I'm Kyle, PawPlacer's founder. Petstablished's free tier is only free once you route enough transactions through their in-house payment portal every month. The subscription isn't really the cost. The exit is.
That one structural choice is the reason most rescues end up on a call with us. This post walks through what leaving Petstablished actually involves, and why PawPlacer won't ever put you in that position.
The pricing, and the thread attached to it
Petstablished has two tiers that become "free" at threshold volume on their own payment portal:
- $24/mo for under 100 adoptions/year, waived at 5+ monthly transactions on their portal.
- $49/mo for 100+ adoptions/year, waived at 10+ monthly transactions on their portal.
The condition is the cost. To get to free, their portal has to be your portal.
PawPlacer:
| Plan | In-care pets | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free | up to 30 | $0 forever |
| Growth | up to 150 | $19/mo |
| Scale | up to 500 | $39/mo |
| Unlimited | no cap | $79/mo |
For rescues that want to use their own payment processor:
| Your rescue | Petstablished | PawPlacer |
|---|---|---|
| ~20 in care, <5 monthly transactions | $24/mo | $0 |
| ~40 in care, 20–30 monthly transactions off-portal | $24–$49/mo | $19 |
| ~200 in care, 30+ monthly off-portal | $49/mo | $39 |
Petstablished pricing verified April 2026. We'll update this post when it changes.
What leaving Petstablished actually looks like
Here's the part nobody tells you until you're in it.
Payment processor migration. Your current setup runs through Petstablished-branded processing. When you leave, adopters' saved payment methods don't follow. They're tied to Petstablished's merchant-of-record configuration, not yours. Any recurring donor on a monthly gift has to re-enter card info on the new system. Expect attrition in that handoff.
Donor receipts and tax letters. Historical receipts were issued through Petstablished. Your next annual tax-letter run will reference transactions that didn't happen on the same processor you're on now. Reconciling donor history across two processors is tedious, and year-end is the worst time to be doing it.
Transaction history linkage. Petstablished-processed transactions are joined to pets, adopters, and adoption records inside their database. Exports can carry the data over, but the audit trail ("this gift funded this pet's surgery on this date") often arrives as a flat table that someone has to reattach manually.
Dispute and refund windows. Open disputes or refund windows on Petstablished-processed transactions stay with Petstablished until they close. You run two systems for 60 to 120 days minimum.
None of this is unique to Petstablished. It's what happens whenever a platform sits between you and your money. It's also why we designed ours the opposite way.
PawPlacer and your money
You plug in your own Stripe account through Stripe Connect the day you sign up. When an adopter pays, Stripe routes funds to your connected Stripe account and pays out on your Stripe payout schedule. PawPlacer is not in the middle. We never see a dollar.
The 2.9% + $0.30 Stripe fee appears as a separate line on the adopter's receipt, so the adopter covers it. You keep the full adoption fee and the full donation.
If you leave, your Stripe account goes with you. Your donor history goes with you. Your customers' saved payment methods stay with them, because they're stored on your Stripe, not ours. There's no payment-processor migration because there's nothing to migrate. Your processor was always yours.
What you'd actually be switching to
Payments aren't the whole pitch. Most switchers walk in over Stripe and stay for things Petstablished hasn't kept up with.
Your website keeps working. Embeddable widgets drop into WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow with one line of code each. There's a widget for the full public profile, the adoptable-pets grid, an individual pet detail page, and every application form (adoption, foster, volunteer). Widgets auto-resize, cache up to an hour so your site stays fast, and match your site's look. Branding removal is on paid plans so visitors just see your rescue's site with modern software running underneath.
Applications are yours to design. The form builder is drag-and-drop. Add a fenced-yard question or a behavioral-history question in Settings between calls, save, and the public profile plus every embed updates instantly. No hardcoded fields, no change request, no waiting on a release cycle.
Adoption events feel modern. The mobile QR checkout was built for the Saturday PetSmart floor. Staff tablet has the pet pulled up, adopter is ready. Hand them a QR code. They finish the whole thing on their phone: donation, payment, agreement, e-signature. Pet auto-marks as Adopted and the record writes itself before you've packed up the X-pen.
AI matching ships on the free plan. Vector-embedding matching ranks applicants against every pet in your system with a plain-English reason per result, five hard guardrails running before the model scores, and a three-layer privacy scrub so applicant names and contact info never leave your database. Auto-disables for rescues in the EU, UK, and Switzerland for GDPR.
Records don't feel like a step backwards. Medical carries lot numbers, lot expirations, refill alerts, recurring follow-ups from daily through yearly, and a clean export for the adopter's vet. Reports span 13 entity types with dynamic date tokens so your monthly grant report stays self-maintaining. The TypeScript SDK with scoped API keys ships on every plan if you want to pipe data out. An AI-assisted CSV importer handles the way in.
The features page covers the rest.
Where Petstablished wins
Three places, to be fair:
Multi-portal syndication breadth. Petstablished syncs to Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, and RescueGroups.org. We sync to Petfinder only. Adopt-a-Pet and RescueGroups are on the roadmap, not shipping today. If multi-portal is a deal-breaker today, that's fair.
Longer track record. More years in market, more documented workflows, more forum answers for edge cases.
Deeper donor CRM automation. Their donor CRM and fundraising campaign tools are more developed than ours. PawPlacer tracks donor profiles, giving history, public donations, wishlist funding, item pledges, and manual gifts in the Fundraising Hub, but advanced campaign, recurring-giving, and tax-letter automation is not the product's center of gravity yet.
If you're thinking about switching
If you've been on Petstablished for years and it works, stay. Migration is a real project and "it works" is a strong reason to keep something that works.
If you're starting fresh, or you're tired of the implicit trade where "free" means routing your payments through someone else's portal, spin up an account. No credit card. Bring your own Stripe from day one. Keep it the day you leave.
