Shelterluv's $2-per-adoption pricing is invisible at 30 placements a month. It's $600 at 300 placements, and $1,000 in a kitten-season peak. The model works against the exact months you most need slack.
I'm Kyle, PawPlacer's founder. Shelterluv is a serious product made by people who've been serving this community for a long time, and the municipal-shelter side of what they do (bite quarantines, legal holds, compliance reporting) is a category we don't touch. If you're a muni, stay where you are. This post is for volunteer and foster rescues running 10 to 500 pets in care at any given time.
The quick answer
- Shelterluv is $2/adoption. PawPlacer is flat on in-care pets. Free up to 30, $79/mo ceiling.
- Your success doesn't raise your bill with us.
- The free plan is the whole platform, not a trial.
- Your Stripe, 0% cut, direct to your bank.
The math
Shelterluv: $2 per adoption, billed monthly. Transfers, RTOs, and TNR don't carry the fee. No per-user charges, no setup fees. If your volume is steady, the model is fair.
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 |
"In care" = pets you're actively caring for. Once an animal is adopted, transferred, or returned to owner, it stops counting. Place 80 this month, end with 25 in care, you're on the free plan.
Side by side:
| Monthly adoptions | Typical in-care | Shelterluv | PawPlacer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | ~20 | $20 | $0 |
| 50 | ~40 | $100 | $19 |
| 150 | ~120 | $300 | $19 |
| 300 | ~300 | $600 | $39 |
| 500 | ~500 | $1,000 | $39 |
At 500 placements, one month of Shelterluv ≈ two years of PawPlacer on Scale. The per-adoption model costs you most in the months budgets are already tightest.
Shelterluv pricing verified April 2026. Check shelterluv.com/pricing for the current number; we'll update this post when it changes.
Two different bets on pricing
Shelterluv bets on a rescue's volume staying roughly predictable. When that holds, the math is fine.
We bet on a different shape: rescues that scale, have bursty seasons, and can't absorb an unpredictable bill. In-care pricing gives you budget predictability. Your bill is a function of your current headcount, not how hard you ran last month. A big adoption weekend reduces next month's ceiling; it doesn't raise it.
Pick the model that matches your reality.
Built for a team, not a solo operator
Shelterluv is solid on records. At the volumes where the per-adoption math starts hurting, you're usually also running a team, and that's where the feature comparison actually shifts.
Your medical coordinator and your adoption counselor can share the same pet list with different columns and different sort orders, because table settings are keyed per user. No fighting over column layouts. No one accidentally hiding the spay/neuter column for the whole team at 8am. Volunteer scheduling has four calendar views so each coordinator sees what they need. Kanban task boards, tags on every entity, and activity timelines on every record give you a shared audit trail without a separate PM tool.
The medical module is the part that could sit next to clinic software. Vaccines with lot numbers and lot expirations, prescriptions with refill alerts before the window closes, procedures with complications and recovery instructions, recurring follow-ups from daily through yearly, a shared medications database, and 22 built-in document types. The adopter leaves with a clean export their own vet can actually read.
Events are the other place volume rescues feel it. Mobile QR adoption checkouts were built for the Saturday floor at PetSmart. Staff tablet has the pet pulled up. Adopter is ready. Hand them a QR code and they finish the whole thing on their phone: donation, payment, agreement, e-signature. The pet auto-marks as Adopted and the record writes itself before you've packed the X-pen into the van.
AI matching ships on the free plan. Vector embeddings, five hard guardrails running before the model scores (species, aggression plus kids, reactive plus other animals, foster capacity, size-vs-housing), three-layer privacy scrub, GDPR auto-disable. Forms are drag-and-drop in Settings, not hardcoded. Embeddable widgets drop into WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, or raw HTML with one line of code each, so your existing website keeps working.
And when the reports request from the board gets oddly specific, the builder runs across 13 entity types with nine filter operators, aggregation, and dynamic date tokens ({TODAY-30}, {START_OF_MONTH}) so your rolling grant report just keeps running.
A TypeScript SDK with scoped API keys, custom pet statuses with care-state flags, bonded pairs, Google Maps transport routing, food schedules with allergen conflict detection, a flyer designer, and an AI-assisted CSV importer are on the full features page if you want more.
Your money
Your Stripe, not ours. Funds route to your connected Stripe account and pay out on your Stripe payout schedule. The 2.9% + $0.30 is a separate line on the adopter's receipt, so the adopter covers it. You keep the whole adoption fee, the whole donation. Keep your Stripe, your donor list, and your transaction history the day you leave.
Where Shelterluv wins
Municipal and compliance workflows. Bite quarantine, legal holds, intake disposition codes, government audit trails. Shelterluv ships this; we don't and we won't.
Standalone fundraising campaign tooling. PawPlacer has a Fundraising Hub for donations, donor profiles, wishlist support, setup status, and reconciliation, but Shelterluv's dedicated campaign workflows are more mature.
Multi-portal syndication. We sync to Petfinder; Adopt-a-Pet and RescueGroups.org are roadmap, not shipping.
Years of institutional polish. More case studies, more forum answers, more vets who've used the system.
Specific donor-CRM integrations. QuickBooks and Mailchimp aren't plug-and-play yet. Our API bridges most of them, but that's not one-click.
If any is a deal-breaker, Shelterluv is the call.
Take it to your board
Run your actual numbers against the pricing table above. If Shelterluv still wins, stay.
If we win, the free plan is the whole platform up to 30 in-care pets. Import with the CSV uploader, flip on matching, embed your pet grid on the website you already run. If it doesn't fit, your data exports cleanly and you're out.
