Security & Data Protection

Animal shelters and rescues trust Pet Friend with sensitive records — adopter information, medical histories, and payment details. Here's how our animal shelter software protects that data.

Cloud hosting on AWS

Pet Friend runs entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, with your data stored across a multi-node database cluster for resilience. There is nothing to install and no server for your shelter to maintain — you access Pet Friend from any device with a web browser.

Encryption in transit

All traffic to Pet Friend is served over HTTPS and delivered through a content delivery network, so data moving between your browser and our servers is encrypted.

PCI-compliant payments

Adoption fees, donations, and other payments are processed by Stripe, Square, and PayPal — PCI-compliant payment providers — whether the card is taken in person on a Square Terminal or Stripe reader, or the payer follows a secure link you texted them. Subscription billing is handled by Chargebee. Pet Friend never stores raw card numbers on its own systems.

Two-factor authentication — optional, or required for everyone

Pet Friend supports two-factor authentication (2FA) with any standard authenticator app — Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password, Microsoft Authenticator, and others. It works on every plan, at no extra cost.

What sets it apart is that you decide how far it goes. From Organization Settings, an administrator chooses between:

• Optional — 2FA is available and each staff member can switch it on for their own account.
• Required — every user in your organization must use it. Anyone who hasn't set it up is walked through setup the next time they sign in, and no one can quietly turn it back off.

That second option is the one auditors, municipal contracts, and grant applications tend to ask about, and it takes one dropdown to satisfy. Turning it on doesn't interrupt anyone mid-shift — it applies at each person's next sign-in. Every user gets one-time backup codes at setup, so a lost or replaced phone never means a lost account.

Two-factor is off by default, because it's your call to make, not ours.

Login protection and audit trails

Accounts are protected against password guessing out of the box: repeated failed sign-ins temporarily lock an account, tuned generously enough that an ordinary typo never triggers it. Passwords are stored using bcrypt — never in plain text, and never recoverable, even by us. Shelter Plus organizations can also switch on an audit log that records who changed what and when.

Single sign-on with Okta

Organizations that use Okta can enable single sign-on, so staff authenticate through your existing identity provider and access is centrally managed.

You own your data — export everything, any time

Your records belong to your organization, and we mean that literally: any administrator can click Download Everything and get a single ZIP containing every table as a CSV file plus all of your photos, signatures, and documents. No support ticket, no export fee, no waiting.

There is no lock-in at Pet Friend. If you ever decide to leave, your data walks out the door with you — the same way it walked in. See our privacy policy and terms of service for details, or read about switching to Pet Friend.