Everything, answered.

Nothing, and there is no card to enter. Create an account, confirm your email, and start entering animals. The part of Rescuely that runs a shelter is free and stays free.

Creating the account is a couple of minutes. Most organizations are verified automatically in that time. Setting up your locations and kennels, adding your staff, and importing your animals is an afternoon for a small rescue and a day or two for a large shelter.

No. There is no demo to request and no call to book. If you want to talk to someone you can, but nothing is gated behind it.

Yes. From a spreadsheet, from PetPoint, from ShelterLuv, or from Animal Shelter Manager. We map your columns with you rather than making you match a template, and we keep your existing animal numbers so your paper files still line up.

That is the common case. Most rescues arrive with a spreadsheet, a group chat and somebody’s memory. Start with the animals currently in your care rather than your whole history - you can add the past later, and nothing depends on it.

No. Rescuely runs in a browser, including on a phone. There is no app to install, which matters most for volunteers who are not going to install one.

Automatically, against public records: the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations, state charity and kennel registries, the adoption listing sites, and Shelter Animals Count membership. Any one clean match verifies you, and you do not do anything while it happens.

Yes, and it is simpler. Signing up from a .gov or municipal .us address verifies you on that alone. A city does not incorporate as a 501(c)(3) and should not have to prove it is one.

You can still use Rescuely straight away. Your account is provisional, which means everything that runs the shelter works and only the things that reach the public wait - publishing to the adoption listing sites, bulk email from your shelter’s name, and card payments.

It does not expire into nothing. If nothing has matched after thirty days a person reads your file, and if you are real you get verified. Nobody loses a record over paperwork.

Settings → Verification shows every check we ran, what each one found, and what would settle it. A source being unreachable when we looked is recorded as “could not check” and is never counted against you.

Yes. Publish one DNS TXT record on your shelter’s domain and we check it on the next run. Settings → Verification shows you the exact record.

Identity and description, intake and outcome, holds, microchips, weights over time, movements between kennels and foster homes, status history, photos, documents, notes, and an audit trail of who changed what.

Yes. Species is a field on the record with its own breeds and colors and its own per-species defaults, so dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, guinea pigs, rats, chickens, pigs, goats, horses, tortoises and snakes all live on the same animal record rather than needing a different system each. Where your intake asks something nobody else asks - which bunnies are bonded, which bird needs a wing check, how often the snake is fed, when the goat’s hooves were last trimmed - that is a custom field with a real type, so it can be reported on.

Yes. Custom fields on any record, with real types - text, number, date, yes/no, or a list you define - so they can be reported on rather than being a notes box with a label.

A return is a new intake linked to the original adoption, so the animal’s history reads as one story and your return rate is a number you can actually produce.

Litters link to the mother and to each other. A bonded pair is recorded on both animals with a must-adopt-together flag that follows them through the adoption process.

Yes - site, building, room, kennel or run, as a real hierarchy. Moves are recorded as movements with a time, which is what makes an accurate in-shelter versus in-foster census possible rather than a guess.

Yes, and it works by drag and drop or entirely from the keyboard. Both paths do exactly the same thing, because a board only a mouse can drive excludes staff who cannot use one.

Yes. An owner files a lost report themselves - species, breed, color, microchip if they know it, and where and when they last saw their pet. It goes straight onto your board with no phone call needed.

A stray intake is automatically treated as a found-side candidate, alongside any found report someone files directly. Either way, it is compared against every open lost report the moment it exists.

On species, breed, color and microchip number where one is known, plus how close in distance and time the two reports are. Every match shows which of those it agrees on, not just a score with no explanation.

No. Matching happens automatically the moment a report is filed, and you can ask it to run again by hand at any time from that report’s page.

Dismiss it. A wrong suggestion does not block the report, and closing a lost report - because the owner found their pet themselves, or it turned out to be a false alarm - takes one click.

Every kennel gets a QR sticker. Scanning it opens that animal’s care screen: feeding, water, medication, walk, nail trim, weight, behavior, or an issue - each one a large button and a short form.

