Of every product in the rescue software space, Pawlytics is the one that shares the most DNA with us. Both built for foster-based rescues. Both convinced old-school shelter software was designed for the wrong kind of organization. Both sure that animal-to-home matching should be data-driven.
I'm Kyle, PawPlacer's founder. Up front: Pawlytics did the hard work of legitimizing foster-first software as a category. FosterFix is a real product with years of iteration behind it, and the team has pushed the whole industry to take this model seriously. If they hadn't, PawPlacer probably wouldn't exist.
You're here to choose between us, though, so let's compare. Head to head, feature by feature, with actual numbers.
The 30-second answer
- Cheaper at every volume. PawPlacer is free up to 30 in-care pets (forever, not a trial) and caps at $79/mo for unlimited. Pawlytics starts at $29/mo and adds $1 per adoption and $1 per signed e-contract once you pass 50 combined per month.
- More AI, and more transparent about what it's doing. We use vector embeddings with deterministic guardrails and publish a full technical writeup.
- Broader platform in one place. Medical, reports, a real custom form builder, embeddable widgets, SDK, API, mobile QR adoptions, transports, events, kanban tasks, food schedules, tags, timelines, flyers, wishlist. All on every plan.
- 0% cut on your money. Stripe Connect, direct to your bank. We never see a dollar.
The pricing math, side by side
Pawlytics prices on combined monthly adoptions and e-contracts:
- $29/month for 0–24 combined
- $49/month for 25–49 combined
- $1 per adoption and $1 per signed e-contract once you cross 50 combined
No permanent free plan.
PawPlacer prices on pets currently in your care:
| Plan | In-care pets | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free | up to 30 | $0 forever |
| Growth | up to 150 | $19/mo |
| Scale | up to 500 | $39/mo |
| Unlimited | no cap | $79/mo |
Side by side at real volumes, counting Pawlytics the way they bill:
| Your rescue | Pawlytics | PawPlacer |
|---|---|---|
| ~15 combined/month, ~20 in care | $29 | $0 |
| ~40 combined/month, ~40 in care | $49 | $19 |
| 80 adoptions + 80 e-contracts (~120 in care) | $160 | $19 |
| 200 adoptions + 200 e-contracts (~400 in care) | $400 | $39 |
At 160 combined per month, PawPlacer is roughly 88% cheaper. At 400 combined, roughly 90%. That's before you compare what each dollar is actually buying.
Pawlytics pricing verified as of April 2026 from their public pricing page. We'll update this post when it changes.
Where your money goes (and doesn't)
No platform cut. No donation cut. No processing fee we tack on. You connect your own Stripe account through Stripe Connect and every adoption fee and every donation lands in your rescue's bank account untouched. Stripe charges adopters the 2.9% + $0.30 as a visible line item at checkout, so your side of the ledger stays clean.
If you leave, your Stripe account, your donor history, and your transaction records go with you.
FosterFix vs. our matching engine
This is the fair fight. Both teams take matching seriously and neither has a black box.
The shape of ours: every pet and every applicant becomes a compatibility profile (pet attributes on one side, application answers on the other, personal data scrubbed before it leaves your database). The system ranks matches Excellent to Low, writes a plain-English reason next to each one, and runs in both directions. Ask "who's the best home for this dog?" or "which pets fit this family?" and get the same ranked answer either way. Hard guardrails sit in front of the model, so it won't ever recommend a reactive pet into a home with other animals, or a foster who's already at capacity, or the wrong species. EU/UK/Switzerland rescues have it auto-disabled for GDPR, and every sensitive field is opt-in.
FosterFix and ours solve the same problem from different angles. Ours is on the free plan, runs in seconds across thousands of profiles, and powers adopter and foster matching from the same engine. The full architecture (vector embeddings, pgvector, three-layer privacy scrub) is in the technical deep-dive if you're the person evaluating this against anything else on the market.
A drag-and-drop custom form builder
This is the part Pawlytics switchers are most often surprised by.
