A €15-a-year collar: a Bosnian hunter's app that replaces the Chinese GPS dog collar's stock software

TRAG Tracking is a GPS app for hunting dogs, built by a small outsourcing company in Sarajevo. It doesn't sell hardware. It takes over the roughly €100 Chinese 4G collars that Balkan hunters already own, and charges €15 per collar per year. It reached #13 on the Croatian Sports Top Grossing chart, but across all platforms it probably has only a few hundred users. This piece looks at how big it really is, which part is actually valuable, and why copying it is better done in a different country.

A group post at 11 p.m.

On the evening of 2026 Oct 21 11:12, a person named Sandro Hrgić posted in the Facebook group "ICAR GPS - ESEEK - GOOXOTA IK122T Pro GPS OGRLICE":

Trag-Tracking domaća aplikacija za sve trakere i suntek kamere.

It says: "Trag-Tracking, a domestic app. Works with all collars and Suntek hunting cameras." Below that is a list of features: track several dogs at once, "pair companion dogs with a code like Garmin," bark detection, route history, group hunts, hunt spot pins on the map, and chase duration. The last line: "Free collar activation assistance, around the clock."

Almost everyone in the group bought an iCar or Gooxota IK122T Pro collar. The admin runs a collar shop in Živinice, Bosnia, and added a price under the post: the founder is offering 7 days of free trial, then one year costs 25 KM (about €12.8).

A month earlier, on Sep 24, someone in another group for Bosnian Rough-Haired Hounds (BARAK LJUTI) posted a full TRAG feature rundown. So far, that's all the promotion anyone can find.

What it is

The collar most Balkan hunters use is a Chinese 4G collar costing around €100: the iCar IK122T Pro and its many white-label versions. Local hunting shops sell them, and so do classified sites like OLX and Njuškalo. The collar comes with its own stock app, "icar gps," which has over 100k downloads on Google Play. Its listing says "Track your car." It was built for vehicle tracking. It has no group hunts, no local language, and many settings still require texting commands to the collar.

TRAG's pitch is simple: give this collar an app that understands hunting. The homepage says it plainly:

Type the SIM number and TRAG does the rest.

Enter the phone number of the SIM card inside the collar. The app asks the collar what model it is, configures it, and connects. No model lookup, no texting, no APN setup. Once connected, you can:

• View a live map with all your dogs on one screen;
• Run group hunts: share a link, the whole team joins the same map, everyone sees every dog, and a push alert fires when a dog starts barking;
• Long-press the map to drop pins with notes and photos ("where the blood trail starts," "which gate needs to stay closed");
• Adjust the collar's reporting interval, beep, flash, training tone, and shock from your phone, and check battery and signal;
• Save every hunt's route, distance, and which dogs ran off, and replay them later.

Pricing in one line: the app is free, each paired collar costs €15 a year, and you pay for SIM data yourself (website, 11-06). The main target is the iCar IK122T Pro, and it also supports TKSTAR's TK909 / 910 / 919 and YG119. The interface is available in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, English, French, and Turkish.

It's made by Slash d.o.o., a Sarajevo software outsourcing company, and this is the only app it has on the App Store. The iOS version launched in Oct 1. By Nov 3 it had reached version 51, with updates nearly every day for over a month (App Store, 11-03).

How big it really is: a number inflated by a small-country chart

Ranking #13 on the Top Grossing chart sounds good. But on the same day, #14 Bowken, #16 MadGoal, and #8 PSS Field Kit all have 0 ratings (App Store, 11-06). The Croatian Sports Top Grossing chart is so easy to reach that a few annual subscriptions can move an app from 80 into the teens, which is why TRAG bounced between 13 and 83 within a week. The rank only tells you that some people are paying. It doesn't tell you how many.

Balkan hunters use Android more, and Android is its main platform. Google Play shows only 100+ downloads. Across all platforms, the estimate is probably a few hundred users (inference). A third-party estimate says "under $5K monthly revenue," but that is only a floor for a band and not very useful.

