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.
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 and vaccine protocol scheduling
Standard intake exams, vaccine series, and spay/neuter scheduling run against protocol templates built for shelter volume — the same clinical charting depth as a full vet practice, applied to dozens of animals moving through at once instead of one scheduled appointment at a time.
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.
Volunteer scheduling
Volunteer shifts, dog-walking rotations, and cattery/kennel cleaning assignments sit on the same scheduling system as your paid staff — a shelter runs on volunteer hours as much as payroll hours, and the software should treat both as real schedule slots.
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.
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 runs $48/mo, waived entirely once a shelter processes 10 or more monthly microchip registrations or adoption payments through its payment portal. RescueGroups.org's Pet Adoption Portal is genuinely free (a separate paid Adoption Toolkit tier runs about $75/yr, if a shelter wants that add-on). Pawlytics moved off its old per-adoption pricing to tiered monthly plans starting at $29/mo as of April 2024 — the $1/adoption rate people still associate with it now only applies during a 3-month trial for new, low-volume rescues. 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.
Three more things we tell every prospective customer upfront: there's no Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet listing sync today (see above); there's no built-in payment processing inside Vivetra itself — your shelter is never locked into a specific processor or a per-transaction cut on your donors' or adopters' payments; and we're a new, unproven vendor next to competitors with real years-long track records. All three are true, and none 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.
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.
Does Vivetra Shelter sync to Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet?