Custom pet care software in Baltimore: two prices for the same software

The woman who made me write this article runs a boarding kennel with a grooming room bolted onto the side of it, about fifteen minutes north of the harbor. She called us because her vaccination reminders were going out of a spreadsheet and her booking system was going out of a different spreadsheet, and the two spreadsheets disagreed about eleven dogs.

We spent about four minutes on the spreadsheets. Then she mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had switched card processors in the spring and her software bill had gone up by thirty dollars a month as a result. Not the processing bill. The software bill. The subscription she had been paying for two years without touching quietly reverted to a higher number the month she stopped letting the platform take her cards.

She did not think this was interesting. She thought it was annoying. I thought it was the whole article, because it is the cleanest example I have found of something this series keeps tripping over: the number the vendor advertises is not the number the vendor is selling. In parking, the unit on the invoice had no relationship to the unit in the tax code. In collision repair, the state added up the shop’s own estimate differently than the shop did. Here it is simpler and, honestly, cheekier. The price on the pricing page is a price for a bundle, and the second half of the bundle has no price on it at all.

“I understood I was paying them for the software. I did not understand I was also paying them for the software with my card volume.”

So let me do this in order. First who is actually in this trade around Baltimore, because the picture in most people’s heads — a couple of big suburban resorts and a PetSmart grooming counter — is wrong and the Census Bureau will say so. Then what ten platforms actually charge, checked one page at a time on a single day. Then the arithmetic on the part they will not print. Then Maryland, which is where this gets genuinely specific and where a national product cannot help you. Then what we would build, what it costs, and the fairly long list of situations in which you should not call us.

The facilities this is actually about

The Census Bureau counts this trade under NAICS 812910, Pet Care (Except Veterinary) Services — boarding kennels, dog daycares, grooming salons, pet sitters, trainers, the lot. I pulled the 2023 County Business Patterns county file and added it up myself, because the API returns nothing useful at county level and the aggregator sites all quote each other.

Maryland has 409 pet care establishments with paid employees, employing 3,472 people against an annual payroll of $97.1 million. That is the entire state. For scale, the same Census file counts 636 offices of lawyers in Montgomery County alone — half again as many law offices in one suburban county as there are pet care businesses with a payroll in all twenty‑four Maryland jurisdictions.

Two things fall out of that table that matter for software. The first is that Anne Arundel County has almost three times as many of these businesses as Baltimore City does, and Baltimore County has more than twice as many. A “Baltimore” pet care article is really an article about the ring. That is not a throwaway observation, because as you will see further down, the county line is where the rules change — and Anne Arundel, the biggest market in the metro, has the most demanding ones.

The second is the size distribution. Of the twenty‑three establishments the Bureau counts in Baltimore City, twelve have fewer than five employees and not one has twenty or more. This is a trade of owner‑operators with a handful of staff, which is exactly the shape of business that gets hurt by a pricing model with a hidden second half, because there is nobody in the building whose job is to read the second half.

And the usual County Business Patterns caveat matters more here than in most trades: CBP counts only establishments with paid employees. Every solo mobile groomer working out of a van, every one‑person salon, every person who boards four dogs in a converted garage is invisible in that 409. There are certainly several times as many operators in Maryland as there are establishments with a payroll. You can see the software industry pricing for exactly that shadow population — MoeGo’s entry plan is $49 a month for a single team member and one van, which is not a plan you build unless a lot of your market is one person.

Two prices for the same software

Here is the sweep. Ten platforms, requested one URL at a time on 23 August 2026, no aggregators, no review sites, no “starting at” figures lifted from a comparison table written in 2021. Where a company publishes nothing, the row says so, because “PetExec costs about $105” is a sentence that exists on nine websites and on none of PetExec’s.

Take the two 404s first, because they are the smallest finding and the easiest to check. PetExec is one of the two or three names that come up in every kennel‑software conversation in this country, and it has no pricing page. Not a gated one, not a “contact us” page — the URL is a 404. ProPet’s pricing URL issues a permanent redirect to the front door. Every “PetExec starts at $105” you will read traces back to an aggregator, and the aggregators in this category are the same ones that have been publishing fifteen‑year‑old numbers for legal and nonprofit software. I have no idea what PetExec costs and neither does anyone who has not had the demo call.

Now the actual finding. Look at the fourth column.

Gingr publishes its boarding plan at $179 a month, with a footnote reading that pricing shown is with active Integrated Payments, and at $209 without. That is a thirty‑dollar monthly difference, $360 a year, for a decision that has nothing to do with the software. DaySmart Pet does the same thing but more comprehensively: every one of its four published tiers carries a pair, $29 or $39, $69 or $89, $149 or $169, $199 or $219, with the lower number in each pair contingent on using DaySmart’s payments. On the Premium tier that is $240 a year.

