It started with a question nobody could answer

Somebody asked, in a group of rescue people, whether there was a national do-not-adopt registry. There was not. That question is why RescueConsole exists.

Who we are

We are Jeff and Heather, a husband-and-wife team who have been together for more than twenty-five years. We came to this the way a lot of rescue people do: we adopted two cats, and then we both started volunteering at the rescue they came from.

Jeff has spent twenty-five years in IT, most of it automating work that people should not have to do by hand. Heather is the creative one: she designed the graphics and the branding for that rescue's marketing. She owns 51% of the company, so RescueConsole is woman-owned.

What we saw

From the inside, we both saw the same thing: almost all of it was done by hand.

Vaccine labels were peeled off the bottle and stuck to a paper sheet. Later, when somebody had time, the sheet was typed into a shared spreadsheet. In between, nobody could say for certain what had been done to a cat: the record existed, on paper, in a folder, in a room. Microchips were registered by typing the number out again on somebody else's website. At adoption events, everyone signed into Square on their own phone, and if a payment came through Zelle or Venmo or CashApp, somebody texted the treasurer to ask whether it had landed. Which cat was in which cubby was written down by hand. Volunteer hours lived in a spreadsheet, and whether anybody had actually turned up was a message in a group chat.

None of that is anybody's fault. It is what happens when the work is urgent, the money is short, and the software either does not exist or does not fit.

What we found when we went looking

So we looked for something to buy. The free platforms were half built, and none of them would say how they were funded, which meant no way to judge whether they would still be there in two years. The cheap ones were a different problem: they would not let us bring our own data in, they restricted how we could get it back out, and the low price held only while nearly every adoption was paid through their own checkout. Take more than six in a hundred some other way, by cash, by check or through an app, and every one past that cost twenty dollars instead of two.

Then there were the tip requests and the marketing upsells shown to our adopters after checkout, which we could not turn off and did not see a cent of. The volunteer platforms charged heavily and still covered only part of what a shelter does.

What we decided

A rescue keeps what it raises. One dollar per adoption. No hidden fees, nothing charged per feature, no tip requests at your adopter's checkout, and no cut of your card processor's fee. If we ever do offer something after checkout, you choose the partners and you keep the commission.

Your data is yours. Every list exports to CSV, any time, and there is an API. If the import or the export does not do what you need, say so in the feedback form inside the app and we will do our best to make it happen.

How we work

We publish what has shipped and what has not: the changelog is written for the people who run rescues rather than for engineers, and the roadmap carries no dates, on purpose.

You do not have to take any of this on faith. Open the demo and look around, or tell us what does not fit the way you work. What rescues ask for is most of how the roadmap gets written.