Search “best software for dog walking business” and the page is Time To Pet’s own blog, Jobber’s own blog, a niche pet-sitting podcast’s resource page, PetPocketbook’s own homepage, and the same listicle site ranking the same tools twice under two near-identical titles. No G2, no Capterra, no large media outlet has actually laid out what these tools cost once a solo dog walker becomes a small team, which is exactly where the pricing models stop looking anything alike.
The short version: Two of the five tools here charge a flat rate that barely moves as you add staff. Three charge per active staff member, and those costs compound fast. At a 10-person team, Precise Petcare’s banded pricing lands at $90/month and Pet Sitter Plus’s flat team rate is $50/month, while Time To Pet’s and Scout’s per-staff formulas put the same team at roughly $200/month and $183/month respectively: over double, for the same number of walkers. Pet Sitter Plus’s advertised $15/month “Solo” price is also a first-year promotion; the standard, ongoing rate is $30/month, and the same 50%-off framing applies to its Team and Enterprise tiers too.
Quick Comparison
| Tool | Solo Price | Team Pricing Model | Cost at 10 Active Staff* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time To Pet | $25/mo (Lite) or $50/mo (Solo) | $40/mo base + $16/mo per active staff | ≈ $200/mo |
| Scout | $33/mo flat | $33/mo base + $15/mo per active staff | ≈ $183/mo |
| Precise Petcare | $20/mo | Banded by staff count (2-5, 6-10, 11-20…) | $90/mo (6-10 band) |
| Pet Sitter Plus | $30/mo standard ($15/mo first-year promo) | $50/mo flat for 2-25 staff (promo: $25/mo first year) | $50/mo |
| PetPocketbook | $25/mo flat, one plan for any team size | Same $25/mo flat, plus a 5% fee on client payments made through the platform | $25/mo (+ 5% of online payment volume, by default) |
Figures for Time To Pet and Scout are our own calculation applying each company’s own published per-staff formula, not a number either company states directly for 10 staff. All five companies’ own pricing pages checked directly on September 3, 2026.
Time To Pet: Clean Tiers for a Solo Operator, Steep Once You’re Hiring
Time To Pet splits its solo offering in two: Lite is $25/month for basic scheduling and invoicing, and Solo is $50/month, adding videos, integrations (Zapier, QuickBooks Online, Dropbox backup, calendar sync), and email marketing campaigns. Once a business has staff, it moves to the Team plan: $40/month base plus $16/month per active staff member, with active staff calculated automatically each billing period (anyone with at least one scheduled service, always including office managers and admins). Drop back to one active staff member and Time To Pet automatically reverts you to the cheaper Solo plan the following month, worth knowing if your team size fluctuates seasonally. Time To Pet states it serves more than 4,500 pet care businesses, and offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.
The per-staff add-on is where the cost curve gets steep. Time To Pet’s own pricing page gives an example bill of “$120/month for staff,” which works out to $40 base plus $16 times five active staff. Run that same formula out further and a 10-person team lands around $200/month, a real number worth comparing against the flatter, banded pricing that Precise Petcare and Pet Sitter Plus use for the same team size (see below).
- Who should NOT default to Time To Pet once hiring starts: a business planning to grow past 5-6 active staff without comparing the per-staff math against Precise Petcare or Pet Sitter Plus first.
- Who it’s right for: a solo operator who wants Time To Pet’s specific integrations (Zapier, QuickBooks Online, Dropbox backup) or a small team that values the automatic Team-to-Solo downgrade in slow months.
PetPocketbook: One Flat Price for Any Team Size, With a Payment Fee Baked In
PetPocketbook takes the opposite approach: one plan, $25/month, with every feature included regardless of team size, including scheduling, visit tracking, report cards for walking, sitting, overnights, daycare, training, and grooming, automated invoicing, a client portal, and team management tools. There’s no staff-count ladder to climb at all, which makes it the cheapest option here for any business past a handful of employees on subscription price alone.
