The nice thing about this purchase is that it’s tied to your Apple ID, so once I purchased it on the iPad, I can also download the same app on my iPhone, to see what she’s up to.

The only caveat is that you have to do another separate purchase on the MacOS App Store even if you’ve bought it on the iOS App Store; it turns out the App Stores are separate. If I remember correctly, we spent another $8 for this, also with no repeating subscription fees. We think this is pretty awesome. We haven’t tried the Android device yet.

Since my husband and I both use iPhones but have separate Apple IDs, we can both see our puppy without buying another iPhone app. We did this by following this page by Apple. After doing that, analogously, the app that I bought on the MacOS App Store can be shared with my husband’s Mac. We did have to reboot our iPhones for it to work.

As you can see in the iPhone screenshot above, you can also say hi to the dog through the app. You can take a photo by clicking on that “Photo.Video” button, and take a 5-second video by holding that same button. It would be saved within the app, so you’d have to download the image or video from your the app to your device. We also like the fact that any noises that the dog makes will be captured and we can hear once she’s awake and start making a fuss, to make sure she won’t have an accident in the crate.