An Animal Shelter Manager Alternative — Hosted & Supported

Let's be fair: Animal Shelter Manager (ASM) is a genuinely capable, long-running open-source project, and it's free. If your organization has the technical capacity to run and maintain it, it can be a great fit. Pet Friend is for the many shelters and rescues that would rather pay a modest, predictable fee and have everything managed for them.

Why shelters look for an ASM alternative

The most common reasons organizations tell us they move from a self-hosted or open-source setup to Pet Friend:

• No servers to run. Self-hosting means someone has to manage installation, updates, security patches, and backups. Not every shelter has an IT person for that.
• Included support. When something breaks, they want a team to call — not a community forum.
• A modern, polished interface. Staff and volunteers pick it up fast, with less training.
• Native mobile apps. Real iOS and Android apps for field intakes, transports, and events.

When you should stay on ASM

We'd rather you pick the right tool than the one we sell. Stay where you are if any of these describe you:

• You have real technical capacity. Someone on staff or a reliable volunteer who is comfortable with servers, database backups, and applying security updates — and who will still be around in two years.
• Your budget genuinely cannot absorb a subscription. If $25 a month is the difference between vetting an animal and not, free is the right answer. Nobody should feel bad about that.
• You've customized it heavily. Open-source means you can change anything, and if you've built workflows around that, moving costs you those customizations.
• It's working and nobody is complaining. The best shelter software is the one your team actually uses. Don't switch for the sake of switching.

If none of those fit — particularly the first one — the rest of this page is worth reading.

What running it yourself actually involves

The licence is free. The work isn't. If you self-host, someone in your organization owns all of the following, permanently:

• The server — provisioning it, paying for it, and keeping the operating system patched.
• Backups — not just taking them, but periodically restoring one to confirm they work. A backup you've never tested isn't a backup.
• Updates — applying new releases without breaking your live data, usually outside working hours.
• Security — you're holding adopter names, addresses, and phone numbers. That's real personal data with real obligations.
• Uptime — when it goes down mid-intake on a Saturday, the person who fixes it is you.
• Succession — the hardest one. What happens when the volunteer who set it all up moves away? This is the single most common reason organizations tell us they came looking.

None of that is a criticism of the software. It's the honest cost of self-hosting anything, and it's a cost paid in staff hours rather than dollars — which makes it easy to underestimate until the person holding it leaves.

How Pet Friend compares

Pet Friend trades "free but do-it-yourself" for "affordable and fully managed":

• Nothing to install or maintain. It's cloud-hosted — we run the servers, updates, security, and backups on AWS, with automatic nightly backups.
• Support is included on every plan.
• Transparent pricing: $25/month for rescues, $50 for shelters, $100 for large organizations — published, no quotes.
• Modern workflow: intake, medical, adoptions with e-signatures, foster, reporting, plus animal control tools and Petfinder and microchip integrations.
• Native iOS & Android apps plus responsive web.

What you actually get, day to day

Beyond the headline list, here's the work Pet Friend does for a shelter in an ordinary week:

• Intake — a guided multi-step form covering the animal, their appearance, medical details, where they came from, and photos. Litter and group intake lets you enter shared details once and create the whole litter.
• Forms your way — mark fields required so they can't be skipped, hide the ones you never use, and add fields of your own to intake, adoptions, and fosters.
• Medical — vaccinations, medications with a medication administration record, procedures, and vet visits on one timeline, with automatic alerts when something is coming due.
• Adoptions — the full pipeline, with the adopter signing the contract on screen or from their own phone via a secure link, and paying the fee online through your own Stripe, Square or PayPal account — or at the counter on a card reader.
• Documents & signatures — build your own forms, or upload a PDF or Word document, place the signature box, and get back a single merged signed PDF filed to the record.
• Printouts you control — a cage card, a full intake record, or your own custom printout showing exactly the fields you choose, ready the moment intake is finished.
• Reporting — census, outcome, medical, and compliance reports, including Shelter Animals Count export, without assembling anything by hand.
• Field work — native iOS and Android apps for intakes, transports, and events, plus animal-control modules for calls, cases, bite investigations, citations, and mileage.
• Security — two-factor authentication, login lockout, an audit log, and single sign-on on the top plan.

What switching actually looks like

Nobody can afford a risky migration in the middle of kitten season. The sequence we recommend keeps your old system available the whole time:

1. Export. Pull your animals and history out of ASM to CSV. Your data is yours and it stays where it is — nothing is deleted.
2. Import into a trial. Upload the CSV and map the columns, with a preview before anything is created. Or send it to us and we'll do it.
3. Check the counts together. We verify totals with you — animals, intakes, outcomes — so you can see nothing was lost in translation.
4. Run both in parallel. Keep your old install running read-only while your team gets comfortable. There is no hard cut-over date.
5. Switch when you're ready. When the team stops opening the old system, you're done. Decommission the server on your own schedule.

And the exit is just as open: you can export your full data set from Pet Friend at any time. We'd rather earn the renewal than trap you into it.

The honest cost comparison

Compare like for like. ASM's licence costs nothing; Pet Friend's Rescue plan is $25 a month, or $300 a year. The fair question isn't "free versus $300" — it's whether self-hosting costs your organization more than $300 a year in staff and volunteer time, server hosting, and risk.

For a shelter with a capable, committed technical volunteer, it very well might not, and you should stay put. For a shelter where that person is already stretched thin — or doesn't exist — a few hours of someone's time over a year usually exceeds it. Only you can price your own hours. If you want the paid-tool side of that maths laid out properly, we wrote up what animal shelter software actually costs and an honest look at the free options, including the ones that aren't us.

See how Pet Friend compares to other shelter software →