Pet Sitting Software for 20 Walkers: What It Costs and 4 Tests to Run

At 20 walkers, price is the first test and the schedule is the harder one. Work out the bill at full headcount, then run four tests in a free trial: a sick call, a group walk at its dog limit, a visit with no signal and a data export. You will finish this page with the formula, a script for each test and a rule for when to move.

Price the tool at 20 active staff, not at the starter tier

A per-seat bill is a base fee plus a charge for every active staff member.

Monthly bill = base fee + (price per active staff x number of active staff)

Time To Pet's Team plan is $40 plus $16 per active staff member, per its pricing page as checked on 2026-10-08. Porchlight's Team plan is $79 a month or $790 a year with unlimited staff. Here is what that looks like as you hire.

At 20, the gap is $360 minus $79, or $281 a month. Over a year that is $4,320 against $790, a difference of $3,530. If you pay Porchlight monthly instead of yearly, $79 x 12 is $948, and the gap is still $3,372. Each walker you add on a per-seat plan at $16 adds $192 a year. On Porchlight Team, the same walker adds $0.

The six-walker version of this math is in What 6 Sitters Really Cost on Time To Pet Team. Use it if you are not at 20 yet.

Rule: when a tool charges per active staff member, multiply by 20 before you sign. Then ask the vendor how it counts a walker who took one visit in the month, because that definition changes the bill.

Time To Pet is well reviewed, and Porchlight's own comparison page says it is stronger in facility and boarding depth, QuickBooks and community. If you run a big boarding facility or live in QuickBooks, price is not your only question. If you run a walking team and the bill is what bothers you, keep reading.

Run the sick-call test first, because someone is out every week

With 20 walkers, a call-out is a weekly event, not a rare one. Scheduling tools built for dog walking say they can redistribute a walker's visits when the walker calls out and carry intro notes for a new walker meeting a pet. That is the feature to test, with your real week.

Example: say you have 20 walkers doing 5 walks a day over 5 days. That is 500 visits a week, and that is the volume to load into a trial. A demo with 3 walkers hides the problem, because a crowded screen and a change that touches many visits only show up at 15 to 20.

Use this script in any tool, trial or not:

1. Pick the walker with the most visits tomorrow.
2. Mark that walker unavailable for the day.
3. Move every visit to another walker, using only your phone.
4. Add an intro note on each visit where a dog meets a new walker: gate code, where the leash hangs, how the dog acts at the door.
5. Check that the clients were told and that the notification has a delivery record.
6. Write down the minutes from step 1 to step 5.

If the tool tells you to use a desktop for step 3, cross it off for an office that runs from a phone. If your time is more than a few minutes, you will pay that cost every Monday that someone calls out. More on phone-run offices in Run a Pet Sitting Business From Your Phone: The 10-Task Test.

Check that recurring walks survive a week without re-entry

Most of your 20 walkers' days repeat. Recurring scheduling (daily, weekly, custom) is a standard feature to expect, so a tool that makes you re-enter walks has a problem. Set up one real week in the trial: 20 walkers with 4 to 6 walks each. Then change one client's day and see if the rest holds.

Cap every group walk below your city's dog limit

If you run group walks, the number of dogs per walker is a rule set by your city or county, and it differs a lot. San Francisco limits dog walkers to 8 dogs at a time. Victoria, British Columbia also set a limit for professional walkers in a bylaw. In the UK, one pet sitter and dog walker association requires no more than four dogs at once. Look up your own local rule. This is general information, not legal advice.

Set your own cap at or below the local number, and treat the local limit as a ceiling, not a target. Then run this check:

• Book one group slot up to your cap.
• Try to add one more dog. Note whether the tool stops you, warns you or lets you.
• Mark one walker in that slot unavailable and move the group to a walker who already has dogs that hour.
• Count the receiving walker's dogs against the cap.

A reassignment is where the cap breaks. The original booking was fine, then a sick call stacked two groups on one walker. Count after every move, not only at booking.

To see how much room you have, use this:

Weekly group capacity = walkers x group slots per walker per day x working days x your cap

Example: say 8 walkers do 2 group slots a day, 5 days a week, with a cap of 4 dogs. That is 8 x 2 x 5 x 4 = 320 dog-walks of group capacity. If you booked 310 this week, you have 10 spare. One sick call and a few dogs have nowhere to go.

Do not assume any tool, Porchlight included, enforces a per-walker dog cap for you. Run the check and see.

Finish a full visit in airplane mode on your worst route

Your walkers lose signal in basements, elevators and rural stops. 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 test your own routes.

1. Put 3 or 4 walkers on real routes, including the dead-signal stops.
2. Have them finish whole visits in airplane mode: check in, notes, photos, check out.
3. When they are back online, check that the notes and photos arrived and that the GPS check-in, check-out and walk route match what the walker says happened.

Move a pilot group first, and run the dry run on your real export

Do not move all 20 walkers on day one. One bad sync or import problem then hits every visit that week. Start with 3 or 4 walkers.

If your clients, pets, rates and recurring schedules live in another tool, the Switch Kit imports exports from Time To Pet, Precise Petcare, Pet Sitter Plus and LeashTime. It has a dry run so you can check the result first and a one-click rollback. How long it takes depends on how much data you have. Do not cut over until the dry run looks right.

Then export everything as CSV and JSON, plus the media manifest. You are not trying to leave. You are checking that you could.

Four mistakes that cost the most at 20 walkers

Your next ten minutes

Open your current software bill and count the staff who were active last month, by that tool's own definition. Plug them into the formula at the top, then plug in 20. Write down both numbers. That is the price you compare every tool against.

Test all four with your own week

Porchlight has a 30-day free trial with no card, so you can run the sick-call script, the group cap check, the airplane-mode visit and the export on your own routes before you pay anything. Start free for 30 days.