Why we don't take commission

I am writing this as the founder of the directory, not in third person, because I want you to know who decided this and why.

Most platforms in this space take 15 to 25 percent of every booking. Rover takes 15 percent from sitters plus 5 to 7 percent from owners. Gudog takes around 20 percent. Pawshake similar. The model is borrowed from Airbnb and it works for Airbnb because there are only so many spare rooms in central London and the platform produces real demand for them.

It does not work for dog care.

The problem with commission in this category

When a platform takes a cut of every booking, three things happen that quietly damage the product.

First, the platform's incentive shifts away from quality and towards volume. Every booking is revenue, regardless of whether the sitter is good. A platform on commission has no reason to remove the mediocre sitters - they still pay.

Second, the sitter's incentive shifts away from the platform and towards taking clients off-platform. A walker who finds you on Rover and clicks immediately with you both knows there is a 20 percent tax on every future walk. The walker pockets the first booking, swaps numbers, and you never see the platform again. The platform's response is to make off-platform contact harder, which makes the booking experience worse.

Third, and most importantly for the UK, the commission model is incompatible with how licensed operators want to work. A licensed daycare with a 5-star council inspection has built a real business with real overheads. They are not running a side hustle from a spare room. Asking them to surrender 20 percent of their rates to a third party that has no licensing relationship with them is a non-starter. So those operators stay off the platforms, and you end up with a directory full of the people who could not get a licence.

I have spent a year talking to UK walkers, daycare owners and home boarders. The same story comes up. The licensed operators do not bother with Rover. The unlicensed sitters live on it. That is a structural problem caused by the model, not by any one decision.

What we do instead

GoodHound makes money in one way. Businesses pay a small flat monthly fee to be listed, currently £19 per month for the standard tier. That is it. We do not take a cut of any booking. We do not push you towards a specific operator. We do not have a "preferred partner" tier that costs the operator more and gets them better placement.

The implication for you is that the price the operator quotes is the price you pay. If Walks with the Pack charges £18 for a group walk in Bristol, you pay them £18. There is no platform fee, no service charge, no insurance levy added at checkout. The booking happens directly between you and the business.

The implication for the operator is that they keep their margins. A 5-star home boarder in Liverpool charging £40 a night keeps £40 a night. On a commission platform, they would keep £32. That is the difference between a sustainable small business and one that quietly cuts corners to absorb the platform tax.

What it lets us do

Because we are not pulled by booking volume, we can be selective.

A business does not appear on this site unless we have matched it to a real council licence record under the DEFRA 2018 regulations. The star rating shown is the council's, not ours. The reference number is the one the council issued. If a licence expires and is not renewed, the listing is removed. If a council suspends a licence, the listing is removed within 14 days.

A commission platform cannot operate this way. The platform with 200,000 listings and 19 percent of the UK pet care GMV is not going to remove revenue-generating sitters because their paperwork lapsed. We can. We will.

What we are not

We are not a booking platform. The booking happens on the operator's own site, by phone, or by text. We surface the operator, the licence, the council, and the recent reviews. The transaction is theirs.

This means the booking experience varies. Some operators have slick online booking. Some are still phone-only. A small number will ask you for a deposit by bank transfer and not by Stripe. That is the trade-off for going direct. The operator pockets the margin and the relationship is between you and them.

We are also not impartial about which operators we like. The directory ranks businesses by licence rating, review quality, and how complete their listing is - not by how much they pay us. The £19 tier is the same £19 whether you have one location or twelve. There is no way to pay us to rank higher. There is no editorial relationship between our blog and any business we have ever spoken to about a listing.

The honest version

Building a directory without commission means slower growth. A commission platform scales by adding sitters, taking their cut, and spending the cut on Google ads. We grow by writing about why councils licence dog care, what star ratings mean, why this matters, and getting people to find us through search.

It is a slower way to grow. It is the only way to grow that does not poison the product. If we ever switch on commission, you will know the directory has been bought by someone who does not understand the category.

For now, the model is the model. Listings pay the bills. The booking is yours. The licence is the gate.

Thanks for reading. If you want to know more about how we verify licences or what we check before a business goes live, the DEFRA licence explainer is the next thing to read.