What Happened to Cat in a Flat? Inside Rover's Quietest Acquisition

If you sat cats through Cat in a Flat in the UK or Europe, something changed under you this year. Not overnight, and not loudly. Seventeen months after Rover acquired the platform, its sitters were migrated onto Rover — onto Rover's fees, Rover's booking rules, and Rover's app.

The brand is still there. You can still go to Cat in a Flat and book a cat sitter. But what sits behind it is now Rover, and the economics that came with that are worth understanding in detail — not because Cat in a Flat was badly run, but because it was well run, and it happened anyway.

What Cat in a Flat Was

Founded in London in 2014 by Julie Barnes and Kathrin Burckhardt, Cat in a Flat did one thing on purpose: cats. Not "pets, and cats too." Cats.

That focus was the product. Cat owners do not generally want boarding — they want someone to come to the flat, feed the cat, change the litter, sit with it for twenty minutes, and send a photo. Dog-first marketplaces treat that as a minor service category. Cat in a Flat treated it as the whole business, and built a community of cat people around it.

By the time Rover announced the acquisition on 31 October 2024, the platform had over 50,000 care providers and had delivered two million visits across nine countries. For Rover, the deal added Switzerland, Belgium, Austria and Ireland to its map, and it was its first move into a species niche rather than a new geography. Terms were not disclosed.

The Seventeen Months

Here is the part worth paying attention to, because it is the part that gets misread.

For seventeen months after the acquisition, almost nothing visible changed. Cat in a Flat kept its name, its site, its cats-only identity, and its founders. If you were a sitter watching nervously in late 2024, by mid-2025 you would have concluded that the worry was overblown. The platform you liked had been bought by a big company and had carried on being the platform you liked.

Then, at the end of March 2026, sitters were migrated onto Rover. Rover's own migration notice put it plainly: your service fees change to Rover's service fees for all bookings made after the activation date, and you manage your business on Rover from then on.

The lesson is not that acquisitions are always bad. It is that the quiet period is not the outcome — it is the runway. Seventeen months of continuity told you nothing about month eighteen.

What Changed for Sitters

The headline change is the fee, and it depends where you sit.

Rover's standard published position is a 20% sitter commission — you take home 80% — with an 11% booking fee charged to the owner on top. In the UK and Europe, where Cat in a Flat's sitters were, Rover has run a 15% sitter fee, dropping to 5% for weekly recurring care while one-off services stay at 15%.

But fees were not the only thing that moved. Rover's own documentation for migrated sitters describes several changes to how cat sitting actually works on the platform:

• Overnight stays and drop-in visits became separate bookings. Mixed-service bookings are not supported, so an arrangement that combined both now has to be split.
• Per-cat pricing was introduced.
• Cash payment is prohibited. Everything runs through the platform.
• Off-platform communication is prohibited, in line with Rover's standard anti-circumvention rules.

For a cat sitter, that second-to-last group matters more than it might sound. A large share of cat work is repeat business with the same handful of local owners, often loosely arranged and sometimes paid in cash. Those relationships did not disappear, but the platform's tolerance for how they are run changed.

Rover framed the move to sitters as an upgrade — more services available, and in the UK and Europe a lower headline percentage than Cat in a Flat's own historic fee. Both of those things are true. It is also true that the terms were set by a company the sitters had not chosen and could not negotiate with.

To Rover's credit, its own sitter help pages did not pretend the transition went smoothly. They say, in as many words: "We hear your frustration and we're listening."

What Changed for Owners

This is the change we find most instructive, and it is easy to miss because the amounts look small.

Cat in a Flat charged pet owners a flat booking fee of about £1.50 per booking. After the migration, those bookings carry Rover's owner-side fee instead — 15% in the UK and Europe, capped at £49 per booking, against Rover's standard published 11% elsewhere.

