· 6 minute read
What per-seat pricing really costs a pet sitting company
The sticker price is not the problem. The problem is what per-seat pricing does to the decision to hire, in a business where the only way to grow is to hire.
A dog walking company grows in exactly one way: more sitters covering more visits. There is no other lever. You cannot serve forty more clients a week by working harder, because the hours are already spoken for.
So when your operations software charges for every active staff member, it has priced the one thing your growth depends on.
The math at a normal size
Take a company with six people: an owner, an office manager and four sitters. Time To Pet’s Team plan is $40 a month plus $16 for every active user, and owners and office managers count, so there is no free seat. That is $40 plus six users at $16, or $136 a month. Texting is not on the pricing page, but per Time To Pet’s help center it is a $10 a month add-on (https://intercom.help/time-to-pet-391e89db40e7/en/articles/11547160-texting-integration), which brings it to $146. (Its help center says staff count as active in months they have a visit assigned. We assume all six do.)
That is $1,752 a year with texting, and the number grows every time you hire. At twelve people it is $232 a month before texting: $2,784 a year.
Porchlight at that size is Team, $79 a month. Flat. $948 a year, or $790 if you pay annually, whether you have two sitters or forty.
To be fair about it: flat pricing is not the cheapest option at every size. Precise Petcare is $45 a month for two to five users and $90 for six to ten, and Pet Sitter Plus is about $76 for six people, against our $79. Porchlight Team is cheaper than Pet Sitter Plus from seven people and cheaper than Precise Petcare from six. Against Time To Pet’s Team plan it is cheaper from three people on (two people is $72 there and $79 here). List prices checked October 2026 from each vendor’s public pricing page.
The part that does not show up on the invoice
The real cost is not the dollars. It is the pause before hiring a seasonal sitter for the holidays, because the software bill goes up on the first of the month and the revenue does not arrive until the fifteenth.
It is deactivating a part-time walker who only covers two shifts a month, and then scrambling when someone gets the flu.
It is the owner who keeps a shared login for two people because a second seat is not worth $16 a month, and then cannot tell who revealed a client’s lockbox code.
Per-seat pricing does not just cost money. It quietly teaches you to run your business smaller and less safely than you otherwise would.
Why we do not do it
Our costs do not actually scale with your headcount in any meaningful way. Another sitter account is a row in a table. Charging for it is a pricing strategy, not a cost recovery.
Porchlight has two plans. Solo is $35 a month for the owner alone, and Team is $79 a month for unlimited staff, the same price for two sitters or forty. Every feature is on both plans, including texting, the importer and the AI assist. There is no per-seat field in our billing code, and we have a test that fails if anyone ever adds one.