Why anyone would pay for this

• The stock app wasn't built for hunters. The collar hardware is good, but the software is a generic vehicle-tracking shell. In October 2025, the admin of the collar group relayed that "ICAR will rename itself next year and release a new app built for hunting." That shows everyone was waiting for someone to fill this gap.
• Losing a dog costs far more than the subscription. A hunting dog is worth several hundred euros. Paying €15 a year for live maps and group hunts is an easy calculation. The stock setup already required hunters to get their own SIM and pay for data, so an extra yearly fee doesn't feel like a big jump.
• Pairing was the biggest barrier, and TRAG removed it. For hunters who aren't technical, texting commands and setting APNs is a dealbreaker. TRAG needs only a phone number. If pairing fails, the developer will help remotely through Viber or WhatsApp, usually "within minutes."
• The users are all in a few groups. People who buy these collars gather in a handful of Facebook groups, and the shops that sell collars run those groups. One post reaches the whole target audience, for almost no cost.
• Timed to hunting season. Rabbit season in Croatia and Bosnia usually opens in Oct 1, and wild boar is in season too. The iOS version launched Oct 1, and the TikTok videos are all tagged #lovnazeca (rabbit hunting) and #lovnadivljesvinje (wild boar hunting). The timing lines up, but it wasn't deliberate as far as we know, so treat it as inference.

Who else is competing: three or four clones squeezed into the same gap in one year

Here's the problem. TRAG isn't the only one going after this gap. In 2026, several nearly identical apps appeared in Bosnia alone:

DogTracker's website shows how crowded this space has become. Next to each dog's name on the map, it displays "GON 13 MIN" (chasing for 13 minutes). If a dog barks in one place for too long, it sends a "LAJANJE U MJESTU" (barking in place) alert. After a hunt, you can replay every dog's track like a movie and export it as GPX. These are details hunters actually care about, and it's free.

TRAG has four real differences: the iOS version already works, it supports TKSTAR, pairing needs only a phone number, and the developer provides hands-on support. But it's the only one of these apps that clearly charges, and it ranks third in installs. Its chart position shows that it's almost the only app on iOS collecting money, not that it's the most popular.

What we don't know yet

• The store pages don't show how many people actually pay, or how Android handles payments.
• Whether Sandro Hrgić and Hamza Kurgas, who posted in the groups, are the developers, partner sellers, or actual users is unverified. Whether the group admin who runs the collar shop takes a cut is also unverified.
• If the OEM iCar app gets a hunting version, or changes its terms or servers, this whole class of third-party apps could go dark overnight.

If it were you

Bottom line: TRAG itself hasn't taken off, and copying it in the Balkans is pointless. There are already three or four competitors there, one of them free. What's worth taking is the structure: a high-volume Chinese hardware line with a terrible OEM app, a crowd of enthusiasts concentrated in a few Facebook groups, an annual per-device fee, and a pairing flow that lets non-technical people use it.

Who it suits: Developers who can build a mobile app plus a small backend, can reverse-engineer or integrate with the device protocols (for these 4G trackers, the protocols are mostly public or already mapped by open-source projects like Traccar), and who are based in a hunting-dog country, speak the local language, and are willing to do support on WhatsApp themselves.

Who it doesn't suit: People aiming for a big business. This is a market of a few thousand to tens of thousands of users paying around ten-odd euros a year each, so the ceiling is low, and the lifeblood sits with someone else's hardware and servers. It also isn't for people who don't want to talk to users one by one, since in this category support is the moat.

How to do it:

• Going to another country: first check Poland, Italy, Spain, France, Turkey, and Romania, the countries with heavy hunting. See how well the IK122T Pro and similar collars sell on local secondhand sites and Amazon, and how active the local-language collar groups are. TRAG has added French and Turkish, which shows it's looking outward too.
• Copy the hardest step first: enter only the SIM number, have the backend auto-detect the model, and push the config automatically. Matching DogTracker's features is enough; group hunts and chase duration are what hunters care about most.
• Changing the audience also works: the same approach applies to herding dog and livestock collars, boat tracking, and trail cameras (Suntek and similar). Start with the model that has the worst OEM app rating and the most buyers.

How to get users: Find local collar-buyer groups and breed groups, get on good terms with the admins, ideally the shops that sell the collars, and have them post your first message. Give the shops a referral cut so they recommend you when they sell a collar. Offer a 7-day free trial with hand-holding through pairing. On TikTok, post screen recordings of the phone map during real hunts, tagged with local hunting terms for rabbit and wild boar.

When to launch: Most of Europe's hunting season runs autumn and winter, so you need to be live before next September to catch the next season's buying and app-switching wave. This season is already more than halfway through.

What would mean you got it wrong: If iCar / Gooxota ships an official hunting app with group hunts and multiple languages next year, the room for third-party apps disappears. If you post in target-country collar groups and fail to pair 30 collars within two weeks, there aren't enough of those collars locally: switch countries or hardware. Conversely, if TRAG or DogTracker passes 10k downloads on Google Play next year, the market is bigger than estimated here, and it's worth going in earlier and faster.