Sit with the shape of that rather than the size of it. A flat fee is a flat fee: it costs the same on a £40 booking and a £400 one, and it does not grow when your cat sitter's rates go up or when you book more often. A percentage is a claim on the transaction. As the booking grows, the fee grows with it.

Owners did gain something real in exchange. Bookings are now covered by the Rover Guarantee, which documents up to £25,000 in vet care reimbursement for eligible claims, plus property damage and third-party medical cover. That is genuine protection that a flat £1.50 booking fee was never funding. Whether it is worth the change in fee structure depends entirely on how much you book.

What Sitters Said

Public reaction was modest in volume, so treat this as anecdote rather than evidence.

A thread on the TrustedHousesitters community forum, titled "Private equity ruined my cat-sitting side hustle," collected some of it. What is interesting is where the complaints landed. One sitter, posting in May 2026, focused not on the percentage but on the product: the interface was worse, and — specifically for cat sitting — there was no option to offer more than one drop-in visit per day.

That is a small detail that tells you something structural. Two visits a day is completely normal for cats: morning and evening, medication schedules, a nervous cat that needs company twice. A cats-only platform builds for that by default. A dog-first platform with a cat category added does not necessarily notice it is missing.

Specialist platforms encode their species' assumptions in a thousand small product decisions. Those are exactly the decisions that get flattened when the specialist becomes a category inside something larger.

What This Means If You Are on an Acquired Platform

Three things travel from this story to any sitter whose platform has changed hands.

First, watch the runway, not the reassurance. Nothing about the seventeen quiet months predicted the eighteenth. If you are told nothing will change, that statement has a shelf life nobody will tell you in advance.

Second, notice what kind of fee you are on. A percentage is not just a bigger or smaller number than a flat fee — it is a different relationship. It scales with your success, and it can be renegotiated by whoever ends up owning it, without your involvement. This is why we charge a flat annual subscription and take 0% of every booking: a fixed fee cannot quietly grow with your business, and it cannot be re-priced by an acquirer, because there is no percentage to re-price.

Third, own the things that are portable. Your clients' contact details, your booking history and your reviews are the assets that survive a migration. Cat in a Flat sitters who had those things outside the platform kept their businesses intact regardless of what the fee did. Sitters who had them only inside the platform inherited whatever terms arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cat in a Flat still running?

Yes, as a brand. You can still book a cat sitter through it. Since the end of March 2026 its sitter side runs on Rover — sitters were migrated onto Rover's fees and platform, and the Cat in a Flat site now functions as a cats-only booking front end for owners, powered by Rover.

What do Cat in a Flat sitters pay now?

Rover's rates. Rover's standard published position is a 20% sitter commission plus an 11% owner booking fee; in the UK and Europe the sitter fee has been 15%, dropping to 5% for weekly recurring care. Be careful with older figures: Cat in a Flat's own help centre still carries undated pre-migration information, and fees vary by market. Check Rover's current fee page for your country rather than trusting a number you read somewhere once.

Did the owner fee really change that much?

The shape changed more than the size. A flat booking fee of about £1.50 was replaced by a percentage — 15% capped at £49 per booking in the UK and Europe. On a small booking the difference is minor; on a large or frequent one it is not.

Does this mean Meowtel will be next?

We do not know, and we are not going to guess. Rover acquired the US cat-sitting platform Meowtel in January 2026, and as of August 2026 Meowtel still operates independently under its co-founders, with its own published fees that make no mention of Rover. What Cat in a Flat shows is that a period of independence after an acquisition is not the same thing as a permanent arrangement.

Is Cat in a Flat available in Australia?

No. Cat in a Flat operated across the UK and Europe, and Rover's own help pages state that Rover operates in North America and Europe. For Australian sitters this is a case study rather than a choice — though it is a fairly direct preview of what platform consolidation looks like from the inside.

If you want the wider picture, our analysis of the 2026 consolidation traces all six Rover acquisitions and what changed after Blackstone took the company private. And if you would rather your fee never moved again, see how the flat model works.