Is Time To Pet Worth It? Cost by Headcount and a Trial Checklist

Time To Pet is worth it if your team stays small, you board or run daycare, or you rely on QuickBooks. If you plan to grow past three or four active users on a budget, price the bill at your next three headcounts before you commit. By the end of this post you will have a cost sheet, a worth-it test and an 8-step trial checklist to run on your own numbers.

Time To Pet is worth it for small teams and facilities, and worth a side-by-side test for growing ones

Use this as the rule:

Reviewers on Capterra praise that all client and pet information sits in one place for employees, and that one system covers client data, internal communication and invoicing. That is a real strength, and it is why many owners stay.

The bill is $40 plus $16 for every active user, and you count as one

Per the Time To Pet pricing page, checked 2026-10-08, the plans are Lite at $25 a month, Solo at $50 and Team at $40 plus $16 per active staff member. The billing help article adds the details that change your math:

• Active users are counted at the end of each billing period. Two active people that month bills at the Team rate. Only the owner active bills at Solo.
• The $16 applies to users 1 to 25. From user 26 on it is $5 per user.
• The Facility plan is listed separately at $80 a month.

Here is the Team plan at different headcounts, with the owner counted as one active user.

Each added active user costs $16 a month, which is $192 a year. The 6 sitter breakdown walks through that case in detail. Prices change, so check the live page the day you decide.

Run the worth-it test with your own hours

Price alone does not answer "worth it." Software that saves you a day a week can justify a bigger bill. Use this:

Monthly bill in 12 months ÷ (hours saved per week × your hourly value × 4.3)

If the result is under 1, the tool pays for itself.

Example: say your bill will be $136 (6 active users), the software saves you 5 hours a week, and your time is worth $25 an hour. The denominator is 5 × 25 × 4.3 = $537.50. $136 ÷ $537.50 is about 0.25. On those numbers it pays for itself four times over, and the price is not the problem.

Now try the other direction. If the software saves you one hour a week at $25, the denominator is $107.50, and $136 ÷ $107.50 is 1.27. At that point you are paying more than you get back, and a cheaper or flat-price option deserves a look.

Reviewers like the all-in-one setup and flag mobile editing

On the plus side, one Capterra reviewer calls the mobile app very smooth, and another says onboarding helped them move over from a different pet sitting tool.

On the minus side, a reviewer says editing fields and scheduling from the mobile app can be finicky and is usually better done on a full desktop, and that the number of features means a learning curve at first. One reviewer also reported not receiving notifications of new requests. That is a single report, not a pattern, but a missed request is a missed booking, so test it.

Field work on a phone gets good marks, and heavy office edits are what some owners move to a desktop. Check the part that matches your day.

Test any tool with this 8-step checklist in the first week

Copy this. It works for Time To Pet, Porchlight or anything else.

• 1. Import or enter 10 real clients and their recurring visits.
• 2. Build next week's schedule for all sitters.
• 3. On a phone, reassign one sitter's day to another sitter. Time how long it takes.
• 4. Complete one full visit on a sitter's phone with notes and photos. Do it once with the phone in airplane mode, turn signal back on, then check what the owner sees.
• 5. Send one invoice and run one payroll period for hourly sitters.
• 6. Export your clients and pets to a file and open it.
• 7. Write down the monthly bill at your headcount today and at two bigger headcounts.
• 8. Send 5 test booking requests. Count how many produce a notification on your phone, and how fast. Pass mark: 5 out of 5.

Four mistakes that cost real money

1. Pricing the plan at today's headcount only. Each hire adds $16 a month on Time To Pet Team, or $192 a year. Price the next three headcounts.
2. Judging the app after one demo. The learning curve reviewers mention shows up with real data. Give it a week.
3. Paying for facility depth you do not use. If you do not board or run daycare, you are paying for features you will never open.
4. Never testing the export. Your records are only portable if you have tried getting them out. Do step 6 in week one, not the week you leave.

Where a flat price changes the answer

If your plan is to grow, the per-user rate is the part that changes. At 6 active users the gap above is $57 a month. At 10 it is $121.

Porchlight is pet sitting software with two flat plans: Solo at $35 a month for an owner doing the visits alone, and Team at $79 a month with unlimited staff, whether you have 2 sitters or 40. It has no per-seat charges and no feature paywalls on core features. 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 test your own routes. SMS is 5,000 segments a month included under a fair use policy. It is a capped allowance, not open-ended texting.

Time To Pet is stronger on facility and boarding depth, QuickBooks maturity, and brand trust and community. Porchlight has no public customer count or reviews yet, so judge it with your own data during the trial: import through the Switch Kit, which has a dry run and a one-click rollback (how long it takes depends on how much data you have), and export every table as CSV and JSON whenever you want.

Time To Pet says it is no-obligation: you can cancel at any time, and it waives the final month's payment if you cancel mid period. Leaving is not the hard part. Getting your records out cleanly is, which is why step 6 matters.

Next 10 minutes: price your headcount

Open a note and write three numbers: your active users today, in 6 months and in 12 months. Then compute $40 + ($16 × each count). Subtract the flat price of any tool you want to compare, multiply the gap by 12, and put it next to your worth-it result. If the gap is smaller than the time you would save, stay where you are.

Start the trial next to your current tool

Run the checklist above on 10 real clients with a 30-day free trial, no card needed, and let your own numbers decide. Start your free 30-day trial.