Free shelter software
The person feeding the dog shouldn’t need a laptop.
Rescuely runs the whole shelter — intake, medical, foster, adoption, the state reporting — and puts a QR sticker on every kennel so the work gets logged where the work happens.
A shift at the shelter
A volunteer scans the sticker on kennel B2.
No login hunt, no finding the right animal in a list. The sticker opens that dog’s care screen. Feeding, water, walk, nail trim, medication — each one is a button, and each one takes a tap and a number.
The kennels have no signal. The entry waits on the phone and sends itself on the way out — once, no matter how many times it retries.
The limp is already on someone’s list.
Anything flagged at a kennel door lands on the medical due list before anyone has to remember to mention it. So does every recheck date, every post-op check, and every vaccination that is about to lapse.
Biscuit · A-000198 due today
Limping on the left rear — raised from the care log by a volunteer, 7:24 am.
Give the rabies shot and Rescuely works out when the next one is due from that vaccine’s own schedule — three weeks for a first dose in a series, a year or three for a booster. Nobody types a date and nobody guesses.
One person record, however many hats they wear.
The woman adopting today fostered two cats last spring and gives twenty dollars a month. That is one record with three roles on it, one history, one address to keep current — not three people who happen to share a surname.
The contract is signed on the screen, the fee is recorded, the outcome is written, and the follow-up call lands on someone’s list for two weeks out.
The Shelter Animals Count matrix is a read, not a reconstruction.
Intake type, transfer scope, Asilomar category and the age split — up to five months, adult, unknown — are captured as fields on the intake and again on the outcome, the day each one happens.
Which means the monthly numbers come out of the columns they were recorded in, and your live release rate is the same figure every time the board asks for it.
Every species
Dogs, cats, bunnies, birds — and whatever else comes through the door.
Species is a field on the animal record, with its own breeds and colors and its own per-species defaults. A rabbit rescue is not a small dog shelter, and a clutch of chickens off a hoarding case is not six dogs with feathers.
Where your intake asks something nobody else asks — which bunny is bonded to which, the goat’s hoof trim, how often the snake is fed, the wing that has to be checked every Friday — that is a custom field on the record, not a note in a box somebody has to remember to read.
Why it’s free
Money that came in for animals should stay with the animals.
Shelter software normally costs two to five dollars every time an animal goes home, or a monthly bill a small rescue weighs against a food order. A shelter that saved three thousand animals last year paid for the privilege of recording it.
The part of Rescuely that runs a shelter is free. Intake, medical, care, foster, adoption, follow-up, the Shelter Animals Count and Asilomar reporting, the listing feeds. No fee per adoption, no seat count, no charge to get your data out.
Four add-ons carry a real cost we cannot absorb, and each is bought on its own: backups and unlimited photos at $25 a month, API access at $10, AI assistants at $10 plus prepaid credit, and donation processing at 1.5% on top of the payment processor’s own fees. Every one of them is optional, and none of them is in the way of the work.
For the person who has to ask the hard questions.
- Your data
- Yours. Full CSV and JSON export on demand, no charge, no notice period, no exit fee.
- Isolation
- Every record carries your shelter’s id and every query is scoped by it, enforced by tests rather than by care.
- Integrations
- Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet feeds, microchip registries and Petco Love Lost, free. Signed webhooks for anything else, on the API add-on.
- The API
- Every screen in the app calls the same public REST API you would — there is no private back channel. Keys and webhooks are a $10 add-on.
- Standards
- Shelter Animals Count and the Asilomar Accords are modeled as fields, not as report queries run after the fact.
- Access
- Roles down to the volunteer who may only log care, with an audit trail on every change.
Your shelter can be running this by the end of the day.
Create your account, verify your organization, and start entering animals. No sales call, no quote, no card. The part of Rescuely that runs a shelter is free and stays free.