Shelter service
Built for animal-shelter intake, medical, and adoption — on the same record as the rest of your clinical work
A shelter isn't a clinic with more cages — it's intake exams and stray holds, vaccine and spay/neuter protocols run at volume, foster placements that come and go, and an adoption process that has to hold up as a real record, not just a spreadsheet. Vivetra's Shelter service runs all of that on the same shared-core deployment as every other service — one animal record from intake through adoption, one billing system, unlimited staff and volunteers.
$200/mo as your first service — unlimited staff and volunteers, fully managed hosting included in that price, not a footnote. +$50/mo if added to an existing Vivetra deployment that already runs another service.
Two pages your shelter can put on its own website
Both are public. No login, no account, no portal — a visitor never knows they're looking at your management system, because from their side they aren't. You switch each one on, set its bounds, and frame it into your own site.
Your adoptable animals, live
A staff member marks an animal adoptable in Vivetra and it appears on a public listing page fed by the same record your medical and intake staff already keep. You control what shows — photos or no photos, adoption fee or no fee, and how many animals a visitor sees at once. Nobody re-uploads a photo to a second website, and nobody forgets to take down the dog who went home on Saturday.
Online donations, without a donation platform
A public one-time donation page with suggested amounts you set, an optional dedication, and the option to give anonymously. The donor is handed to Stripe's own hosted checkout — no card number ever touches your deployment — and the gift lands back on your shelter's books. It runs on your shelter's own Stripe account, so your Stripe relationship and your processing rates stay yours, with a small Vivetra platform fee on top of Stripe's own rate.
What adopters, fosters, and donors see
Behind those two public pages there's a real portal for the people who take an animal home or foster one — so the adoption process stops living in an inbox and a folder of scanned PDFs.
Applications that arrive as records
An adopter or a prospective foster applies online and the application lands attached to the animal and the person, in the system, where the next volunteer on shift can find it — not in whoever's email happened to be on the contact form.
Adoption paperwork, signed where they are
Adoption and foster agreements and forms are e-signed from a phone or a laptop, and the signed copy stays on the animal's record. No printing, no scanning, no “we'll mail it back.”
Adoption fees paid online
An adopter can pay the fee from the portal, with a card kept on file if they'd rather — through your shelter's own connected Stripe account, on your own Stripe rates.
Follow-up and the foster journal
Post-adoption follow-up and a foster's own journal of how an animal is doing come back into the same record, so the history of an animal placed out of the building isn't a gap you fill in later from memory.
Built for how a shelter actually moves an animal through intake
Intake and stray-hold tracking
Owner-surrender, stray, and transfer intakes each carry their own hold-period clock and disposition path — so the legally required stray-hold window is tracked against the record itself, not a whiteboard or a separate spreadsheet someone has to remember to check.
Medical intake and behavior assessment
Every intake gets full medical charting on the same clinical depth as a vet practice, plus a structured behavior assessment that flags a bite history or reactivity directly onto the animal's record — not a sticky note on a kennel door.
Adoption workflow with foster tracking
Adoption applications, holds, and finalized adoptions move through a structured workflow tied to the animal's full medical history — and an animal placed in foster care keeps its record current with the foster's location and check-in status the whole time it's out of the building.
Cruelty-case and legal-hold tracking
Cruelty, neglect, and custody-dispute seizures get their own structured case record — docket number, seizing agency, bond amount and deadline, next hearing date — with every seized animal linked to the case so nothing gets adopted out or transferred while a court still has to decide.
Unlimited staff and volunteers, one flat price
Add a foster coordinator, a dozen weekend dog-walking volunteers, or a second intake tech without a per-seat quote — the price above doesn't change because your headcount grows.
One record, intake through adoption
The same animal record that opens at intake carries every exam, vaccine, foster placement, and behavior note through to the adoption or transfer that closes it out — no separate adoption-tracking tool to reconcile against your medical system.