I want to be fair about this, because it is not a scam and it is not unusual. Software companies discount subscriptions against payment volume for a perfectly rational reason: the payments line is more profitable and more durable than the subscription line, so they will trade margin on one to win the other. Restaurant point‑of‑sale has done it for a decade. It is a legitimate commercial structure and it can genuinely be the better deal.

The problem is narrower and it is this: neither company publishes the rate. You are being offered a discount on a known number in exchange for accepting an unknown one, and the unknown one is roughly eight times larger.

The number nobody prints

One company in the category publishes a straight, complete, readable card rate, and it is MoeGo, in its own help center rather than on its pricing page. The wording is theirs:

“2.9% plus 50 cents with a card present for card reader, tap to pay · 3.4% plus 30 cents without a card present for the online invoice, card on file, enter card info”

Credit where it is due — that is more transparency than the rest of the category manages, and I would rather do business with a company that prints a high number than one that prints no number. But it is a high number, and the shape of it is unusual enough to be worth an arithmetic table, because fifty cents is an enormous fixed component for a trade whose typical transaction is a day of daycare.

Work out the effective percentage at each ticket size and the two rates behave very differently:

The two lines cross at exactly forty dollars. Below forty dollars, the card‑not‑present rate is the cheaper of the two, which inverts the advice every payments blog on the internet gives you. Above forty dollars, normal service resumes. And a day of dog daycare in this metro is thirty‑something dollars.

So a facility whose revenue is mostly boarding stays is being charged something close to three percent, which is defensible. A facility whose revenue is mostly daycare is being charged something closer to four and a quarter, and is being charged more for tapping the card at the counter than for running the card on file overnight. I doubt anyone designed that on purpose. It is what happens when a flat per‑transaction fee meets a business model that sells a small thing two hundred times a month.

Everyone else is quieter. Gingr describes its payments as interchange‑plus — a genuinely good structure, in that you see the wholesale cost and the markup separately — but does not publish the plus, which is the only part it controls. Its documentation does publish two other numbers worth knowing: a $4.50 flat convenience fee that can be applied to non‑recurring card‑not‑present transactions, and a surcharge of up to 3% that can be automatically applied to eligible credit card transactions. DaySmart Pet publishes no rate at all and offers instead to match or lower whatever you are paying now — a competitive promise rather than a price, and one you cannot evaluate before signing.

What the discount is actually worth

Here is the arithmetic I wish somebody had put in front of the woman with the two spreadsheets before she signed anything.

Gingr’s payments discount is $30 a month, so $360 a year. A processing rate is a percentage of your card volume. So the question — the only question — is: how much worse can the bundled rate be before the discount stops paying for it?

Seven hundredths of a percentage point. That is the entire margin of error on a half‑million‑dollar business. A rate that is worse by seven hundredths of one percent — a difference so small that no salesperson would even frame it as a difference — wipes out the whole discount. Anything worse than that and you are paying the platform for the privilege of a lower invoice.

Put real numbers on a real shape of business. Take a composite facility that looks like several we have talked to around the Beltway: 24 boarding runs, a daycare room that averages twenty dogs a day, one grooming table. Boarding does 4,800 dog‑nights a year at about $50; daycare does roughly 5,000 dog‑days sold as a mix of ten‑day passes and singles; grooming does 1,800 appointments at about $75; the counter sells $15,000 of food and shampoo. Call it $570,000 of revenue, of which $530,000 comes in on cards across about 5,850 transactions — an average ticket of just over ninety dollars, because the packages and the boarding stays pull it up.

Three thousand and forty dollars a year, to save three hundred and sixty. And notice the other proportion in that table, which is the one I would actually put on a whiteboard: the subscription is about a tenth of what the software company collects from you. $2,148 of subscription against $18,295 of processing. Everybody in this trade shops the first number and nobody shops the second, and the second is eight and a half times bigger.

Two honest caveats on that table, because it would be easy to over‑read it. The rates are illustrative: Gingr does not publish one, so I have used MoeGo’s published card‑present rate as the bundled figure and a routine independent card‑present rate as the alternative. Gingr’s interchange‑plus pricing might well come in below 2.9% + 50¢ for a business with this mix — I hope it does. The point is not the exact figures, it is that you cannot do this arithmetic at all until somebody gives you the rate, and the discount is designed to be accepted before that happens. The second caveat: a genuinely competitive bundled rate is a good deal, and several operators we have spoken to are on one. Ask for it in writing, with the per‑transaction cents spelled out and the card‑not‑present rate beside it, and then run the table above on your own numbers. It takes ten minutes.