Yes, but a limited one. “Volunteer” is a real role that can log care and nothing else. Scanning the sticker takes them to the login if they are not signed in, then straight to the animal.

That is the normal case and it is designed for. An entry logged with no signal waits on the phone and sends itself when signal returns - once, no matter how many times it retries, because each entry carries an id generated on the device.

It lands on a cross-animal issues board and on the medical due list immediately. It does not wait for anyone to remember to mention it.

Yes. A weight logged at the kennel door goes into the animal’s weight history; a medication logged there goes into its medical chart. You do not enter it twice.

Yes. Care log entry types are yours to define, including what each one asks for, so a sanctuary tracking enrichment and a municipal shelter tracking bite quarantine are not stuck with the same list.

Exams, vaccinations, diagnostic tests, surgeries, medications given, treatment protocols, per-animal costs, and the veterinarians and clinics involved.

From that vaccine’s own schedule - three weeks for a first dose in a series, a year or three for a booster - rather than a flat reminder. Nobody types a date and nobody guesses.

A named course of treatment you define once. Applying it to an animal creates the individual treatments it implies, each with its own due date, so a two-week course is fourteen scheduled items rather than one you have to remember.

Yes, generated from the record, carrying the issuing veterinarian’s license number as the law requires.

Yes, across every animal, and every item on it is keyed back to the record that created it - so you can see not just that something is due but why.

Yes, by cost type, per animal. That is the number that answers “what did this rescue actually cost” when a board asks.

Yes. Wildlife has its own intake, separate from the shelter’s regular animal intake, built around the species, circumstance and injury a wild animal actually arrives with.

Every wildlife case is linked to the licensed rehabilitator handling it - their contact details and what species and permits they hold - so a transfer between your intake desk and a rehabilitator is a real record, not a name in a note.

You record the disposition - released back to the wild, transferred to another rehabilitator or facility, or did not survive - with the date and details, so a wildlife case has a clear end the same way a shelter animal’s does.

Yes. A diet plan lives on the animal’s record - what it eats, how much, and how often - separate from the general feeding your kennel routine already follows.

It turns a diet plan into the actual tasks someone does each day - this animal, this food, this time - rather than staff working from memory or a sticky note on the kennel door.

No, it feeds it. A scheduled feeding task shows up right on the animal’s existing QR care screen, and logging it there closes the task - the sticker on the kennel door still works exactly as it did before.

No. One person record with both roles on it, one history, one address to keep current. The woman adopting today who fostered two cats last spring and gives twenty dollars a month is one person, not three.

Rescuely spots likely duplicates and offers a merge that keeps the history from both records rather than discarding one.

Yes. Alerts and do-not-adopt flags appear wherever that person appears, with a reason, a severity and an optional expiry.

You define the form. Applications arrive on a board grouped by status, and you can review, ask for more information, approve or decline, with notes kept against each one.

Yes. Settings has a document template editor for your adoption contract, and every save is a new version rather than an edit - a contract already signed keeps meaning exactly what it meant when it was signed, even after you change the wording.

Yes, on a phone. The signed PDF is stored with the signer’s name, the time, their IP address and a checksum, so what was signed is provable later.

Foster homes have capacity, preferences and home-check dates. A placement is a real movement of the animal, so an animal in foster is genuinely in foster in the census rather than a note in a field.

It is built for anyone doing field work, not just a shelter’s intake desk - a bite report, a loose-dog call, a welfare check. A rescue that never touches this stays unaffected by it.

A live list of open incidents, so whoever is answering calls can see what is out there and who is assigned to it, without a radio or a whiteboard.

A case groups the incidents, animals and people involved in one situation, and a citation attached to it records what was issued, to whom, and why - the paperwork side of the same record, not a separate one.

Yes - equipment loans record what went out, to whom, and when it is due back, the same way a foster placement tracks an animal.

Issue a license against an animal and its owner, and Rescuely assigns the next license number itself, so nobody keeps a separate list to avoid a duplicate. Renewals and status changes stay on the same record.

Yes. Items carry a stock level that goes up when you receive a purchase order and down when you record using or wasting something, so “how much dog food do we actually have” is an answer, not a walk to the storeroom.

