Defective litterbox, AI customer service & deleting reviews.
Helaas hebben wij een zeer negatieve ervaring gehad met dit bedrijf. Toen wij na 2 weken problemen kregen met hun electrische kattenbak hoopte wij op een professionele en zorgvuldige afhandeling. In plaats daarvan kregen we een standaardantwoord dat duidelijk door AI gegenereerd leek te zijn en totaal niet inging op de inhoud van mijn klacht. Serieuze klachten als dat de sensor niet reageerde op onze katten bleven zelfs onbeantwoord. Dat gaf ons het gevoel dat mijn probleem niet serieus werd genomen. Nog zorgwekkender is dat nadat wij een 1 ster review hebben achter gelaten op de website van Hombli, deze nu een aantal maanden later nergens meer te vinden is en wanneer wij deze opnieuw plaatsen komt deze ook niet op de website. Dus vandaar posten wij de eerlijke review nu op Trustpilot.
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Originele review zoals gepost op Hombli hun eigen website:
I had pre-ordered the litter box shortly after pre-orders opened and received it in mid-October. Within less than 2 weeks we ran into many issues: daily urine leakage, defective sensor, motor fault and all litter falling into the garbage bag. The defective sensor meant that the drum would keep rotating even when one of my cats would go near or inside the litter box.
I reached out to Hombli via email and provided a lot of details including photos and videos of the defects. I even managed to record a video showing the defective sensor and all the litter falling into the garbage bag. Instead of replying to the concerns, the only reply I received was them asking me what type of cat litter I use. This is completely irrelevant to all the other issues I mentioned. Even after explicitly asking them to reply to the issues, they never did and have not to this day.
I asked Hombli if they could first send a new litter box so that I would have a box to ship the defective litter box back in, and they wouldn't do that. I asked if they could send me an empty box to ship it back, they still wouldn't do that. At this point I had bought puppy training pads for the urine leakage and a new bag of litter because all the litter had fell into the garbage bag twice already. Now Hombli is also expecting me to buy a temporary litter box for my cats, and take care of finding a huge shipping box myself.
The litter box was defective, I have proven this many times and they still wouldn't budge. I decided to give them an ultimatum: either they first send me a new litter box, or I return everything for a full refund. They kept saying they wouldn't be able to refund me, even though the product was showing a very serious defect (not-working sensor) on top of all the other defects. I decided to ship everything back myself and shortly after opened a case with PayPal because I had absolutely no trust in Hombli refunding me the money.
A couple days after my return shipment arrived, I received an email from Hombli telling me they developed a rubber border to prevent urine leakage and asking if they could send it to me. I had no idea why they would email me this considering I already let them know I have returned the litter box and cancelled the purchase agreement. That's when I decided to run all their emails to me through an AI-detector.
Turns out, out of the 9 emails Hombli has sent to me, 6 of them were detected as 100% AI-generated and 1 as 72% AI-generated. The tool I used (QuillBot) is reliable since it detected my own emails, which I wrote myself, as 100% Human-written.
Today, PayPal has decided to close the case in my favor and refunded me the entire order. The last thing I heard from Hombli was them confirming that the litter box is defective and they would see if it's possible to refund me and that they would get back to me. They never got back to me.
I was a huge Hombli fan. In total I still have 17 Hombli devices in-use which work great, but I will never be purchasing any new Hombli devices in the future.
Let this be a warning to everyone that if you run into any issues with your litter box, don't expect good customer service.
21 November 2025
Unprompted review