The other meters, and the one that is genuinely fair

Payments is the big one, but it is not the only place the advertised price stops being the price. There are four other meters running in this category and they meter four completely different things, which is why comparing two quotes side by side is close to impossible.

Text messages. Every platform in the trade sends vaccination reminders, appointment confirmations and “your dog is ready” texts, and every platform charges for them differently. DaySmart Pet includes an allowance that scales with the tier — 500 messages on Basic up to 5,000 on the unpublished top tier — and prices two‑way texting and text marketing as separate “contact us” add‑ons. MoeGo includes 200 messages per van on Basic and 900 on the plans above it. Kennel Connection charges a flat $50 a month for unlimited two‑way SMS, which is the clearest deal in the category if you send a lot and the worst if you send a little. Pawfinity charges per message on a sliding scale: 5¢ under 500 messages, 4.5¢ from 501 to 1,000, 4¢ from 1,001 to 1,500 and 3.5¢ above that, plus a carrier surcharge on US numbers. A 24‑run facility texting every confirmation, reminder and ready‑for‑pickup will comfortably clear a thousand messages a month, so on Pawfinity that is roughly $40–$45 a month of texting sitting on top of a $60 subscription. The messages are not a feature. They are a second product.

Modules. DaySmart Pet charges $25 a month each for the daycare calendar and the boarding calendar. Read that again, because it is easy to skim: if you run daycare and boarding — which is to say, if you are a boarding and daycare business — the two calendars you exist to operate cost $50 a month on top of the tier. Website builder is $15, reputation management is $49. Kennel Connection prices its VoIP module at “contact for pricing”. Gingr bundles more of this into the base tier than most, which is a point in its favor and part of why its base tier is higher.

Storage. This is my favorite one, and I mean that with a certain amount of teeth. Pawfinity charges $5 a month for secure document storage under 5 GB, then $0.80 per gigabyte from 5 to 10 GB and $0.60 per gigabyte above that. Document storage, in this trade, means the vaccination certificates. The one artifact Maryland law actually requires you to be able to produce, which arrives as a photograph of a piece of paper taken on a customer’s phone at eleven o’clock at night, is metered by the gigabyte. A facility with six hundred active dogs, three certificates each, photographed rather than scanned, is into the second pricing band without doing anything wrong.

People. Two products meter staff, and they do it in the same unusual way. Time To Pet’s Team plan is $40 a month plus $16 per active staff member, and Scout’s is $39 plus $18 per active staff member ($33 plus $15 if you pay annually). What makes this interesting is the definition. Time To Pet’s own documentation says an active staff member is “any staff member who has at least one scheduled service during the billing period,” that office managers and administrators are always counted, and that the count is calculated automatically at the end of each billing period, with the consequence that — in their words — “your costs will also be significantly lower during the slow months!”

I have read a lot of pricing pages for this series and that is the fairest meter I have come across in any trade. Pet care is violently seasonal: Thanksgiving through New Year and the last three weeks of July will do a quarter of a boarding kennel’s year, and February will do almost nothing. A per‑seat license that keeps charging for the eleven part‑timers you use at Christmas and not in February is a tax on seasonality. A meter that empties out in February is not. If you run a pet‑sitting or walking operation with a big casual roster, Time To Pet’s structure is worth the switch on the metering alone, and I would say so on a call even though it is not something we would build.

So: five meters. Subscription, payments, messages, modules, storage, and for two vendors, people. Six. The advertised number covers one of them.

The part no national platform models

Everything above is arithmetic, and arithmetic is portable — it is as true in Boise as it is in Baltimore. This section is not. This is the layer where a national product stops being able to help you, and it is the reason we keep writing these articles one trade and one state at a time.

The certificate is a specific document, not a checkbox

Every pet care platform on the market advertises “vaccination tracking.” What that means in practice is a field for a date and a place to attach a photo, with an alert when the date passes. That is a reasonable product decision and it is not what Maryland asks for.

COMAR 10.06.02.10 requires that an owner or custodian have a dog, cat or ferret adequately vaccinated against rabies by the time the animal is four months old. The proof is not generic. Section D(1) provides that a vaccine manufacturer shall issue the official National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians (NASPHV) Form 51, Rabies Vaccination Certificate, or an equivalent form, and D(3) sets out what a Maryland‑licensed veterinarian must complete on it: the vaccine manufacturer and product details, the vaccination date, the veterinarian’s credentials, the owner’s information, the rabies tag number, and the animal’s species, age, weight, predominant breed and color.