Where we're honest about the gap
Here's the question we'd ask first if we ran a shelter, so we're going to answer it before you have to ask: the shelter software market is saturated with free or near-free options, and every real competitor in this category syndicates its adoptable animals to Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet. Vivetra Shelter currently does neither. That's the sharpest honest gap of any service we offer, and we'd rather you hear it here than discover it partway through a demo. The public listing page described above is a real, useful thing, and it is not the same thing: it reaches the people who already found your website, and syndication reaches the ones who haven't. We're not going to pretend one closes the other.
Shelterluv charges $2.00 per adoption, billed monthly, with every other outcome — transfer, return-to-owner, and the rest — free, and no monthly or setup fee on top of that. Petstablished publishes $48/mo on its subscription-plans page, waived entirely once a shelter processes 10 or more monthly microchip registrations or adoption payments through its payment portal — though it publishes at least two other figures elsewhere on its own site (a $49/$24 split by annual adoption volume, and a flat “free to use” claim), so confirm which one a quote actually reflects. RescueGroups.org's Pet Adoption Portal is genuinely free; its other services are priced separately by the year — Data Management $75/yr, Website $100/yr, Online Forms $59/yr. Pawlytics moved off flat per-adoption pricing to tiers set by adoption volume as of April 2024 — $29/mo at 0–24, $49/mo at 25–49, and $1 per adoption plus $1 per contract at 50+, which is also the overage rate when a lower tier's volume is exceeded. PetPoint and Chameleon, both from the same parent company, and ShelterBuddy round out the larger-shelter end of the market — ShelterBuddy publishes no public pricing figure at all, and quotes contact-vendor-for-pricing; it was genuinely founded by RSPCA Queensland in Australia, though the company is now headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Two more things we tell every prospective customer upfront: there's no Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet listing sync today (see above), and we're a new, unproven vendor next to competitors with real years-long track records. Both are true, and neither is a footnote.
The closest thing to our pricing model
There's one existing product in this category whose pricing model actually resembles ours: Shelter Manager (also known as ASM) — GPL open-source, self-hostable, built by Sheltermanager Ltd, a company genuinely based in England and Wales. Of every vendor in this segment, it's the closest analog to Vivetra's own flat-rate approach, rather than a per-adoption or per-seat subscription.
The difference is what you're not doing yourself. Shelter Manager's self-hosted path means your shelter's own IT volunteer or contractor runs the server, applies the patches, and restores the backup if something goes wrong. Vivetra is fully managed for you — we operate the deployment as part of your monthly price, so nobody at your shelter ever touches a server. And where Shelter Manager is a standalone shelter tool, Vivetra Shelter runs on the same shared core as our full veterinary-practice service — the same clinical charting depth a vet clinic uses, applied to shelter intake and medical volume, not a separate lighter-weight system built just for adoption tracking.
Questions about this service
Does Vivetra Shelter sync to Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet?
Not yet. Every established competitor in this category offers that sync today, and we'd rather say so plainly than let a demo surprise you with it. It's the clearest gap between Vivetra Shelter and the rest of the field right now. What we do have is a public, no-login adoptable-animals page you can embed in your own website, fed straight from the animals your staff mark adoptable — useful, and genuinely not the same thing. That page reaches the people who already found your website. Syndication reaches the people who haven't.
Can we take donations without buying a separate donation platform?
Yes. Vivetra Shelter includes a public, no-login donations page you can switch on and embed in your own site — one-time gifts, suggested amounts you set, an optional dedication, and the option to give anonymously. The donor is handed to Stripe's own hosted checkout, so no card number ever touches your deployment, and the gift comes back onto your shelter's books. It runs on your shelter's own Stripe account: your Stripe relationship and your processing rates stay yours, with a small Vivetra platform fee on top of Stripe's own rate.
See your own price
Pick this service alone, or bundle it with the others your practice group needs, and see the exact monthly number before you talk to anyone.