Doggos vs. Rover vs. Wag

Doggos.com was first launched in 2017 as a free, educational blog for dog owners...you may have even read some of our articles! 🎉 🦮

Over the years, our very small team has experimented with offering different features, like video chatting with dog trainers during the pandemic, and booking appointments with local businesses like groomers and veterinarians, but what we got the most requests for were consistently dog sitting and boarding services.

However, for a very long time, this just didn't seem like something we could offer.

Rover and Wag (and formerly DogVacay) already existed to solve this problem, and they had huge software teams and hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. They had the users, the marketplace effect, the huge advertising budgets... and it didn't really seem like a little website like doggos.com could compete.

Several months of coding up a new version of doggos later, we invite you to decide!

How we're different

To start, we removed all fees for pet sitters.

On doggos.com, sitters keep 100% of what they earn... so they don't have to artificially raise their prices to offset a platform fee. This approach means sitters can offer their lowest priced services on doggos.com, and still get paid more, because we don't add extra fees on top of that. This drives costs down for everyone, from the dog sitter to the pet owner.

We make money when pet owners use our platform, and by providing optional services at checkout, which we think is much more fair than charging steep fees to both parties just to make more money.

Just take a look at the difference in total fees for yourself:

It didn't feel right to us to charge both parties, and after doing some research, it was clear that the dog sitters using the existing platforms didn't agree, either. Questions & complaints around "Why platform fees are so high?" are all over the internet, and while we fully believe in providing a safe, high-quality experience for our community, we do not think it has to come at such a high cost.

How is it possible to have fees so low?

We've changed how we do sitter onboarding to a much slower, more manual, process, with a lot of contact between the doggos.com team and the sitters we allow onto the platform. This helps cut down on some of the high costs associated with having sitters on the platform who are not knowledgeable enough to be providing pet care, so we don't have to compensate by having high platform fees to offset the inevitable veterinary and legal claims.

The design problem

After removing all fees for dog sitters, and making our fees for dog owners the lowest available of any platform, it was time to take a critical look at design. Starting with the obvious: when booking a dog sitter, do you care more about where your dog will be staying, what their routine will be, and how often you'll get updates... or what your potential dog sitter looks like?

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While we updated our search, it was hard to ignore how focused other platforms were on profile photos, names, and other personal information about the dog sitter. It was as if sitters were being ranked by their liklihood of being young, female, and conventionally attractive, but not on their skill and experience when it came to dogs.

So we changed that, too.

Our profiles put the accomodation at the forefront, like Airbnb, but for dogs.

The first thing you'll see in our search results is images of houses, backyards, and resident pets. We discourage headshots, pictures of children, or other images of people to be used on our search page altogether, and have created an area for dog sitters to add this personal information to the bottom of their page, instead.

We've also added tons of new search options to help dog owners find sitters that fit their situation the best, such as:

• Filters for behavior concerns like reactivity or separation anxiety
• Filters for raw diets, and sitters who can accomodate specialty diet instructions like heating or cooking food
• Filters for licensed businesses
• And so much more...

Our unique dog sitter application process

Not just anyone is allowed to become a sitter on doggos.com.

We believe that our platform provides significant financial benefits to dog sitters, so we take time to get to know every single sitter we allow onto the platform. We do this with our multi-step application process, which includes a background check, drivers license verification, age verification, and a video call with the doggos.com support team, called "The sitter interview."

You can read more about the complete sitter application process here.

If approved, we provide ongoing support to sitters via video calls and seminars to make sure they are not only getting the most out of the platform, but they are providing the safe, reliable care that dog owners expect from us.

Rules for sitters

Doggos enforces certain rules that sitters must abide by to appear in search results. These rules include:

• A maximum of 3 dogs per household (unless the sitter has an active business license)
• Required photos of dogs at drop-off, and before pick-up.
• Address changes must be verified

We created these rules to protect dogs and ensure that the sitters on our platform are providing high-quality care. As dog lovers ourselves, we know it can be tempting to want to say yes to every dog owner who needs a sitter, but we also recognize the problems that not enforcing limits on how many dogs can be hosted at the platform level creates for pet owners and local communities, and we're committed to doing better.

Importantly, we also do not believe that "anyone can be a dog sitter." We focus on finding locals with a proven track record of success as a dog sitter, or licensed businesses only. We believe this is a big part of what makes us different, and we are always working on ways to improve our process for new pet care providers joining the platform, as well as the pet owners who trust us.

Independently owned & operated

Doggos.com is run by a fully remote, US-based team, that is ALWAYS ready to hear your feedback! We're working on getting a community chat going later this year in 2024 so stay tuned! :)

We don't have corporate offices, and we don't believe in product managers. We are committed to staying small, focused, and highly responsive to feedback, and are so excited about our vision to give back control to small businesses and pet owners across the country.

Join us! 🐶❤️

-the doggos.com team