The catch is in how payments work rather than the subscription line. PetPocketbook’s own pricing FAQ states that businesses are required to offer online payment through the platform as an option, and that pet parents pay a 5% service fee by default when they use it, on top of what the business charges. The business can choose to absorb part or all of that fee instead of passing it to clients, but it isn’t waived by default. Cash, checks, and other offline payment methods are still allowed and can be logged in the platform without the fee. For a business doing meaningful volume through in-platform payments, that 5% is worth modeling against the flat $25 subscription: a business processing $4,000/month in online payments through PetPocketbook is looking at roughly $200/month in service fees on top of (or in place of, if absorbed) the subscription cost.
- Who should NOT assume $25/month is the whole cost: a business planning to route most client payments through PetPocketbook’s own checkout. Model the 5% fee against your actual payment volume before comparing it to a flat-fee competitor.
- Who it’s right for: a growing team that wants the cheapest possible subscription line regardless of headcount, especially one that plans to keep most payments offline or is comfortable passing the 5% fee to clients the way food delivery and ticketing services already do.
Precise Petcare: Banded Pricing That Wins Decisively at Small-Team Scale
Precise Petcare prices by active-staff band rather than a per-seat multiplier: Solo is $20/month, 2-5 staff is $45/month, 6-10 staff is $90/month, 11-20 staff is $160/month, climbing to $390/month at 101+ staff. Every band includes the identical feature set (scheduling, the mobile app, GPS tracking, a Live Sitter Map, late-arrival alerts, unlimited client accounts, billing, and staff workflows), so unlike Time To Pet, there’s no separate feature tier to upgrade into on top of the staff-count jump. Annual billing gets a 5% discount, and there are no contracts.
Against the per-staff formulas above, the banding wins clearly once a team has more than 2-3 people. A 6-person team costs $90/month flat on Precise Petcare, versus roughly $136/month on Time To Pet’s per-staff formula ($40 + $16 × 6) or $123/month on Scout’s ($33 + $15 × 6). Precise Petcare’s own pricing page doesn’t mention a percentage fee on client payments, unlike PetPocketbook, though we checked this only against the pricing page itself rather than a separate payments-terms document.
- Who should NOT choose Precise Petcare: a true solo operator who will never hire. Time To Pet’s $25/month Lite tier and PetPocketbook’s $25/month flat plan are cheaper starting points than Precise Petcare’s $20/month Solo tier once you factor in that Precise Petcare’s tiers are built around eventual team growth.
- Who it’s right for: a business that already has, or expects to build, a team of 2 or more, where the banded pricing avoids the compounding per-staff costs that Time To Pet and Scout carry.
Pet Sitter Plus: The Advertised Price Is a First-Year Promotion, Not the Real Price
Pet Sitter Plus currently advertises Solo at $15/month and Team (2-25 staff) at $25/month, both prominently displayed on its pricing page. Read the fine print on the same page, though, and both are “50% off your first 12 months” promotional rates. The standard, ongoing price (what you pay from month 13 onward) is $30/month for Solo and $50/month flat for Team, regardless of whether that team has 2 staff or 25. Enterprise (25+ staff) follows the same pattern: $174.50/month promotional, $349/month standard, with pricing capped so that staff beyond the first 25 are free.
That flat $50/month Team rate, once you’re past the promotional year, is the cheapest team-tier price in this comparison at any team size above roughly 3-4 people: cheaper than Precise Petcare’s banded pricing at 6+ staff, and dramatically cheaper than Time To Pet’s or Scout’s per-staff formulas at any team size past a handful. The full feature suite (GPS check-in/out, client portal, vaccination tracking, key management, unlimited invoices, QuickBooks Online and Stripe integration) is included on every tier with nothing locked behind an upgrade, and only active staff count toward the tier.
- Who should NOT budget off the $15/$25 sticker price: anyone comparing costs past year one. The real ongoing price is double the advertised figure, and that’s easy to miss since the promotional framing is what’s shown by default.
- Who it’s right for: a team of any size from 2 to 25 staff that’s comfortable modeling the standard $50/month price rather than the promotional rate, since that flat number beats every per-staff competitor here once a team has more than a few people.
Scout: Similar Formula to Time To Pet, Slightly Lower Per-Staff Rate
Scout prices almost identically to Time To Pet in structure, just with different numbers: Solo is $33/month flat, and Team is $33/month base plus $15/month per active staff. Scout states it serves more than 1,100 dog walking and pet sitting companies, and donates a portion of revenue from every completed booking to animal charities. Optional growth add-ons are available beyond the core plans, including a fully white-labeled branded app at $300/month, an SEO-optimized website at $42/month, and a paid-ads management service at $1,000/month, none of which are required to use the core scheduling and invoicing software.
