The deal, in the words we would use out loud.

What is free

Animals, intake and outcome, the QR care log, medical, people, foster, adoption, reporting, the adoption listing feeds, and three photos per animal. No fee per adoption, no seat count, no time limit, and no charge to export your data and leave.

What is free today for a shelter’s core work stays free. If we ever 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.

What costs money

Each add-on is bought on its own. None of them is required to run a shelter.

• Backups & unlimited photos — $25 a month.
• API access — $10 a month, for the REST API, scoped keys and signed webhooks.
• AI assistants — $10 a month, plus the credit the assistants use.
• Donation processing — 1.5%, on top of whatever the payment processor charges.

We will give you at least thirty days’ notice before a price goes up, and you can cancel an add-on at any time. Canceling never deletes anything: extra photos become read-only, the API stops answering, the assistants stop. Your records stay exactly where they are.

AI credit

AI is prepaid. You add credit in amounts of $20, $50, $100 or $500, the assistants spend against it, and when it runs out they stop. Nothing is ever billed to you after the fact.

Three things to know before you add credit:

• It does not expire. Credit bought today is still there in two years.
• It is not refundable once added. We cannot turn it back into money, so add what you expect to use rather than filling it up.
• It pays for AI assistants only. It is not a balance against the other add-ons.

You can also set your own monthly limit on top of your balance, which stops the assistants at an amount you choose without touching the credit itself. If an assistant fails on our side you are not charged for it.

Verifying your shelter

Free software attracts people who are not running a shelter, so we check that you are. Until you are verified you have every part of the product that runs a shelter; what waits is publishing to the adoption listing sites, sending bulk email from your shelter’s name, and taking card payments.

We may decline or withdraw verification if an organization is not what it said it was. If we are wrong about you, say so and a person will look.

Your data

It is yours. Full CSV and JSON export on demand, free, without asking anyone. We do not sell it, and we do not hold it to keep you. We do study animal records in aggregate — never person records, and never naming a shelter — which the privacy page sets out in full.

You are responsible for what you put in it — particularly for the people in your records, who gave their details to you rather than to us.

What we will not promise

That the service will never be down. It runs on one well-kept server rather than three data centers, because the alternative is the kind of cost that turns free software into $2 an adoption. Keep exporting if a day of downtime would be serious for you.

Rescuely is software for keeping records. It is not veterinary advice, legal advice, or a substitute for either — and that goes double for anything an AI assistant drafts, all of which is a draft for a person to check before it becomes part of an animal’s record.

Ending it

Close your account whenever you like. We will close one that is being used to do something illegal, or to harm animals or people, and we will say why.

Changes to these terms

We will email you before anything here changes in a way that matters, and the pricing and AI credit terms above will not change for credit you have already bought.

Asking us

hello@rescuely.net. A real person reads it.