Who Really Pays? How Pet Platforms Charge Both Sides

When people compare pet sitting platforms, they usually compare one number: the sitter commission. Rover takes 20%. Pawshake takes 19%. Floofers takes 10%. It is an easy comparison to make because those figures are published, and it feels like the whole story.

It is not the whole story. On most commission marketplaces there are two fees on a single booking, not one. The sitter pays a percentage of what they earn, and the pet owner pays a separate fee on top of the sitter's rate, usually revealed at checkout rather than on the sitter's profile. Neither party tends to see the other's fee. Both are paying the same platform for the same transaction.

This post adds the two sides together. Every figure below comes from the platforms' own published pages, checked on the dates shown, for the Australian market. Where a platform does not publish an amount, we say so rather than estimating — and as you will see, that gap is a significant part of the story.

The Two-Sided Fee, Explained

A commission marketplace sits between two people who want to transact. It can charge either side. Most charge both.

The sitter-side commission is the headline number. It is deducted from the sitter's earnings, so a sitter who lists at A$70 per night does not receive A$70 per night. On a 20% commission, they receive A$56.

The owner-side fee is added to the sitter's rate at checkout. It is not usually shown when browsing profiles, which is why owners often describe it as appearing from nowhere at the final step. The sitter never sees this money either — it does not increase their earnings by a cent.

The gap between what the owner pays and what the sitter receives is the platform's total take on that booking. That gap is the number worth knowing, and it is almost never the number being advertised.

What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Here is the current picture for the Australian market, drawn from each platform's own published pages:

Two things stand out. First, the sitter-side commissions cluster tightly — 19% and 20% are effectively the same number, which is what a consolidated market looks like. Second, the owner-side column is where the platforms genuinely differ, and it is the column that is hardest to research.

A Worked Example: One Week of Boarding

Numbers in a table are abstract. Here is a single realistic booking.

A pet owner in Melbourne books seven nights of dog boarding with a sitter who lists at A$70 per night. The sitter's listed rate for the stay is A$490.

On Rover, the owner pays an 11% booking fee at checkout on top of that rate — A$53.90 — bringing the owner's total to A$543.90. The sitter has 20% deducted from the A$490, receiving A$392.

The owner paid A$543.90. The sitter received A$392. The difference — A$151.90 — went to the platform. That is 27.9% of what the owner actually spent, on a booking advertised as a 20% commission.

Neither party is likely to arrive at that figure on their own, because neither sees the full picture. The owner sees a total and assumes most of it reaches the sitter. The sitter sees a 20% deduction and assumes that is the platform's whole take.

On The Pet Sitter, the owner pays A$490 and the sitter receives A$490. There is no commission on any plan and no owner-side fee at all. The platform is funded by the sitter's annual subscription — €199 per year plus VAT at the founding rate, €0 on the Free plan — not by a cut of each booking.

Run the same arithmetic across a year of bookings and the gap compounds:

Why the Owner Side Is the Hard Part to Research

Writing this post required checking each platform's published pages. The sitter-side commissions were straightforward — every platform publishes them, usually prominently, because a low commission is a selling point to sitters.

The owner side was different.

Rover publishes its owner fee. It is 11% at checkout, and California bookings carry an additional 25% owner marketplace fee. Its US fee page states no cap on that booking fee; where Rover does cap it, it says so — C$65 per booking in Canada, and £49 in the United Kingdom and €49 in Germany on the 15% owner fee those markets charge (Rover support documentation, checked 6 September 2026). Whatever you think of the amount, the number is stated. Credit where it is due — that is what transparency looks like, and it is why we were able to compute the worked example above.

Mad Paws confirms an owner booking fee exists but does not publish the rate. Its help pages state that owners pay a booking fee on every booking and that the fee scales with the length of the booking, with long-standing legacy accounts excepted. The actual percentage is not published anywhere we could find. That means neither we nor an owner can calculate the total cost of a Mad Paws booking before reaching checkout. (Rover acquired Mad Paws in a deal agreed in September 2025, so these are now one company charging two different fee structures.)

Pawshake charges a "Member Service Fee" to owners in some regions, shown only at checkout. The amount is not published, and it is region-dependent — which is precisely why we will not quote an Australian figure for it. We can tell you the sitter-side commission is 19%. We cannot tell you the total take, and neither can a Pawshake customer, without going through checkout to find out.

This is the part that deserves scrutiny. A fee you can look up is a price. A fee you can only discover by starting a transaction is something else. We are not alleging anything improper — platforms are entitled to set their own pricing and their own disclosure practices. But an owner comparing platforms cannot make an informed comparison when half the cost is only visible at the end of the funnel.

Where Floofers Sits

It would be easy to write this post as though every commission platform behaves the same way. That would be inaccurate.

