I guarantee you the microcontroller that handles the wifi is 10x more powerful than what would be required to just run an offline schedule. There’s no processing involved… It’s not like this is using a camera + AI to see if your cat is too fat.
Edit: I just looked up this model and its actual features… it’s not that far off, since it seems to run image recognition to tell when the cat is eating. If they’re streaming video back to the cloud for processing, that sounds even worse than what I was expecting. It would be entirely possible to run a small image recognition model locally in a product like this.
There are much simpler solutions like the ones that detect a chip in the pets collar (or the embedded id chip most pets have)