Recording what you ordered from a vendor, at what cost, and when it arrived - so a shelf of stock has a paper trail back to what was actually paid for it.

Yes - the same vendor record a purchase order points to also holds their contact details, so it is not retyped every time you order from them again.

Yes - a feeding task can point at the actual food item in your inventory, so what an animal is scheduled to eat and what you have in stock are the same data, not two lists that can disagree.

Yes, as a monthly matrix. Intake type, transfer scope, age bucket and the admitted-for-sheltering flag are captured as fields on the intake the day it happens, so the report is a read rather than a reconstruction.

Lines A through W and live release rate, from the Asilomar category recorded at both intake and outcome.

Yes, and that is the point. It comes out of the columns it was recorded in rather than being rebuilt from adoption records each time, so it survives somebody checking your working.

Length of stay, occupancy and capacity, intake and outcome by type and month, animals in care by location and status, and open care-log issues.

Yes. Full CSV and JSON export of everything your shelter owns, on demand, free, without asking anyone.

Three per animal. That is what the adoption listing feeds take, so three is enough to list every animal you have.

$25 a month, which also includes nightly backups. It is one add-on because they are the same thing - disk we rent every month whether or not anyone looks at it.

They become read-only and stay downloadable. We do not delete a shelter’s records over a bill.

The database is backed up nightly regardless - that is us protecting the service. The add-on gives you your own restorable backups rather than depending on ours.

An API is how two computer programs talk to each other without a person clicking any buttons. When your phone’s weather app shows today’s forecast, it is not looking out a window - it is asking a weather service’s API for the number, and the API hands it back. Rescuely’s API lets your own website, a spreadsheet, or another piece of software ask Rescuely for your shelter’s data, or send it updates, the same way.

A webhook is Rescuely speaking first instead of waiting to be asked. Without one, another program would have to keep checking back every few minutes to see if anything changed - like refreshing a page hoping for news. With a webhook, the moment an animal is adopted, Rescuely sends a message straight to your own website or system saying so, right then. It is a notification built for computers instead of people.

$10 a month for the full REST API, scoped and revocable API keys with their own rate limits, and signed outbound webhooks. One price for all of it.

Yes, exactly. Every screen in Rescuely calls the same public endpoints your integration would. There is no private back channel, so the API is a real product rather than an export button.

Fire on intake, outcome, adoption, medical and care-log events, signed with HMAC-SHA256, retried on a backoff to twenty-four hours, then dead-lettered where you can replay them. They are also guarded against pointing at a private address.

No. Full export, the adoption listing feeds and the public adoptable-pets endpoint are free and stay free. The add-on is for building against Rescuely, not for leaving it.

Because serving an API other people build against costs us capacity every day, and it is a developer capability rather than part of the daily work of a shelter. Nothing a shelter needs to run sits behind it.

On an animal’s dashboard: suggest what it needs next from its own care log and medical history, flag patterns a busy person would miss, draft an adoption biography, and turn a spoken encounter into text for a note.

No. Everything it produces is a draft for a person to edit and approve. A medical record that fills itself in is a liability rather than a feature.

$10 a month, plus the credit the assistants use. Credit is prepaid in amounts of $20, $50, $100 or $500.

No. Credit bought today is still there in two years.

No - credit is not refundable once added, so add what you expect to use rather than filling it up. It also pays for AI assistants only and is not a balance against the other add-ons.

The assistants stop and say so. Nothing else in Rescuely is affected, and you are never billed after the fact for something you did not already pay for.

Yes. Set your own monthly limit on top of your balance and the assistants stop at that amount without touching your credit.

The animal’s own record is - species, breed, weight, status, care log entries. No person’s name, address, phone number or email is ever included. An adopter did not agree to that and none of these questions needs it. If you never turn the assistants on, nothing is sent at all.

You are not charged for it. A call that produced no answer costs nothing, and the attempt is still recorded so you can see it happened.

Yes. A fund is what the money is for - general operating, a spay/neuter program, a building campaign - and every donation is recorded against one, so you can answer what a fund actually holds.