Read that list as a data model rather than as a regulation and something jumps out. Four of those fields — species, age, weight, predominant breed — are fields your booking system already has, entered separately, by a different person, at a different time, and never reconciled against the certificate. When a health officer asks you to produce the certificate for the brindle boxer in run 14, the question is not whether you have a date in a box. It is whether the document you have on file is the document that describes the dog in the run.

There is a wrinkle in subsection B(2) worth knowing, because it is the kind of thing that gets misquoted. The duty to present certificates on request from the local health officer, the Public Health Veterinarian or the local animal control authority falls on kennel operators except for a kennel licensed by the local animal control authority as a boarding kennel. A licensed boarding kennel is carved out of that particular state‑level demand. Do not read that as relief. It is a carve‑out from one sentence in one chapter of COMAR, and what fills the space is the county license — which, as you will see in a moment, has conditions of its own and an inspector attached.

The bite report does not go to your software

If you run a daycare play group you will eventually have an incident. Not often, not usually serious, and mostly dog‑on‑dog — but a handler gets caught between two dogs sooner or later, and at that moment a specific legal sequence starts that has nothing to do with the incident note in your booking platform.

COMAR 10.06.02.05 requires a person having knowledge of an individual’s bite from, or non‑bite contact with, an animal to report it immediately, by telephone or in person, to the local police or sheriff’s department — except in Frederick County, where the report goes to the county animal control center. The police or sheriff then complete the Maryland Animal‑Bite Report and Rabies Quarantine Agreement Form supplied by the Department, make that report available to the local health officer within 24 hours, and enforce the orders of the local health officer and the Public Health Veterinarian. The health officer, in turn, reports the number of bite and non‑bite contacts to the Public Health Veterinarian monthly. A biting animal is quarantined for at least ten days, or for whatever period the Public Health Veterinarian specifies.

Three things about that chain matter to anybody building or buying software for this trade.

First, the commonly repeated version of this rule — “you have 24 hours to report a bite to the health department” — is wrong twice over. The report is immediate, not within 24 hours, and it goes to the police, not the health department. The 24 hours is the police department’s deadline for getting the completed form to the health officer. If your staff handbook says otherwise, fix the handbook.

Second, the report is a state form completed by somebody else. No product in this category generates it, and none should pretend to. What your system can do — and what none of them does — is put the answer to the follow‑up question in one place before it is asked. The follow‑up question is always the same: was that animal’s rabies vaccination current on that date? Which is a question about a document, an effective date and an expiry date, joined to an incident timestamp. Three tables. Nobody joins them.

Third — and this is the commercial reason to care rather than the compliance reason — Maryland law is unusually pointed about dogs. Under Md. Code, Courts and Judicial Proceedings §3‑1901, enacted in 2014, evidence that a dog caused personal injury or death creates a rebuttable presumption that the owner knew or should have known that the dog had vicious or dangerous propensities, and in a jury trial the judge may not rule that the presumption has been rebutted before the verdict comes back. The statute addresses owners; a boarding facility is not the owner. But the facility is the party that had the animal, chose the play group, set the staffing and wrote — or did not write — the record of what happened. Whatever the eventual legal posture, the only asset you have in that conversation is your own contemporaneous record, and “incident logged 3:42 p.m., see note” is not one.

“Every platform sells me a vaccination reminder. Not one of them can tell me who was in the yard.”

An attendant for each animal while it is being groomed

Maryland does not license groomers. There is no state board, no examination, no continuing education. Which means the entire regulatory regime for grooming in this metro is county law, and it changes when you cross a road.

Anne Arundel County — the largest pet care market in the metro, remember, with sixty‑one establishments to Baltimore City’s twenty‑three — requires a grooming parlor license under County Code Article 12, §4‑707. The fee is $60 a year and the parlor is subject to annual inspection. Sixty dollars is nothing. The inspection is not nothing, because §4‑805 sets out what the inspector is looking at: water at a minimum of 180°F for washing and disinfecting cages or another approved method; cages of nonporous material large enough for each animal to stand up, turn around and stretch to full length, with clean dry bedding; fresh water in a secured, tip‑proof, daily‑cleaned vessel; daily food free of visible contamination; adequate ventilation and a room temperature healthful for each species; and, last on the list:

“an attendant for each animal while it is being groomed.”

That single clause is the most interesting sentence I found in three days of reading, because it is a staffing ratio written into county law, and it is a ratio of one to one.

Think about what grooming software is built to do. Every scheduling product in the category — MoeGo, Gingr’s Spa plan, DaySmart, Pawfinity, all of them — is designed around overlapping appointments, because overlap is where a grooming salon’s margin comes from. You bathe the labrador, put it in a drying box, start the schnauzer, come back to the labrador. The whole point of the calendar view is to let one groomer stack three dogs across a two‑hour window. That is the product. That is what you are buying.