Floofers, the Australian indie platform, charges a 10% sitter commission and documents no owner-side fee at all. Its total take on a booking is 10%, and both sides can determine that before booking. On the specific question this post asks — who really pays, and can you find out — Floofers gives the cleanest answer of any commission platform in the Australian market.

We have written elsewhere about Floofers' struggle to reach the booking volume a marketplace needs to sustain itself, and we do not think a 10% commission is a viable long-term model without significant capital. But on transparency, they are ahead of platforms many times their size, and it would be dishonest to lump them in with the rest.

The Subscription Alternative

There is a second model, and it is not new.

Time To Pet is pet sitting business software, priced at US$500 per year billed annually on its solo plan (US$50 per month if you pay monthly). It is not a marketplace — it does not bring you clients, and it is priced in US dollars regardless of where you operate. But it takes 0% of your bookings. A sitter turning over A$40,000 a year pays the same as a sitter turning over A$10,000.

That is the essential property of a subscription: the platform's revenue is decoupled from your earnings. Grow your business and the platform does not automatically take more. On a commission marketplace, the opposite is true by design — your best year is also the platform's best year at your expense.

The Pet Sitter is built on the subscription model, with one difference from pure software: a marketplace is being built alongside it, and owner-side search and browsing are coming soon. Free is €0 forever with 0% commission. Pro is €199 per year plus VAT at the founding rate for the first 100 subscribers, rising to €299 plus VAT afterwards. That is the entire price. There is nothing added at anyone's checkout.

We should be straight about the trade-off. A subscription asks a sitter to pay before they have earned anything through the platform, which is a harder proposition than "list for free and we will take a cut later". We are early, our sitter network is small, and we cannot yet match the demand volume of a platform with 70,000 Australian sitters. Those are real disadvantages and we would rather name them than have you discover them.

What This Means If You Are Choosing a Platform

If you are a pet owner: the rate on a sitter's profile is not what you will pay. Before comparing platforms, take a booking all the way to the checkout screen on each one and compare the totals. That is the only reliable way to see the owner-side fee, and on at least two major platforms it is the only way at all.

If you are a sitter: your commission is not the platform's total take from your client relationship. If your client is paying an additional fee you never see, that fee is coming out of the same client's budget — money that could have gone toward your rate. When you evaluate a platform, ask what it charges the person paying you, not just what it charges you.

For both: ask whether the number is published. A platform that states its fees on both sides has made a choice to be checkable. That is worth something independent of whether the fee is high or low.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do all pet sitting platforms charge pet owners a fee?

No. Rover charges owners an 11% booking fee at checkout. Mad Paws and Pawshake both confirm an owner-side fee exists but do not publish the amount. Floofers documents no owner fee. The Pet Sitter charges owners nothing — pet owners never pay us anything, on any plan.

What is the real commission on a Rover booking?

On a seven-night booking at A$70 per night, the owner pays A$543.90 (the A$490 rate plus an 11% booking fee) and the sitter receives A$392 (the A$490 rate minus 20% commission). The platform's total take is A$151.90, which is 27.9% of what the owner spent — despite the headline commission being 20%.

Why can't you tell me Pawshake's or Mad Paws' total fees?

Because neither publishes its owner-side fee. Pawshake's Member Service Fee applies in some regions and the amount is shown only at checkout. Mad Paws confirms a booking fee that scales with booking length but does not publish the rate. We only assert figures we can verify against a platform's own published pages, so we report the gap rather than filling it with an estimate.

Is a subscription actually cheaper than a commission?

It depends on your booking volume. A 20% commission costs more than a €199 plus VAT annual subscription once you are earning roughly €83 per month in bookings. Below that, a commission platform is cheaper. Above it, the gap widens every month — and unlike a commission, the subscription does not grow as you grow.

How often are these figures checked?

Every figure in the table above carries the date it was last verified against the source platform's published pages. We re-check them whenever we publish or update pricing content. If you find a figure that has changed, tell us and we will correct it.

The Question Worth Asking

The pet care industry has spent a decade normalising the idea that a marketplace should take a percentage from both sides of every transaction it touches. That model built genuinely useful platforms, and it is not inherently wrong — matching sitters with owners has real value and deserves to be paid for.

But it is worth asking what the fee is actually buying, and whether it should scale forever with the size of your business. A sitter in their fifth year, with a full client book they largely built themselves, is paying the platform substantially more than a sitter in their first — for the same product.

We built The Pet Sitter around a different answer: charge a flat, published price, take nothing from the booking, and charge the pet owner nothing at all. Whether that model wins is not yet decided. But the arithmetic in this post is not really an argument for us. It is an argument for reading the checkout screen.

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