Because We're Different!

Our commitment to independent pet care professionals.

Our Commitment to You

We'll be upfront about something most software companies won't say directly: Leashkin is a business. We have a team to pay, servers to run, and tools to keep building. We charge money for what we make, and we're not apologetic about that.

But here's what makes us different from every other platform in this space — our business only works when yours does. We don't make money when you book a client. We don't take a percentage when you get paid. We make money when you look at your monthly subscription and decide it's worth keeping. That single fact changes how we think about every decision we make.

What you pay and what you get

Let's talk about what the pet care industry actually costs you.

The major pet care platforms — the marketplaces that connect providers with clients — take a percentage of every booking you complete. Not a monthly fee. Not a flat rate. A percentage. Every time a client pays you, the platform takes its cut first. Based on publicly available fee information from the major platforms as of 2026, industry standard sits around 20%, with some platforms taking as much as 40 cents of every dollar you earn. Those numbers are published on their own websites. We didn't invent them.

That's not a service fee. That's a permanent tax on your work — one that compounds every month, every year, for as long as you stay.

Run the math. A provider doing $3,000 a month on a platform that takes 20% gives away $600 every month. That's $7,200 a year. On a platform taking 40%, it's $1,200 a month — $14,400 a year. Not to tools you chose. Not to software that makes your business better. To a marketplace that also competes with you for your own clients, owns your reviews, and can change its terms whenever it wants.

And when platforms hit financial trouble — which some in this industry currently are, as their own public financial filings show — providers are the last to know and the first to lose. The commission keeps getting paid right up until the day the platform stops working.

Leashkin charges a flat monthly fee — $0 for Free, $4.99 for Pack, $19.99 for Pro, $39.99 for Business. That's it. Every dollar you earn above that is yours. We don't take a percentage when you get paid. We don't take a cut when you book a new client. We don't take a cut when you raise your rates or add a service or have your best month ever. We make money by charging you a fair monthly fee for tools worth having — and nothing more.

We chose this model deliberately. A flat fee means we're incentivized to build tools that genuinely save you time and grow your business — not to maximize transaction volume so we can skim more off the top. When your business thrives, you stay. When you stay, we grow. There's no tension between what's good for you and what's good for us.

The processing fee — and who controls it

When a client pays an invoice with a card, there's a 5% processing fee. This covers Stripe's transaction costs plus Leashkin's payment infrastructure. It's a real cost — not a revenue line we invented.

Here's the part that matters: on Pro and above, you decide who pays it.

You can pass the fee to the client — they pay 5% on top of the invoice total, and you receive the full amount. You can absorb it yourself — the client sees a clean invoice total and you net 95%. Or you can split it however you choose. Cash, Venmo, Zelle, and other payment methods are always 100% free. The 5% only applies to card payments, and you're always in control of whether and how it shows up.

Free and Pack subscribers have a default fee display that works for most situations. Pro unlocks the full fee control panel because serious professionals running real businesses deserve to decide how their payment terms work — not have that decision made for them by the platform.

Compare that to the major platforms, where the platform controls pricing, sets service fees, and adjusts them without your input. Leashkin doesn't tell you what your work is worth. You do.

Your clients are yours. No exceptions.

Leashkin is not a marketplace. We don't show your clients other providers. We don't send them emails about competitors. We don't own the relationship you built — you do.

On the major platforms, your clients belong to the platform. Your reviews belong to the platform. Your search ranking belongs to the platform. If you leave or get deactivated, you leave with nothing — no client list, no contact information, no history. Most platforms make it deliberately difficult to export your own data. A formal privacy request can take 30 to 45 days and returns information in formats designed for legal compliance, not portability. Client contact details, booking history, and service records are often unavailable or buried in formats that are impossible to work with.

When you add a client in Leashkin, that client belongs to you regardless of your subscription level, regardless of whether you stay or go, regardless of anything. If you cancel your account tomorrow, you can export your full client list, their contact information, their pets, and your complete service history. We will never hold your data hostage.

This isn't a legal nicety. It's a foundational commitment. We believe the marketplace model — where the platform sits between you and your clients and could theoretically pull that relationship away — is fundamentally bad for independent providers. We built Leashkin to be the opposite of that.

A review system that's fair to everyone

On the major platforms, reviews are the platform's asset. They live on the platform's system, serve the platform's algorithm, and stay behind when you leave. A difficult review from a difficult client sits on your profile with no meaningful recourse. A great review from your best client is worth nothing once you walk out the door.

We built something different — and more honest about what reviews are actually for.