And in Anne Arundel County the code says an attendant for each animal while it is being groomed. Now, “being groomed” is doing real work in that sentence and I am not going to pretend it resolves cleanly — a dog in a drying box is arguably not being groomed, and I am a software person, not your lawyer. But that ambiguity is exactly the point. Every scheduling decision a groomer in Millersville or Severna Park makes is a judgment call against a clause, made forty times a week, in a calendar that has no concept that the clause exists. The software will happily book a state of the world the county might not accept, and it will never once ask.

The rest of the Anne Arundel license mechanics are worth having in one place, because they are the sort of thing that gets discovered late. Licenses run to 30 June regardless of when you got yours and must be renewed within 90 days after 30 June, with a $25 late fee for missing the initial application or the renewal (§4‑711). The Agency, the Health Officer or the Health Officer’s representative may revoke or suspend, and on revocation the licensee shall immediately cease all operations and activities authorized by the license — there is no wind‑down period for the dogs already in the building. Violations sit at Class E: $50 first, $100 second, $500 third and subsequent. And §4‑717 puts the burden of proof of licensing on the owner, not on the county, which is a quietly important sentence: it is your job to be able to produce the paperwork, on the day, on request.

Three jurisdictions, three regimes, one metro

Cross the county line and it all changes.

Baltimore City issues a single facility or commercial license that covers a veterinary hospital, a groomer, a shelter or a stable. The application fee is $250, and the process does not begin with a form — it begins with telephoning the Office of Animal Control to schedule a meeting. You bring the application, an affidavit certifying that the applicant, owner, operator, agent and employees have never been convicted of animal abuse, cruelty or neglect, your lease if you are a lessee, written permission from the property owner if you rent, and every relevant Maryland license, city zoning permit, variance, building permit and trade permit. The city also repealed its multi‑pet permit in December 2012, on the explicit reasoning that the requirement was pushing people away from licensing their animals at all — which is a rather more thoughtful piece of regulatory design than it is usually given credit for.

Baltimore County takes a different approach again, and it is a definitional one. County Code Article 12 defines a holding facility as “any animal shelter, commercial kennel, commercial stable, grooming parlor, humane animal shelter, or pet shop,” and separately defines a commercial kennel as an animal boarding place or establishment for “the boarding, grooming, sale, or training of dogs or cats for which a fee is charged.” Read those two together. A business that boards dogs and grooms them — which is most of the businesses in this article — satisfies the grooming parlor definition and the commercial kennel definition, and both are holding facilities. Enforcement sits with the Animal Services Division of the Health Department.

So a small chain with three sites — one in Canton, one in Towson, one in Severna Park — is running three different licensing regimes with three different renewal calendars, three different inspecting authorities and, in one of them, a one‑to‑one attendant clause that shapes how the calendar may be filled. There is no setting in any product on the market for that. There is not even a field for which county a location is in that does anything.

The seven‑to‑one problem, which is also the opportunity

Before the price list, one more number, because it reframes everything above and it is the single strongest commercial argument in this trade.

The American Pet Products Association put United States pet spending at $158 billion in 2025, projected to reach $165 billion in 2026. Break the 2025 figure apart and it goes like this: $68.3 billion on food and treats, $34.4 billion on supplies, live animals and over‑the‑counter medications, $41 billion on veterinary care and products, and $14.3 billion on everything else — which is to say boarding, grooming, training, pet sitting, walking and insurance, all of it, combined.

So the entire category this article is about, nationally, is $14.3 billion. And the products those same customers buy for those same animals are $102.7 billion. Americans spend roughly seven dollars on pet products for every dollar they spend on pet services.

Now consider who has the relationship. A boarding kennel sees the same dog four times a year for a week at a time. A daycare sees it three mornings a week, fifty weeks a year. A grooming salon sees it every six to eight weeks for its entire life, and the groomer will notice a coat change before the owner does. These businesses have a contact frequency that a pet food retailer would commit crimes for, and they have something better than frequency: they have the record. Weight, breed, age, coat type, diet, feeding schedule, allergy notes, the brand the owner brings in a ziplock bag with the dog’s name written on it in marker. All of it already written down, because the boarding record required it.

And then the customer goes home and orders the food from Chewy.

In every facility we have looked at, counter retail runs at two to three percent of revenue — a shelf of leashes behind the desk, a few bags of the food they use in‑house, some shampoo. On our composite facility that is $15,000 out of $570,000. Nobody thinks of it as a business line. It is treated as a convenience for customers who forgot something, which is exactly what it looks like when the only tool you have is a point‑of‑sale drawer at a counter that is staffed from seven to six.

