FAQ

PawPlacer is a modern pet management platform built specifically for non-municipal animal shelters, fosters, and rescue organizations. We streamline operations with features like pet tracking, adoption management, foster partnerships, volunteer coordination, task management, and much more. Every feature we build comes from direct feedback from shelters and fosters—ensuring PawPlacer actually meets the real needs of animal welfare organizations.

Absolutely! PawPlacer includes a free forever plan with access to all features, limited only by the number of active pets, users, and task boards. It's perfect for small shelters, individual fosters, or anyone wanting to try out the platform.

Totally fair question—and no, it's not a scam. Yes, our pricing is unusually low, and that's on purpose. We're a small, scrappy team of developers and shelter staff who know powerful software doesn't have to be locked behind enterprise pricing. Most of the cost and bloat in traditional systems comes from maintaining outdated tech and maintaining big municipal contracts. That's not our model. We know firsthand that most animal welfare organizations run on razor-thin budgets. PawPlacer was built for them. Each of us has volunteered or worked at a pet organization in some capacity, and we've seen the constant financial strain. If we can remove just one part of that strain, we're doing what we set out to do. Profit isn't our mission—getting more pets into loving homes is. Ironically, we noticed signups rise when we raised prices, but that's not the point. We'd rather stay affordable for the people doing this emotionally heavy, critical work—work some of us still do, and others now support by writing code. Affordable doesn't mean shady. It means you've found a product built by the right people, for the right reasons, with the right priorities, on the right tech stack.

No hidden or per-pet fees, ever. Cancel anytime without penalty. After canceling, you'll have read-only access to your data. Reactivate your plan to regain full access. You can also export your data at any time (including after cancellation), and we encourage you to reach out—we'll create a custom export formatted exactly how you need it, for free. (For the developers out there: we know SQL inside and out. For everyone else: this means you can ask for any combination of data and we'll provide it in a clean, easy-to-use spreadsheet.). From the exports page in settings, you can export a richly-formatted CSV, XLSX, or XLS file with all of your pet data.

No problem! Unlike many websites that load everything on your device, PawPlacer does most of the heavy lifting on our servers first, then sends you only what's needed. This means your device doesn't have to process or download as much, and pages load quickly—even on older devices or slow internet. Check out our technical FAQs for more details.

Yes! Set default fees by age and species or customize per pet. Enable temporary discounts for events. We never take a percentage of your adoption fees—ever. You choose which payment methods to accept, from PayPal to Venmo to Bitcoin, and keep 100% of the proceeds. We also offer a donation feature for supporters who want to contribute directly to your organization.

Yes! We have no-code widgets you can add to your site to let potential adopters, fosters, and volunteers view your pets and/or apply and donate directly. We also offer a fully documented and heavily-typed PawPlacer SDK on npm for developers who want to build custom integrations and ship quickly, as well as exposed REST APIs for those who prefer a more manual approach. Grab a key from Settings → SDK & API and you'll be ready to ship.

No. While adoption fees are permitted, selling pets is strictly prohibited. PawPlacer supports legitimate shelter and foster adoption processes only. Puppy mills, backyard breeders, and other unethical practices are not allowed and will immediately result in account closure and subscription cancellation. Zero exceptions to this policy.

No. We will never remove our free plan. In the future, we may increase prices on other plans to better reflect the value we provide. However, existing customers will be grandfathered into their current rate for as long as they keep their plan. If you're signed up today, you lock in your price permanently.

PawPlacer was built by organization volunteers and tech professionals who care deeply about improving animal welfare. Unlike corporate-owned or VC-backed companies, we answer only to our users, not stakeholders. We focus on agility, organization-specific needs, and keeping costs fair—not maximizing profits.

Yes! You can easily import pets, adopters, fosters, and volunteers with our CSV importer. Our AI-powered migration assistant automatically maps pet fields, standardizes formats, and handles all the technical details—no matter what your data looks like. It seriously works like magic.

Absolutely. Create custom forms for adoptions, fosters, volunteers, and partners with our form builder. Add any field type and set required responses. All terms are fully customizable in settings.

PawPlacer is a mobile-responsive web platform accessible from any device with an internet connection. This ensures you always have the latest features without managing separate apps. Add a shortcut to your home screen for easy access—with modern web technology, the experience is nearly identical to a native app. Thanks to smart caching, you can still view most of your data even without a connection. Web push notifications are coming soon for devices that support them.