We don't ask for a review the moment a visit ends. Most platforms send the review request immediately — while the client is still reading the report card, before they've had time to think about the experience at all. That's not designed to get honest feedback. It's designed to catch clients in the moment and maximize review volume for the platform's own ratings.

Leashkin waits. After a visit is completed, we give the client time to absorb the experience — to read the report card, see the photos, and actually reflect on how the visit went — before we send the review request. A review written with a little time behind it is more honest, more considered, and more useful to you than one tapped out in thirty seconds while the client is still opening the app.

When the client does leave a review, they submit a star rating and optional written feedback through their portal. The star rating is permanent and belongs to the client — it cannot be changed, hidden, or removed by the provider. That's intentional. Clients deserve a fair, honest voice in how providers are represented, and star ratings are how we protect that.

The written feedback is different. You see it before it's published. You can read it, respond to it privately, and decide whether to publish the written text to your public profile. If a client left feedback that's unfair, retaliatory, or factually wrong, you don't have to make it public. That's your call.

But the star rating stands regardless. Always.

This is the balance we landed on — and we think it's the right one. Clients get a permanent, unfiltered record of how they rated their experience, requested at a moment when their opinion has had time to form. Providers get protection from written feedback that could damage their reputation unfairly. Neither side gets to disappear the other's voice entirely.

A profile with forty honest four-and-five-star reviews built over time is more credible than a wall of perfect fives collected the moment each walk ended. We think your clients will trust it more. We think you'll be proud of it more.

Your star rating average exports with your data. Your written reviews export with your data. Your reputation belongs to you — built fairly, protected honestly, and yours to take wherever you go.

Your data, anytime — in seconds

Here's something no other platform in this industry offers: a complete, instant download of everything in your account. Your clients. Their pets. Every visit. Every invoice. Every payment. Downloaded to your computer in seconds, anytime, for free, on every plan.

The major platforms make this effectively impossible. A formal privacy request can take 30 to 45 days, requires a written submission, and returns data in formats that weren't designed to be imported anywhere else. Some platforms offer no data export at all — no download, no dashboard, no way to take your own business history with you. If one of those platforms disappears tomorrow — and there are real reasons to believe some of them might, as their own public financial filings show — their providers lose everything they built there.

We built data export into Leashkin from day one because we believe your business records belong to you, not to us. You don't need our permission to access them. You don't need to submit a request and wait six weeks. You click a button and your data is in your hands in under a minute.

This matters most when something goes wrong — a platform shuts down, a price changes, you decide to move on. When that day comes, your data is already on your own computer. Not locked inside a system you can no longer access.

We think every platform should work this way. Almost none of them do.

Why feedback lives inside the app

Most software companies bury a feedback link in a footer. They run quarterly surveys. They form focus groups with providers they've already selected. Then they announce a roadmap driven by whatever their investors think the market wants.

We don't do it that way.

Feedback is built directly into your dashboard and your clients' portal. When something isn't working — a button that's in the wrong place, a feature that's missing, a workflow that wastes your time — you tell us from inside the app in about thirty seconds. When your clients experience something confusing in their portal, they can flag it directly, and you see it first.

We read every submission. We track patterns across all providers on the platform. When five different providers flag the same thing in the same week, that goes to the top of our build queue. Not because five providers are a statistical sample — but because five real people running real businesses told us something matters. That's enough.

Your feedback doesn't go to a product manager who filters it through a prioritization framework. It goes to the people building Leashkin, who are also the people who need Leashkin to work well in order to keep you subscribed.

That's not altruism. It's alignment. Your success and our success point in exactly the same direction. We built the feedback system to make sure we never forget that.

When you leave — and why we ask

If you cancel, we ask two questions before you go. Not to guilt you. Not to make cancellation harder. Because the providers who leave teach us more than the ones who stay.

If ten people cancel because the same feature is missing, we build it. If the pricing is wrong for where someone's business is, that's a real signal. We'd rather know the truth and get better than lose you quietly and keep making the same mistakes.

And before you go, we make it easy to take everything with you — your full client list, visit history, and invoice records, downloaded in seconds. Because that's how we've always worked, and canceling doesn't change it.

Your answers go directly to the people building Leashkin. We read every one.

The deal, plainly stated

The major platforms in this industry take 20% to 40% of everything you earn, own your clients, own your reviews, and make it nearly impossible to take your own data when you leave. Some of them are in serious financial trouble. The commission keeps getting paid right up until the day they stop working.

Leashkin charges a flat monthly fee, never takes a cut of your earnings, gives you full control over how processing fees are handled, and lets you download everything you've ever put in with one click — whether you're staying or leaving.

We make money when you find Leashkin worth keeping. That's the whole model. We think it's a better deal. We think you do too.