Your adoption, foster, volunteer, and surrender applications aren't hardcoded. You build them yourself in a drag-and-drop editor. Sections, questions, ordering, required vs. optional, public vs. internal, all editable. The field renderers validate themselves: email, phone, URL, dates, a full address block, currency, agreement checkboxes with legal text you control, entity tags so applicants can pick the pet they're applying for, and pet-specific fields like species and energy level.
Save it; your public profile and every embedded widget updates instantly. The first time a coordinator asks for a new question and you add it in Settings between calls instead of filing a support ticket, that's the moment.
Medical records, end to end
Pawlytics has medical records. Ours go deeper, and the difference shows up most on the recurring side of rescue medicine: parasite preventatives, boosters at 8 and 12 weeks, the monthly heartworm check that keeps getting missed.
Vaccinations carry lot numbers and lot expirations. Prescriptions alert you before they expire or need a refill. Procedures capture complications and recovery instructions. Recurring follow-ups run on every cadence a rescue actually uses (daily through yearly), and the pet's next-due date shows up on the dashboard without anyone having to build a spreadsheet. A shared medications database and full clinic/vet profiles sit behind it so volunteers aren't typing doses from memory.
22 built-in document types plus unlimited custom ones attach to the pet's timeline. All of it travels with the pet through foster and into adoption, and the adopter walks out with a clean history to hand their own vet.
Reports that replace your spreadsheet
Pawlytics' analytics defaults are good. Ours trade default depth for configurability. You build the report you actually need instead of picking from a menu.
13 entity types are reportable (pets, adopters, fosters, volunteers, adoptions, foster assignments, medical records, vaccinations, procedures, prescriptions, transports, drivers, events). Pick fields, filter with nine operators, group, aggregate, export CSV or XLSX, up to 10,000 rows per query. The piece that earns its keep for grant season is dynamic date tokens like {TODAY-30} and {START_OF_MONTH}. Save the report once; it runs the correct rolling window forever without anyone editing dates. Five templates ship in the box: Population, Medical, Length of Stay, Outcomes, Financial. All free.
Tags, notes, activity timelines, and relationships
Foster rescues run on handoffs. A coordinator picks up a case at 11pm that another coordinator was working last Tuesday, and the only way that works is if the story is in one place.
Tags attach to every kind of record: pets, adopters, fosters, volunteers, events, transports. Whatever your team already says on the group chat ("behavior review pending," "sponsor funded," "needs transport this weekend") becomes a filter and a saved report. Every record has a notes timeline with author and timestamp. And relationships link across the system so a pet's bonded companion, an adopter's foster history, or a volunteer's transport log is one click away from the record you're looking at.
The end of tab-hunting is a quiet feature until it isn't.
Custom pet statuses that map to your workflow
Out of the box you get the whole shelter-lifecycle vocabulary. Intake, Medical Hold, Surrendered, Available, Fostered, Hold, Recovery Period, Pending, Stray, Quarantine, Medical Treatment, Lost, Escaped, Returned to Owner, Adopted, Deceased, Euthanized, Transferred, Archived, and more.
But your rescue isn't every rescue. Add your own statuses like "Vet Hold: Awaiting Dental," "Behavior Eval: Second Pass," or "Transport Pending: PA to NY." Each status carries a care-state flag (in care vs. out of care) that tells billing, the dashboard, and the public profile exactly how to treat the pet.
Public profile and embeddable widgets
Every rescue gets a hosted public profile at pawplacer.com/shelters/your-org. Logo, description, contact info, operating hours, adoptable pets gallery, events tab, flyers tab, donation checkout, live application forms. Every section toggles on or off in Settings.
For rescues with their own website, the same content drops onto WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, or hand-coded HTML with a single line of code:
- Full public profile embed
- Adoptable pets grid
- Individual pet detail
- Adoption, foster, and volunteer applications
Responsive iframes with auto-height, cached up to an hour so your site stays fast. Optional branding removal on paid plans. Your existing site keeps its look and its SEO.