At PawPlacer, our focus isn't on competing—it's on serving. We want to give shelters, fosters, and rescues a new tool to manage their operations using UIs and methods that they are comfortable with. We're grateful to platforms like Shelterluv and Buzz for blazing the trail; PawPlacer couldn't have existed during the many years they have been serving this community. We see ourselves as friendly peers in the same mission, not opponents, and we're excited to keep learning, innovating, and contributing alongside them—all in service of helping animals find homes.

PawPlacer didn't start as a business, but rather as a passion project to serve a community we deeply care about. With minimal technical expenses and a solid capital foundation from our founder, we have plenty of runway for the long haul. We run on a modern tech stack, stay fully remote, and grow through community support instead of ads, keeping every dollar focused on making the platform better. We hire thoughtfully, maintain a 100% retention rate, and our small but mighty team wears multiple hats to stay fast, flexible, and laser-focused.

PawPlacer is here to stay. We have substantial capital available to ensure continued development and growth. Our lean, efficient approach keeps costs low while allowing us to continually improve the platform. We're committed to keeping PawPlacer affordable, scalable, and evolving based on the needs of shelters and fosters—now and for the long haul.

No. PawPlacer provides organization management software only. We don't take in, house, foster, or transport pets. Contact local organizations directly for these services.

Absolutely. PawPlacer is built to scale with your organization, no matter how large. We use modern cloud infrastructure, proper database design, and efficient code to ensure fast performance and reliability at any scale, on any device. (See our technical FAQ for the nerdy details.) We stress-tested our platform with 1 million pets in a real-world scenario just to see if we could break it—it handled everything with ease.

We believe these features—like our AI data uploader with export abilities, Canva-like flyer maker, and many more—are genuinely helpful for most organizations. We offer them for free because we have a mission, and our team of developers are passionate about building tools that help organizations rather than maximize profits. Plus, they're fun to code! Yes, we could charge a lot for them, but we don't and we won't.

Never. We believe in clear, upfront pricing. The only payments we collect are subscription fees for small, medium, and large organization plans. We never take a cut of your donations or adoption fees.

We take privacy and data security extremely seriously. PawPlacer is built with modern security practices to protect your data. We never sell or share your data—or any data you collect from fosters, adopters, etc.—with third parties. For payments, we don't handle them directly; instead, we use Stripe, a secure third-party processor. If you try to collect highly sensitive info (like SSNs) on forms, we'll show a strong warning to maintain security awareness. We also offer an easy data export option so you can keep local backups anytime. Check our security FAQ for the technical deep-dive.

No—we intentionally steer clear of municipal contracts to stay fast and flexible. Government partnerships often come with bureaucratic red tape, slow procurement cycles, and one-size-fits-all mandates that stifle innovation and explode costs. By working directly with shelters and fosters, we remain agile, responsive, and focused on your unique needs.

PawPlacer is built by a small, dedicated team of developers, designers, and organization volunteers who understand shelter needs firsthand. Our support staff handles most inquiries, with developers and leadership available for technical discussions or upon request. We typically respond within 6 hours during business hours (8AM-8PM EST) and within 24 hours maximum, 7 days a week. Everyone contributes across multiple areas to ensure PawPlacer truly serves the organization community.

PawPlacer is proudly built on legacy PHP, jQuery, and a single-table SQL database, lovingly hosted on a shared cPanel server. Just kidding. We run a modern, high-performance stack: React, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL, all powered by serverless architecture with Supabase and Vercel. The frontend is rendered with Remix for near-instant loads using SSR, even on low-bandwidth networks—perfect for resource-limited organizations. We've crafted highly optimized RPCs that minimize database calls and properly indexed everything to make even massive queries blazing fast. The UI is built with custom shadcn components for accessibility and consistency. Payments flow through Stripe, emails through Resend, and AI features—like pet biographies and intelligent column mapping—are powered by OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini. Scalability, speed, and developer joy, all in one beautiful stack.

TL;DR: We encrypt files and fields and ensure our database only shows you what you have access to. Full answer: Our platform is built on a zero-trust foundation. Every table is protected by strict Row-Level Security (RLS) and least-privilege functions, with robust input validation to prevent unauthorized access. Public pet profiles are completely isolated from private data, and our QR-based adoption links are tokenized and self-destruct after use or inactivity. Role-based PostgreSQL policies plus RPC checks ensure only approved actions succeed. API keys leverage pgcrypto's 256-bit randomness and are stored as bcrypt-salted hashes.