Best Pet Sitting Software for a Company With Employees: Cost and 5 Checks

Price pet sitting software at the team you will have, not the team you have. Against Time To Pet's Team plan, Porchlight's flat $79 Team plan is cheaper from 3 sitters and $153 a month cheaper at 12. Below you get that bill table, five pass or fail checks and an email that makes any vendor answer them.

Directory pages give you a ranked list. A ranked list does not tell you what the bill is when you hire the sixth sitter, whether a visit survives a basement, or whether you can leave with your records.

The bill flips at 3 sitters, and the gap grows with every hire

The formula: base fee plus per-user fee times active sitters. Run it at 3, 6, 12 and 25, not at today's headcount.

Example: say you run 3 sitters now and plan to hire 3 more by next summer. Here is the monthly bill for each team plan.

Time To Pet's Team plan was $40 plus $16 per active staff on its pricing page when checked on 2026-10-08, and Porchlight's side-by-side with Time To Pet shows the plans together. Porchlight's Team plan is $79 a month with unlimited staff, the same at 2 sitters or 40.

At 6 sitters, a year of Time To Pet Team at the monthly rate is $1,632. Porchlight Team billed annually is $790.

Pet Sitter Plus also prices by active user. Take its base and per-user figures from its own pricing page and run the same formula at your four headcounts.

The rule: if you will have 3 or more sitters in the next 12 months, price the flat plan first. If you will stay at 1 or 2, per-seat pricing costs the same or less, so choose on features. More on why the gap grows in what per-seat pricing really costs.

Five checks a tool passes or fails

Run every tool through the same five checks. Each has one question and one pass test. A tool that cannot show you the answer fails that check.

A visit that survives a basement is the first test to run

Give one sitter the app, send them to the worst address on your route and have them switch on airplane mode before they start. On Porchlight, a full visit can be completed in airplane mode and syncs when signal returns, and the pending queue survives a force-quit, battery death and phone reboot. Not every action works in real time offline, so run your own route before you pay. What a full visit needs is in pet sitting software that works offline.

The mistake it prevents: visit notes and photos vanish in a dead zone, and the client gets no proof the visit happened.

An alert with no delivery record is a booking you lose without knowing

Ask to open the log for one real notification. Porchlight logs every send with a delivery record across push, email and SMS and retries failures. It includes 5,000 SMS segments a month under a fair use policy, so ask every vendor what happens after its included amount.

Export on day one, not when you want to leave

Download every table in the first week of the trial and open the files. If the answer is "we can send you a client list", the tool fails. Porchlight offers one-click export of every table as CSV and JSON plus a media manifest.

Move your data with a dry run and a way back

Re-typing clients, pets, vaccinations, rates and recurring schedules is what keeps owners on a tool they dislike. The Porchlight Switch Kit imports exports from Time To Pet, Precise Petcare, Pet Sitter Plus and LeashTime with a dry run and one-click rollback. How long the import takes depends on how much data you have.

Ask for one real pay run before you trust the payroll tag

Pet care platforms list time tracking, payroll integration and commission calculations. A feature tag says nothing about how a pay run works. Test it:

1. Pick one sitter and one pay period with about 10 visits.
2. Have the vendor run that sitter's pay from the visit record, not from a spreadsheet.
3. Pass: paid time matches the check in and check out times, and the report exports.
4. Fail: you retype any hours, or an inactive seasonal sitter still adds to your bill.

Pay rules themselves are covered in hourly payroll for pet sitters.

Pick the tool by what you run

Paste this email to every vendor

Send the same message to each tool and compare replies side by side. Vague answers are an answer.

Hi, we run a pet sitting company with [number] sitters today and expect [number] by [month]. Please reply with: 1) the monthly price at both sizes, 2) whether a sitter can finish a full visit with no signal and what syncs later, 3) how I can see whether a failed alert was retried, 4) how I export every table if I leave, 5) whether your import has a dry run and a rollback, and who does the mapping.

Run a 7 day trial that can actually fail

• Day 1: run the import dry run if you are switching, then give two sitters the app and send one to a dead zone address.
• Day 3: send yourself a booking alert and open its delivery record.
• Day 5: run one invoice batch and one pay run from real visit data.
• Day 7: export everything as CSV and JSON and open the files.

The tool passes when every line finishes without a spreadsheet and without a support ticket.

Decide by headcount

Do this in the next ten minutes

Write down how many active sitters you will have in 12 months, put that number in the email above and send it to your top two tools.

If flat pricing and offline visits fit your team, Start free for 30 days. No card is needed, so you can run the whole 7 day trial on your own routes before you pay.