Here is the arithmetic that makes the case. Move retail from 2.6% of revenue to 8% — not an aggressive target on a customer base you already see weekly, and still nowhere near the national ratio — and you add about $30,600 of turnover. At a 40% gross margin that is $12,240 of margin a year, against a fixed‑price online store that costs $6,000 once. Payback is under six months, and after that it compounds, because a repeat food order is the most predictable revenue in retail.

To be scrupulous: several platforms in the sweep list “retail management” or “retail sales” among their features, and Gingr explicitly includes retail sales under its integrated payments. That is a till. It rings up a bag of food when somebody is standing in front of it. It is not a store your customer can buy from at nine o’clock on a Sunday night when they notice the bin is nearly empty, it does not know that the labrador in run 14 eats about three quarters of a pound a day and therefore finishes a 30‑pound bag in forty days, and it will not put the reorder in front of the owner on day thirty‑six. That is not a criticism of the till. It is a different product, and nobody in this category is selling it.

What custom actually costs

We publish our prices, which after a vendor sweep that produced two 404s feels almost combative. Here they are against the problem I have just described.

One honest note on tax, since it applies to our invoice as much as to anybody’s. Since 1 July 2025, Maryland taxes data and information technology services under NAICS 518, 519 and 5415, and software publishing under NAICS 5132, at 3% — Tax‑General §11‑101(m)(14) and (15). Pet care services are not on the enumerated list, so the state taxes the boarding you sell at nothing and the software you buy to run it at three percent. On a $2,148 Gingr subscription that is about $64 a year, which is not a number worth a paragraph in most trades and I am not going to pretend otherwise here. It applies to a fixed‑price build from us too: 3% on $6,000 is $180.

What we would actually build

Almost everything above reduces to one design decision, and it is the same one every time: these systems store answers where they should store the facts that produce answers.

A vaccination is not a date field, it is a document — issuer, veterinarian, product, lot, administration date, expiry date, tag number, and the animal it describes — and the animal it describes is a separate assertion from the animal in your booking, which is precisely why the two need to be reconciled rather than conflated. A grooming appointment is not a block on a calendar, it is a sequence of phases with different attendance requirements, because bathing and drying and finishing are not the same activity and one county has written a rule that only bites on one of them. Capacity is not a number, it is a function of runs, size classes, temperament pairings and, in a daycare room, of the staffing rule that applies in the jurisdiction the room is in. An incident is not a note, it is an event with a cast — which animals were present, which handler, which room, what time — because that is the only form in which it can answer a question asked six months later by somebody who is not friendly. And a package or a membership is not revenue, it is a liability: the customer has paid for ten days and used four, and the six you owe them are a debt, not a sale.

Do that and a lot of things stop being work. The certificate expiry report writes itself and can be run against tomorrow’s arrivals instead of against the whole database. The inspection folder for Anne Arundel assembles itself in an afternoon rather than a weekend. The store knows what each dog eats and how fast, so the reorder goes out on day thirty‑one without anybody remembering. The seasonal staffing plan can be checked against the attendant rule before the schedule is published rather than after an inspector reads it. And the payments rate becomes a thing you shop annually, like insurance, instead of a thing bundled into a subscription discount you accepted in 2023.

None of this is exotic engineering. It is perhaps a dozen tables, a documents table with dates on it, and the discipline to derive rather than store. It is unexotic in exactly the way good operational software usually is.

When you should not call us

I would rather say this now than at the end of a call.

• You are a solo groomer or a one‑van operation. Keep renting. MoeGo at $49 or Pawfinity at $60 is a genuinely good deal at your size, and no build we could do pays that back. Spend the money on a second dryer.
• Your platform works and your processing rate is competitive. Then you have already done the hard part. Get the rate in writing at renewal, check it against the tables above once a year, and go back to running the business.
• Your problem is that the phone rings during grooms. That is a staffing and a booking‑funnel problem, and online booking in the product you already pay for will fix most of it. Turn it on before you commission anything.
• You want to be found. A custom system will not bring you customers. If the real issue is that nobody in Hampden knows you exist, that is marketing, and the money goes further there first.

Where custom does earn its keep is narrower and easier to test: you run more than one site, or one site with more than one service line; your card volume is over about $400,000 a year; you have package or membership balances you cannot state to the dollar; you are in a jurisdiction whose rules actually shape your schedule; and you have a customer list you have never sold a bag of food to. If four of those five are true, the case usually makes itself on the payments line and the store, before we even get to the operations.

