Why We Built The Pet Sitter

I spent years as CTO of Pawshake, one of Europe's largest pet sitting marketplaces. I helped scale the platform from under $3 million in gross merchandise value to over $5 million. I built the systems that matched tens of thousands of pet owners with sitters across 9 countries. I saw the business from every angle — the database queries, the support tickets, the revenue dashboards, and the sitter feedback that never quite made it to the product roadmap.

And eventually, I left to build something better.

This is the story of why.

The View From Inside a Commission-Based Marketplace

When I joined Pawshake, the mission felt right. Connect pet owners with trusted, local pet sitters. Give people an alternative to impersonal kennels. Let animal lovers earn money doing what they love. It was a genuinely good idea, and the early team was passionate about it.

The business model was standard marketplace economics: take a percentage of every booking. At Pawshake, that commission sat around 15%. Rover, which dominates the US market, takes 20% from sitters and an additional 5-11% from pet owners. Mad Paws in Australia was charging 17.6% before Rover acquired them in late 2025.

From the company side, commission models make perfect sense. Revenue scales linearly with bookings. There is no cap on growth. Investors love it because the take rate is predictable and the margins improve as the platform gains density in a market.

From the sitter side, the picture is very different.

The Maths That Changed My Mind

Let me walk you through the numbers I stared at for years.

A pet sitter in Melbourne earning $3,000 per month in bookings — a realistic figure for someone doing this as their primary income — would pay $450 per month in commission at Rover's 20% rate. That is $5,400 per year. At Pawshake's 15%, it was $5,400 annually. At Mad Paws' old 17.6% rate, it was $6,336.

Scale that up to someone earning $5,000 per month — the kind of experienced, five-star sitter who is the backbone of any pet sitting platform — and they are handing over $12,000 per year to Rover. Twelve thousand dollars. For what, exactly?

For being listed in search results. For a messaging system. For payment processing that Stripe could handle for 2.9% plus 30 cents.

The irony was brutal: the better a sitter performed, the more the platform punished them. Our highest-rated, most-booked sitters — the ones who built their own client base through years of excellent care — were paying the most in absolute fees. A sitter earning $60,000 per year was paying $12,000 to Rover or $9,000 to Pawshake. Every year. Indefinitely.

What I Heard From Sitters

At Pawshake, I had access to support tickets, NPS surveys, and direct sitter feedback channels. The pattern was unmistakable.

The number-one complaint was not about bugs, or search rankings, or the app being slow. It was about fees.

I remember a sitter in Antwerp — she had been on the platform for three years, had a 4.97 rating across 200+ reviews, and she did the maths in a support ticket. She had paid over EUR 8,000 in commission fees to date. She asked, genuinely, what she was getting for that money that she could not get from a simple website and a WhatsApp group.

I did not have a good answer.

Another sitter in Melbourne told us she had started taking repeat clients off-platform because she could not justify losing $30-50 on every booking. We called this "platform leakage" internally and treated it as a problem to solve with payment holds and anti-circumvention measures. We built systems to detect when sitters shared phone numbers in messages, and flagged accounts that showed booking drop-off patterns with high message volumes.

Looking back, that was the moment I should have questioned the model more deeply. When your product team is spending engineering cycles preventing your best users from leaving, the value proposition has a fundamental problem.

Building ModerateKit and Seeing the Bigger Picture

After Pawshake, I built ModerateKit, a trust and safety platform for online marketplaces. We were eventually acquired by Gainsight, and the experience gave me a much wider lens on how marketplaces operate.

I worked with platforms across industries — not just pet sitting, but home services, freelance work, tutoring. The pattern was always the same. Commission-based marketplaces start with low take rates to attract supply. As they scale and consolidate (usually through acquisition), take rates creep up. Sitters, freelancers, and service providers have fewer alternatives, so they absorb the cost. The marketplace captures more value from each transaction while delivering incrementally less.

Rover is the textbook example. They acquired DogVacay in 2017. Fees went up. They bought DogBuddy and expanded to Europe. They acquired Cat in a Flat. They bought Gudog in Spain. And most recently, they acquired Mad Paws in Australia. Each acquisition eliminates a competitor, and the remaining options for sitters shrink.

I started to see clearly that the future for pet sitters in a commission-dominated market was one of declining margins and increasing dependency on platforms that treated them as supply to be optimised rather than professionals to be empowered.

The Subscription Model Alternative

The Pet Sitter was born from a simple question: what if a pet sitting marketplace charged sitters nothing on their bookings?

Not a reduced commission. Not a "lower fee for premium members." Zero commission. Zero percent. Sitters keep 100% of what they earn.

Instead of taking a cut of every booking forever, The Pet Sitter operates on a flat subscription model. Sitters pay a predictable monthly or annual fee for access to the platform, visibility in search, a professional profile, and all the tools they need to manage their business. Pet owners use the platform for free.

The economics are straightforward. At $19.99 per month (or less on an annual plan), a sitter earning $3,000 per month saves over $5,000 per year compared to Rover's 20% commission. A sitter earning $5,000 per month saves over $11,700 per year.

That is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural change in who captures the value in the pet sitting economy.

Why This Matters for Pet Owners Too

Commission models do not just hurt sitters. They distort the entire market.

When a sitter on Rover sets their rate at $50 per night, the pet owner actually pays between $52.50 and $55.50 (after Rover's 5-11% owner service fee). The sitter receives $40. There is an $12-15 gap between what the owner pays and what the sitter earns, and that gap is pure platform extraction.

On The Pet Sitter, if a sitter charges $50 per night, the owner pays $50 and the sitter receives $50 (minus standard payment processing, which is a fraction of what commission platforms charge). Prices are lower for owners. Earnings are higher for sitters. The only entity that loses is the middleman.

What We Are Building

The Pet Sitter is not just a cheaper version of Rover. We are rethinking what a pet sitting marketplace should be.

We are starting in the markets I know best — Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) and Belgium (Antwerp and Brussels) — and expanding from there. Every sitter gets a full professional profile, calendar management, booking tools, and visibility to pet owners in their area.

Because our revenue comes from subscriptions rather than transaction volume, our incentives are aligned with sitters for the first time. We succeed when sitters build sustainable businesses on the platform, not when we extract the maximum percentage from every booking.

We are building trust and verification systems informed by my experience at Pawshake and ModerateKit — identity verification, review systems tied to verified bookings, and transparent safety standards. But we are not building systems designed to trap sitters on the platform. If a sitter wants to share their phone number with a repeat client, that is their business. They are professionals, and we treat them as such.

Join Us

If you are a pet sitter tired of losing 15-20% of your income to platform fees, join The Pet Sitter. Early members get access to our founding sitter rates, which lock in the lowest subscription price we will ever offer.

If you are a pet owner, you can search for sitters in your area for free. You will find experienced, trusted pet care professionals who are not inflating their prices to compensate for commission fees.

The pet sitting industry is worth over $5 billion globally, and growing. The question is whether that growth benefits the people actually caring for animals, or the platforms sitting in the middle. We have made our choice.

Check out our pricing page to see the full breakdown of what The Pet Sitter costs compared to commission-based alternatives. The numbers speak for themselves.