Scout’s per-staff rate ($15) is a dollar cheaper than Time To Pet’s ($16), and its base is $7 lower for Team ($33 vs. $40), so Scout comes out slightly cheaper than Time To Pet at every staff count using each company’s own formula: a 10-person team runs approximately $183/month on Scout versus $200/month on Time To Pet. Both are still well above Precise Petcare’s or Pet Sitter Plus’s banded pricing at that same team size.
- Who should NOT choose Scout over Precise Petcare or Pet Sitter Plus on price alone: a team of more than 3-4 people, where the per-staff formula costs meaningfully more than the banded alternatives.
- Who it’s right for: a solo operator or very small team (2-3 people) who wants Scout’s specific feature set and is comfortable with the per-staff scaling, or a business that wants Scout’s optional branded-app and marketing add-ons available in the same ecosystem.
Who Should NOT Buy Any of These Five
A dog walker with one or two regular clients, paid by cash or Venmo with a text-message schedule, doesn’t need a dedicated platform yet. That’s what Time To Pet’s $25/month Lite tier or a free calendar app covers until the business is real enough to need client portals and automated invoicing. On the other end, a multi-location pet care franchise or a facility running boarding and daycare alongside in-home visits needs different tooling than any of these five in-home-focused platforms; Time To Pet’s own separate Facility plan ($79/month) and its dedicated “In-Home + Facility” sales conversation exist specifically because that’s a different product shape.
The same per-staff-versus-flat-rate pattern shows up in service businesses beyond pet care. See our guide to software for dog grooming businesses for a related trade where staff-count pricing traps show up in a different form.
FAQ
Is there free software for dog walkers? None of the five tools compared here has a permanent free tier. All offer free trials: Time To Pet and Pet Sitter Plus both give 14-30 days with no credit card required, PetPocketbook’s 30-day trial starts after an onboarding session rather than immediately, and Precise Petcare and Scout both offer trials without requiring payment details upfront.
What’s the cheapest pet sitting software for a solo dog walker? On standard (non-promotional) pricing, Precise Petcare’s $20/month Solo tier is the lowest confirmed entry price, with Time To Pet’s $25/month Lite tier and PetPocketbook’s $25/month flat plan close behind. Pet Sitter Plus’s $15/month Solo rate is cheaper still, but only for the first 12 months before it reverts to $30/month.
How does pricing change once a dog walking business hires staff? It depends heavily on the pricing model. Time To Pet and Scout charge a base fee plus a per-active-staff add-on that compounds as a team grows. Precise Petcare and Pet Sitter Plus use flat bands that stay cheap even at 10+ staff. PetPocketbook charges the same flat rate regardless of team size, but adds a 5% fee on payments processed through its platform by default.
Do any of these charge a percentage fee on client payments? PetPocketbook does: a 5% service fee applies by default when clients pay online through the platform, though a business can choose to absorb part or all of it. Pet Sitter Plus’s pricing page states Stripe integration is included without describing an additional platform-level percentage fee. Time To Pet requires its own Time To Pet Payments for automatic charging. Precise Petcare’s and Scout’s pricing pages don’t state a percentage payment fee.
Bottom Line: Which Should You Choose?
- Solo operator, cheapest confirmed standard price: Precise Petcare, $20/month.
- Solo operator who wants specific integrations (Zapier, QuickBooks, Dropbox): Time To Pet’s Solo tier, $50/month.
- Growing team of any size, want the cheapest flat rate and don’t mind the payment fee: PetPocketbook, $25/month plus a default 5% fee on online payments.
- Team of 2-25 staff, want a flat published price with everything included: Pet Sitter Plus, $50/month standard rate (not the $25/month promotional price shown by default).
- Team of 6+ staff, want banded pricing without a payment-processing fee mentioned: Precise Petcare, from $90/month at 6-10 staff.
- Small team (2-3 people) who wants Scout’s specific ecosystem and optional branded-app add-ons: Scout, $33/month base plus $15/month per active staff.