How we work

We are a small studio and we are deliberate about it. You talk to the people writing the code — there is no account manager between you and the build. The price is fixed and public before we start, you pay half to begin and the balance when it ships, and the source code, the repositories, the keys and every account are yours at the end. We build on a deliberately boring stack, React and TypeScript over Node and Postgres with Stripe for payments, deployed on infrastructure you own, so that any competent developer can pick it up after we hand it over. If you want to see what that looks like before you talk to us, the demos are real applications rather than screenshots, and the pricing page has the numbers on it.

And if the honest answer on the call is “keep your subscription, renegotiate your rate and put a store on the front of it,” that is what you will hear. We have said a version of it to a florist, a towing company and two dental practices this year.

Questions we get from pet care owners

How much does dog boarding, daycare and grooming software cost in 2026?

Between $25 and $209 a month per location for the platforms that publish a figure, and we could not find one for the rest. Checked on 23 August 2026: Gingr lists Spa at $109, Play at $169 and Stay at $179 with its Integrated Payments or $209 without, with Enterprise quote‑only. DaySmart Pet lists Basic $29 or $39, Deluxe $69 or $89, Deluxe Growth $149 or $169 and Premium $199 or $219 — the lower number in each pair applying only if you use its payments — plus $25 a month each for the daycare and boarding calendars. Pawfinity lists Royal at $110, Groom & Train at $60 and Stay & Play at $60. Kennel Connection lists KC Cloud and Hybrid at $149, Desktop from $89, Hello‑Groom at $69 and two‑way SMS at $50. Revelation Pets lists Silver at $60 and Gold at $77. MoeGo lists Basic at $49, Growth at $99 per van and Ultimate at $159 per van. Time To Pet lists Lite $25, Solo $50, Facility $79 and Team at $40 plus $16 per active staff member. Scout lists $39, or $33 billed annually, plus $18 per active staff member. PetExec has no pricing page at all — its pricing URL returned a 404 when we requested it — and ProPet redirects its pricing URL to the homepage.

Why do Gingr and DaySmart Pet show two different prices for the same plan?

Because the lower number is conditional on using the vendor’s own card processing. Gingr’s Stay plan is $179 a month with active Integrated Payments and $209 without — $30 a month, $360 a year — and the page carries the footnote that pricing shown is with active Integrated Payments. DaySmart Pet prints the same structure on all four published tiers, a $10 to $20 monthly gap. Neither publishes the processing rate the discount is tied to. That matters because the processing line dwarfs the subscription: on a facility taking $530,000 a year on cards across 5,850 transactions, card processing at a published pet‑care rate is roughly $18,300 a year against a $2,148 subscription. The discount is about 2% of the bill it is attached to, and a rate premium of only 0.07 of a percentage point cancels it entirely.

What card processing rate do pet care software platforms charge?

Almost none of them will say. The clearest published figures we found on 23 August 2026 are MoeGo’s, in its own help center: 2.9% plus 50¢ with a card present for card reader and tap to pay, and 3.4% plus 30¢ without a card present for online invoices, cards on file and manually entered cards. Those two rates cross at a ticket of exactly $40: below $40 the card‑not‑present rate is the cheaper of the two, which inverts the usual advice, and a $36 daycare day sits below the line. Gingr describes its payments as interchange‑plus without publishing the plus, and separately documents a $4.50 convenience fee on non‑recurring card‑not‑present transactions and a configurable surcharge of up to 3%. DaySmart Pet publishes no rate and offers instead to match or lower your existing fees. Ask for the rate in writing, with the per‑transaction cents, before you accept any subscription discount tied to it.

Does Maryland require a license to run a dog grooming or boarding business?

Maryland does not license groomers at state level, so the whole regime is local and it changes at the county line. In Anne Arundel County a grooming parlor license is required under County Code Article 12, §4‑707, costs $60 a year, and the parlor is subject to annual inspection; §4‑805 sets the standards, including 180°F wash water or an approved alternative, nonporous cages sized so an animal can stand, turn and stretch, adequate ventilation, a healthful room temperature for each species, and an attendant for each animal while it is being groomed. Licenses run to 30 June and must be renewed within 90 days after that date, with a $25 late fee. In Baltimore City, a facility or commercial license covers a groomer, shelter or veterinary hospital, carries a $250 application fee, and the process starts by telephoning the Office of Animal Control to schedule a meeting. Baltimore County licenses a “holding facility” — a defined term that includes a commercial kennel and a grooming parlor — and defines a commercial kennel to include boarding, grooming, sale or training for a fee, so one business can meet two definitions at once.

