Shelterluv Pricing Explained

Shelterluv is one of the few shelter software vendors that publishes its pricing, and the model deserves credit for being genuinely simple: no quote process, no tier matrix, no contract negotiation. But the pieces are easy to mix up. There's a software fee, a payment-processing rate, and an optional adopter-paid fee — three different numbers that routinely get blurred into one — and what you'll actually pay over a year depends almost entirely on a single variable: how many adoptions you complete.

This is the plain-English breakdown. Shelterluv's own pricing pages can be hard to reach for some readers and crawlers, so we've compiled the published numbers here with dates and sources. Everything below comes from Shelterluv's published pricing article (dated June 21, 2025), its help-center documentation on covered fees, and Capterra's 2026 listing, all verified in July 2026. If you're reading this much later, confirm the current numbers directly with the vendor.

The three numbers

Shelterluv's pricing comes down to three numbers. Only the first is an unconditional charge to your organization. The second applies only to card payments you run through its built-in payment system. The third is optional and paid by adopters — not by you.

1. The software fee: $2.00 per adoption

Per Shelterluv's published pricing article (June 21, 2025; corroborated by Capterra's 2026 listing), the core software fee is $2.00 USD per adoption, billed monthly. Other outcomes — transfers and return-to-owner among them — are free. There are no yearly charges, no setup fee, no add-on fees, and no support fees.

That one number is essentially the whole software price list. Shelterluv publishes no tiers and no monthly minimum — none published, so check with the vendor if your situation is unusual. Complete 40 adoptions in a month and the software bill for that month is $80; complete 5 and it's $10.

2. Payment processing on Shelterpay: 3.4% + $0.30

Card payments processed through Shelterpay, Shelterluv's built-in payment system, run 3.4% + $0.30 per transaction — a rate Shelterluv's pricing article attributes to the payment processor. For comparison, standard processors such as Stripe publicly list 2.9% + $0.30, about half a point lower.

Two things keep this number in perspective. First, it applies to card transactions through Shelterpay only — adoption fees collected in cash or by check never touch it. Second, the gap is modest in absolute terms: on a $150 adoption fee, 3.4% + $0.30 comes to $5.40, versus $4.65 at the standard 2.9% rate — a difference of 75 cents per transaction. Across 500 card payments a year at that average, the half point works out to roughly $375. Real money, and worth a line in the budget, but not a headline.

3. The covered fee: an optional 2.6%, paid by the adopter

This is the number that gets garbled most often online, so it's worth stating precisely. At Shelterpay checkout, an adopter can opt in to cover fees. When they do, the covered amount includes your organization's processing fees and software fee, plus an additional 2.6% paid to Shelterluv. If the adopter declines, your organization is not charged the 2.6%.

In other words: the covered fee is adopter-paid and optional, not a charge on your organization. When adopters do opt in, it offsets costs you would otherwise have paid yourself.

What the software fee adds up to in a year

Because the software fee is per adoption, annual cost is a straight multiplication: adoptions per year × $2.00. Here's the published rate at four volumes, next to Pet Friend's flat published plans for scale:

Read the table honestly and the crossover is obvious: at low volume, per-adoption pricing is the cheaper software bill, and it isn't close. At 100 adoptions a year, Shelterluv's published fee is $200 — a third less than our least expensive plan. The lines cross around 150 adoptions a year, and above that the flat bill pulls ahead, by more the busier you get.

The budgeting angle: flat versus usage-based

Most shelters and rescues run on hard budgets. Municipal agencies submit line items a year ahead; nonprofits write software costs into grant applications and board-approved budgets months before the money is spent. That's where the difference between the two models shows up in practice, separate from which one is cheaper.

A flat bill can be written into next year's budget in advance, to the dollar. A usage-based bill moves with your best months — and the months that spike it are precisely your most successful ones. There's something backwards about a strong adoption season reading like a cost overrun on the software line, even when the per-animal cost is small.

If you want the break-even points against Pet Friend's plans, they're clean numbers:

Above each threshold, the flat plan costs less, and the gap widens with every additional adoption. For the broader picture of what shelter software costs — including the setup fees, add-ons, and per-record charges some other vendors layer on — see our guide to animal shelter software costs.

When Shelterluv's model works in your favor

We'd rather be straight about this than pretend the math always points our way: for small organizations, per-adoption pricing is genuinely cheap. A foster-based rescue completing 60 adoptions a year pays about $120 in software fees — less than half our cheapest plan — for a capable, well-designed platform. Seasonal organizations do well too: quiet months cost nearly nothing, because the bill scales down as readily as it scales up.

If that describes you and you're happy with the product, the pricing model is working in your favor and staying put may be the right call. The case for a flat-priced alternative gets stronger as your volume grows past the break-even points above, or when budget predictability starts to matter more than squeezing the software line to its minimum. For the fuller product-to-product comparison beyond pricing — migration, data ownership, features — see our Shelterluv alternative page.

Sources

All figures above were verified in July 2026 against the following public sources:

• Shelterluv, “Pricing and What it Includes” (published June 21, 2025) — the $2.00 per-adoption software fee, free non-adoption outcomes, the absence of yearly/setup/add-on/support fees, and the 3.4% + $0.30 Shelterpay rate it attributes to the payment processor.
• Capterra, Shelterluv listing (2026) — corroborates the $2.00 per-adoption price.
• Shelterluv help center, “Covered Fees Overview and FAQ” — how the adopter opt-in covered fee works, including the additional 2.6% paid to Shelterluv and the fact that organizations aren't charged it when adopters decline.

Pricing changes. Before you budget around any number here — ours included — confirm it directly with the vendor.

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