Pricing
Free is the plan. Not the trial, not the tier.
Everything that runs a shelter costs nothing, forever. Four optional add-ons carry a real cost, they are priced at what they cost us, and each one is bought on its own.
Every shelter
$0 / forever
No card, no seat count, no per-adoption fee, no contract, no charge to export your data and leave.
- Unlimited animals, people, users and volunteers
- Intake, outcome, holds, movements, kennel board
- QR care log on every kennel, offline-tolerant
- Medical: exams, vaccinations, tests, surgeries, protocols
- Foster homes, placements, applications, adoption contracts
- Shelter Animals Count and Asilomar reporting
- Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet listing feeds
- Three photos per animal — what the listing feeds take
- Full CSV and JSON data export on demand
Add on, or don’t
Only what has a bill behind it.
Four add-ons: backups and unlimited photos at $25 a month, API access at $10, AI assistants at $10 plus the tokens you use, and donation processing at 1.5% on top of the payment processor’s own fees. Each is bought on its own; none of them is a bundle you have to take whole.
Everything here is opt-in per shelter, can be switched off without losing a record, and the AI spend cap is yours to set.
Rates are set at cost plus the processing overhead. If we ever get cheaper, so do you.
What costs money, and why.
Backups and unlimited photos
Nightly backups of everything your shelter has entered, plus as many photos per animal as you want to keep. Three photos is what the listing feeds take, so three is what every shelter gets free; a fourth photo is disk we rent every month for as long as you keep it. Stop paying and the extra photos go read-only rather than disappearing.
$25 / month
API access
The full REST API every screen in Rescuely already calls, opened to you: scoped, revocable keys with per-key rate limits, signed outbound webhooks, and an OpenAPI document. Serving and supporting an API that other people build against is real work and real capacity, so it is priced rather than absorbed. You do not need it to run a shelter — the listing feeds and the data export stay free.
+$10 / month
AI assistants on the animal dashboard
Care assistance in context, early warning on an animal that is going the wrong way, follow-up suggestions, and speech-to-text transcription of encounters and notes. Inference is billed to us per token, so tokens are billed to you per token on top of the monthly fee, with a hard cap you set and a running total you can see. Off by default.
+$10 / month + tokens
Donation processing
Taking a donation or an adoption fee by card means a processor takes their percentage and someone has to keep the two ledgers agreeing. We take 1.5% and the payment processor charges their own fees on top of that. Recording a cash, check or waived fee is free and always will be.
1.5% + processor fees
The questions a director asks next.
- What happens if I never pay?
- Nothing. You run your shelter on Rescuely indefinitely: animals, intake and outcome, the QR care log, medical, people, foster, adoption and the Shelter Animals Count and Asilomar reporting, with three photos an animal. What you do not get is nightly backups, photos past three, the API, the AI assistants and card payments. The work is free; the add-ons are the parts with a bill behind them.
- Is there a size where it stops being free?
- No. A county shelter with four hundred kennels pays the same as a rescue with nine foster homes.
- Will you sell my data?
- No. It is not part of the model, and the export exists so you can walk if we ever change our mind.
- What if I stop paying for backups and photos?
- The extra photos become read-only and stay downloadable, and the nightly backups stop. Your export never stops. We do not delete a shelter’s records over a bill.
- Why does API access cost money?
- An API other people build against is capacity we serve and support every day, and it is a developer capability rather than part of running a shelter. Ten dollars a month is what it costs us, and nothing that a shelter needs to do its work sits behind it.
- What does donation processing actually cost?
- Our 1.5%, plus whatever the payment processor charges on their own rate. Recording a cash, check or waived fee is free, so you can run the whole shelter without ever taking a card.
- How do I get my data out?
- CSV and JSON export of every table you own, on demand, at no charge, without asking anyone.
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.