A time-boxed fundraising effort with its own goal, tied to a fund. Donations against it roll up into its progress automatically rather than you totaling a spreadsheet by hand.

Yes - a soft credit records that a gift was made in someone’s name even though they were not the one who paid, so a memorial gift shows up correctly for both the donor and the person being honored.

A commitment to give an amount over time, broken into installments you record as they come in - useful for a multi-year capital pledge that is not one payment.

Yes. A sponsorship links a donor to a particular animal, for shelters that offer that as a way to give.

A donation that repeats automatically on a schedule, billed through your own Stripe account the same way a card adoption fee is. The first charge and every one after it become an ordinary recorded donation without anyone re-entering it.

One click cancels it in both places - the Stripe subscription stops billing the donor’s card, and your own giving records stop showing it as active - so there is nothing separate to go and do in Stripe.

1.5%, on top of whatever the payment processor charges. That covers the integration and keeping the two ledgers agreeing.

No. Recording a cash, check or waived adoption fee is free and always will be. Card processing is opt-in per shelter.

No. Card payments wait until your organization is verified, because taking money in a shelter’s name is exactly what a bad actor would want to do.

Yes. Create an event - an adoption day, an open house, a fundraiser - and people register for it themselves rather than you keeping a list by hand.

Yes. Post open shifts and volunteers sign up for the ones that work for them, so filling a schedule is not one person calling down a phone list.

Yes - an hours log per volunteer, which is what most shelters need for grant reporting or a year-end thank-you letter with a real number in it.

A shift is a block of time at your shelter; a task is a specific thing that needs doing - reachable by anyone with the right role, whether or not it is tied to a scheduled shift.

It is the same person record everyone else in Rescuely has, with volunteer details - availability, skills, the roles they can fill - added to it. A volunteer who later becomes a foster or an adopter is still one record, not three.

Yes. Roles carry specific permissions - a volunteer who may only log care is a real role, not an honor system - and every change is recorded in an audit trail.

Sign up normally. Rescuely recognizes that your organization is already here and turns your signup into a request to join it. The people who run your shelter approve it and you get a link to set a password.

No. Unlimited staff and volunteers on the free plan. Charging per seat would mean a shelter rationing who gets to record care, which is the opposite of what this is for.

Deactivate their account. Their history stays intact - who did what and when is part of the record and does not disappear when someone moves on.

Animals, intake and outcome, the QR care log, medical, people, foster, adoption, lost and found, wildlife, animal control field operations, diet and feeding, inventory and vendors, donors and giving, events and volunteers, reporting, the adoption listing feeds, three photos per animal, unlimited users, and full data export.

No. A county shelter with four hundred kennels pays the same as a rescue with nine foster homes.

What is free today for a shelter’s core work stays free. If we add something new that costs us money to run it may be a paid add-on, but we will not move something you already rely on behind a bill.

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. Money that came in for animals should stay with the animals.

Nothing. You run your shelter on Rescuely indefinitely with three photos an animal, no card payments and no AI. That is the whole product minus three conveniences.

At any time, and it never deletes anything. Extra photos go read-only, the API stops answering, the assistants stop. Your records stay where they are.

You do. We hold it so the software can run and so we can give it back, and we do not license it from you. Person records - your staff, and the adopters, fosters and surrenderers in your files - are never studied for any purpose of ours. Animal records may be, in aggregate and with no person or shelter named.

No. Every record carries your shelter’s id and every query is filtered by it - enforced by tests that inspect every database query and fail the build if one is missing the filter, not by care.

No. Not to advertisers, not to a data broker, not as an aggregate product. It is not part of the model.

In aggregate, yes: outcomes and length of stay, medical conditions that turn out to be common, and where an illness is showing up in more than one place at once. It carries no person, names no shelter, and is never sold. The privacy page sets out exactly what it covers and how to be left out of it.

CSV and JSON export of every table you own, on demand, at no charge, without asking anyone.

What you enter, minus the things nobody should store: identity documents are held as a type plus the last four characters, never a whole license or passport number, and never a date of birth or social security number.

Export everything, then close the account. We delete your data within thirty days, sooner if you ask.