What rabies records does a Maryland boarding kennel have to keep?

Under COMAR 10.06.02.10, an owner or custodian must have a dog, cat or ferret adequately vaccinated against rabies by the time the animal is four months old, and the proof is a specific document: the official NASPHV Form 51 Rabies Vaccination Certificate, issued by the vaccine manufacturer, or an equivalent form, completed and signed by a Maryland‑licensed veterinarian. The certificate carries the animal’s species, age, weight, predominant breed and color, the vaccine manufacturer and product details, the vaccination date, the tag number and the veterinarian’s credentials. Except for a kennel licensed by the local animal control authority as a boarding kennel, a kennel operator must present a valid certificate for each animal four months or older on request from the local health officer, the Public Health Veterinarian or the local animal control authority. In practice this means the certificate, not a checkbox in your booking system, is the thing that has to exist — and it has to describe the dog that is actually in the run.

What do I have to do if a dog bites someone at my daycare in Maryland?

COMAR 10.06.02.05 requires a person with knowledge of a bite or non‑bite contact with an animal to report it immediately, by telephone or in person, to the local police or sheriff’s department — except in Frederick County, where the report goes to the county animal control center. The police or sheriff then complete the Maryland Animal‑Bite Report and Rabies Quarantine Agreement Form supplied by the Department, make it available to the local health officer within 24 hours, and enforce the orders of the local health officer and the Public Health Veterinarian; the health officer reports counts to the Public Health Veterinarian monthly. A biting animal is quarantined for at least ten days, or a period set by the Public Health Veterinarian. Note what is not in that sequence: your software. The incident note in your booking platform is not the report, and the question you will be asked afterwards is whether the animal’s rabies vaccination was current on that date — which is a question about a document.

Is custom pet care software cheaper than Gingr, PetExec or MoeGo?

Not as a straight replacement, and we will say so on the call. A boarding and grooming platform at $150 to $210 a month is roughly $2,000 a year, and no honest build pays that back by replacing it. The arithmetic changes when you look at the lines beside the subscription. On a facility taking $530,000 a year on cards, moving from a 2.9% + 50¢ rate to a 2.7% + 10¢ merchant account saves about $3,400 a year — more than eight times the payments discount the platform offered you for staying. Lifting counter retail from three percent of revenue to eight percent, on a customer list that already exists, is worth another $30,000 of turnover. Our fixed prices are a $3,500 Prototype Sprint, an online store from $6,000 and a custom app or operations system from $12,000, so the case is usually made on the payments line and the store, not on the subscription.

Should a Baltimore boarding or grooming business build its own online store?

This is the strongest single argument in the trade. The American Pet Products Association put US pet spending at $158 billion in 2025 and projected $165 billion for 2026, of which food and treats were $68.3 billion and supplies, live animals and over‑the‑counter medications were $34.4 billion, while boarding, grooming, training, sitting, walking and insurance together were $14.3 billion. Americans spend roughly seven dollars on pet products for every dollar on pet services. A boarding kennel or grooming salon sees the same dog every week or every month, and already records its weight, breed, coat type, diet and allergy notes because the boarding record requires them; no other retailer selling that customer food knows any of it. Most facilities capture two to three percent of revenue in counter retail. Moving that to eight percent on a $570,000 business is about $30,600 of additional turnover, which at a 40% gross margin repays a $6,000 online store in under six months.

Method and sources. Vendor pricing was read directly from each company’s own published pages and help documentation on 23 August 2026; where a URL returned a 404 or redirected away, we have said so rather than quoting an aggregator, and prices change without notice. MoeGo’s processing rates are quoted verbatim from MoeGo’s help center; Gingr’s convenience fee and surcharge figures come from Gingr’s own support documentation. Establishment, employment and payroll figures are from the US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 county file, NAICS 812910, extracted and totalled by us; CBP counts only establishments with paid employees, so solo operators and single‑van groomers are excluded. Industry spending figures are the American Pet Products Association’s 2026 State of the Industry Report. Regulatory citations are to COMAR 10.06.02.05 and 10.06.02.10, Md. Code, Courts and Judicial Proceedings §3‑1901, Anne Arundel County Code Article 12 §§4‑707, 4‑711, 4‑717 and 4‑805, Baltimore County Code Article 12 §12‑1‑101, and Baltimore City’s published animal permit requirements. The composite facility is ours, built from the shapes of businesses we have talked to, and is illustrative rather than a real client. Nothing here is legal, tax or veterinary advice — verify your own position with Anne Arundel County Animal Services, the Baltimore City Office of Animal Control, the Baltimore County Animal Services Division, your local health officer or your own advisers before relying on any of it.