Mobile QR adoption checkouts
Start an adoption on a staff tablet at a Saturday event, hand the adopter a QR code, and they finish on their own phone: donation selection, payment, agreement review, e-signatures. The pet auto-marks as Adopted, the adoption record auto-creates, the adopter gets redirected to a thank-you page. Built for the parking-lot-at-PetSmart reality. How it works.
SDK and REST API, on every plan
Free plan included.
pawplacer-sdk on npm, typed end to end, with retry, idempotency headers, and smart caching. REST endpoints for pets, people (adopters and fosters), adoption fees, and contracts. Scoped read/write API keys. Rate-limit metadata on every response header. Published OpenAPI 3.1 contract.
Rare in this category. One technical volunteer can wire PawPlacer into Zapier, your donor database, a custom intake, your website. Developer docs.
Dashboard widgets and per-user table settings
These two features end up mattering more than the marketing suggests, so they get their own section.
Dashboard widgets. Live counts of pets in care, pending applications, today's volunteers, upcoming medical, and tasks due, plus quick-search and a schedule view. When a volunteer logs in on a Sunday night to see what's on deck Monday, the answer is there.
Per-user table settings. Your medical coordinator and your adoption counselor can be on the exact same pet-list page with completely different columns and sort orders, because table settings are keyed to each user. Nobody steps on anyone else's view. Turn on custom fields in your columns and we automatically fetch only those custom fields from the server, so queries stay fast even when your applications are 60 questions long.
This is the quiet feature that stops your team from fighting over a shared view during onboarding. It matters the most the day you hire somebody new.
The shorter list
- AI-assisted data importer that preserves the microchip leading zeros Excel would have eaten, dedupes emails, and auto-creates adoption records when you upload adopters with a
pet_idscolumn. How it works. - Food and supplement schedules with automatic allergen conflict detection that flags when a product contains something the pet is allergic to. That one's caught real mistakes.
- Task kanban boards, volunteer scheduling with four calendar views and no-show tracking, transports with Google Maps routing, and an events module with a public events tab.
- Flyer designer with drag-and-drop templates, print-ready 8.5×11 output, and one-click social sharing.
- Document management across 30+ file formats with folders, role-based access per document, and in-browser preview.
- PetLink microchip registration, custom pet statuses with care-state flags, bonded pairs tracked as linked companions, 13 standard roles, and full CSV and XLSX export on every plan.
See every feature if you want the full list.
Month-to-month, export-ready
Cancel from the dashboard anytime. Export everything on any plan. Bring your own Stripe; keep it when you go.
Where Pawlytics still wins
Named plainly:
FosterFix has more real-world mileage. Theirs has been running with foster-based rescues for years. Ours is newer, even if the architecture is strong.
Grant and outcome reporting refined over time. Our reports module is comprehensive and covers 13 entity types, but Pawlytics has years of feedback from foster rescues shaping their analytics defaults.
Larger foster-rescue-specific community. More peers on Pawlytics means more forum answers when you hit a weird edge case. We're catching up, but we're newer.
If "longest-running foster-matching algorithm" is the deal-breaker, Pawlytics has that.
What we'd tell a friend
If your rescue is foster-driven, with 20 to 200 animals at a time and coordinators triaging Petfinder inquiries at 11pm, PawPlacer was built for you specifically.
You get AI matching, a real custom form builder, comprehensive medical, comprehensive reports, tags and timelines and relationships, custom statuses, mobile QR adoptions, embedded widgets, SDK, API, transports, events, kanban tasks, food schedules. The whole platform. Free up to 30 in-care pets. When you grow past that, it's $19/month. Then $39. Then $79. No per-adoption fees. No per-e-contract fees.
Try it for an afternoon with no credit card. Import your data with the CSV uploader, flip on AI matching, embed your pet grid on your existing site, keep every dollar of every adoption and every donation. If we don't fit, export everything and leave.
