Looking for a Shelterluv Alternative?

Shelterluv is a capable, well-designed platform, and for plenty of organizations it's a good fit. But it isn't the only option — and the shelters and rescues that move to Pet Friend usually do it for a few consistent reasons.

Why shelters look for a Shelterluv alternative

These are the reasons organizations most often give us when they're evaluating a switch. Your mileage will vary, so weigh them against your own needs:

• Predictable, flat pricing. Teams want to know exactly what they'll pay each month, with no cost that scales with how many animals they adopt out.
• No per-adoption charges. Getting animals into homes is the goal — some organizations prefer software that never adds a fee to it.
• A lower price point for small rescues. Budget-conscious rescues want capable software that starts low.
• Owning their data. The confidence that they can export everything and leave any time, with no lock-in.

When you should stay with Shelterluv

We'd rather you choose well than choose us. Stay where you are if:

• Your team likes it and uses it properly. Adoption by your staff is worth more than any feature list. Switching software everyone already knows has a real cost in retraining and mistakes.
• You depend on an integration we don't have. Check your must-have connections first — if something in your stack only talks to your current system, that outweighs everything else.
• You're mid-season. Don't migrate during your busiest intake months. Plan it for a quiet stretch, whatever you decide.

What to actually compare

Feature checklists all start to look alike. When shelters tell us what really mattered after they switched, it's usually these five things — worth asking of any vendor, including us:

• What's the total yearly cost, including everything? Not the headline number — setup fees, per-adoption or per-record charges, add-ons for the modules you actually need, and what happens when you grow.
• Can you get all your data out, by yourself, today? Not "contact support for an export" — a self-serve export you can run right now. This is the single best predictor of how a vendor will treat you later.
• What does it cost to leave? If the answer is unclear, that's the answer.
• Who fixes it at 4pm on a Saturday? Ask what support is included at the price you'd actually pay, not at the enterprise tier.
• Does it work where your staff work? A lot of shelter work happens in a kennel, a van, or at an adoption event — not at a desk.

How Pet Friend compares

Pet Friend covers the core work a shelter or rescue does every day — and prices it simply:

• Transparent, published pricing: $25/month for rescues, $50 for shelters, $100 for large organizations with animal control tools. No setup fees, no per-adoption fees, listed right on the site.
• The full workflow: intake, medical records, adoptions with e-signatures, foster management, and reporting.
• Integrations you rely on: automatic Petfinder listings and microchip registration.
• Mobile-ready: native iOS and Android apps plus a responsive web app for field intakes and events.
• Your data stays yours: export everything at any time — no lock-in.

What you actually get, day to day

The work Pet Friend does for a shelter in an ordinary week:

• Intake — a guided form covering the animal, appearance, medical, origin, and photos, with litter and group intake so you enter shared details once for a whole litter.
• Forms your way — mark fields required, hide the ones you never use, and add your own fields to intake, adoptions, and fosters, so the form matches how your shelter actually works.
• Medical — vaccinations, medications with a medication administration record, procedures, and vet visits on a single timeline, with alerts when something is due.
• Adoptions — the whole pipeline, with the adopter signing on screen or remotely from their own phone and paying the fee through your own Stripe, Square or PayPal account — or in person on a Square Terminal or Stripe reader.
• Documents & signatures — build your own forms, or upload a PDF or Word file, place the signature, and get a single merged signed PDF filed against the record. No separate e-signing subscription.
• Printouts you control — cage cards, a full intake record, or a custom printout showing exactly the fields you pick, ready as soon as intake is done.
• Reporting — census, outcome, medical, and compliance reports including Shelter Animals Count export.
• Field work — native iOS and Android apps, plus animal-control modules for calls, cases, bite investigations, citations, and mileage on Shelter Plus.
• Security — two-factor authentication, login lockout, an audit log, and single sign-on on the top plan.

What switching actually looks like

A migration you can't undo is a migration nobody wants to start. The sequence below keeps your current system available throughout, so there's no point at which you're exposed:

1. Export from Shelterluv. Pull your AnimalInventory export. Your existing system is untouched and keeps running.
2. Import it. Upload the file — Pet Friend detects the Shelterluv format automatically and maps animals, statuses, microchips, intake history, and active fosters, with a preview before anything is created.
3. Verify the counts together. We check totals with you so you can see for yourself that nothing was lost.
4. Run in parallel. Keep both systems for as long as you need while the team finds its feet. There's no cut-over deadline.
5. Switch when the team stops going back. That's the real signal you're done.

Pick a quiet stretch rather than peak intake season, and the whole thing is low-drama. If you'd rather not touch it at all, white-glove migration is free — send us the export and we'll handle the import and the verification.

A fair word on price

Cheaper isn't automatically better, and we won't pretend otherwise. What flat pricing buys you is predictability: $25, $50, or $100 a month depending on the plan, published on the site, with no setup fee, no per-adoption fee, and no charge that grows as you adopt more animals out. You can forecast next year's software line from today's.

What it doesn't buy you is a bigger company behind it — Pet Friend is small and deliberately so. If having a large vendor matters to your board, weigh that honestly. If what matters is knowing your bill and owning your data, that's the trade we've made. Either way, run the numbers yourself: our guide to what shelter software costs lays out the questions to ask any vendor.

See how Pet Friend compares to other shelter software →