The story behind Animal Friends OS
Animal Friends OS is built by an operator who has been running a pet-care shop since 2013.
Before Animal Friends OS was a line of code, it was a grooming table, a pair of shears, and a dog that would not stop moving.
Animal Friends OS is built by an operator who has been running a pet-care shop since 2013. Not as a side project, not as a stepping stone to something else—as the thing. He opened a pet care facility in Florida with the kind of naive ambition that only works if you are too stubborn to quit. No investors. No trust fund. Just a facility, a handful of clients, and the willingness to be the first person in the building every morning and the last one to leave.
Animal Friends OS is built by an operator who has been running a pet-care shop since 2013. Not through marketing tricks or growth hacks—through the kind of work that shows up in five-star reviews written by people who actually bring their dogs back. The kind of reputation you cannot buy or manufacture.
The business grew beyond grooming. Boarding. Daycare. Dog training. Pet transport. A monthly membership program with active members paying for ongoing care packages. Staff scheduling, payroll, inventory, client communications—all the operational complexity that hits you when your one-person operation becomes a real business with employees and systems and responsibilities.
"I did not set out to build software. I set out to run a pet care business. The software part happened because the industry left me no choice."
Every pet care facility owner knows the feeling. You sign up for a software platform that promises to solve everything. Scheduling, client management, payments, communications. The demo looks great. The salesperson is enthusiastic. You commit.
Then reality hits.
Chase tried them all. Spreadsheets, which worked until they did not, which was always at the worst possible time.
The pattern was always the same. Software built by technology people who had never worked in pet care. Features that looked impressive on a features page but collapsed under the weight of how a real facility actually operates. Client communication systems that texted customers from the software company's phone number, not yours. Payment processors that took a cut of your revenue on top of your monthly subscription. Pricing models that charged per employee, punishing you for growing your team.
And then there was the private equity problem.
Over the last decade, private equity firms have systematically acquired pet care software companies. The playbook is always the same: buy the company, cut costs, raise prices, extract maximum value before the next sale. Innovation dies. Support degrades. Prices double, then triple. You are locked in because migrating your client data to a new system feels impossible, and they know it.
He watched prices climb industry-wide. He watched features stagnate while billing got more aggressive. Annual contracts with auto-renewal clauses. Per-user fees that made hiring expensive in a new, invisible way. Transaction fees that skimmed money off the top of every credit card swipe.
"I remember sitting at my desk at 11 PM, trying to figure out why my software was texting my clients from a random 1-800 number instead of my business line. That was the night I decided I was done paying someone else to make my life harder."
Chase is not a computer science graduate. He did not attend a coding bootcamp. He taught himself Node.js, MySQL, and Express by reading documentation, watching tutorials, and building things that broke until they did not break anymore. He did this while running a full-time pet care operation with staff, clients, and animals that needed attention regardless of what was happening on his laptop.
The first version was ugly. It barely worked. Not theoretical problems imagined by a product manager in a conference room—real problems experienced by a real operator in a real facility.
Booking that actually matched how pet care scheduling works, not how restaurant reservations work. Client profiles that tracked grooming notes, vaccination records, behavioral flags, and feeding instructions in one place. SMS communication that came from his business phone number, not a generic software number. Payment processing through his own merchant account, at his negotiated rate, with zero transaction fees going to the software company.
Every feature in Animal Friends OS exists because Chase needed it. Not because an investor told him to build it. Because at 7 AM, standing at a grooming table with a nervous golden retriever and a fully booked schedule, he needed that feature to exist—and it did not.
The appointment system handles multi-service bookings because pet care is not a one-service business. The staff scheduling module accounts for grooming skill levels because you do not assign a new hire to a full dematting session. The boarding calendar tracks feeding schedules, medication times, and exercise routines because boarding is not hotel management—it is animal care.
Over months, then years, the system grew. QuickBooks integration. Payroll. A client portal. A branded client app. iDogCam camera integration for boarding transparency. A website builder. Two-way SMS. Automated reminders. Waitlists. Multi-location support for franchise operations.
It was no longer a scrappy internal tool. It was a full operating system for pet care businesses.
"Every line of code in this platform was written by someone who has been bitten, scratched, peed on, and covered in dog hair. That is not a sales pitch. That is a design philosophy."
When Chase decided to make Animal Friends OS available to other pet care facilities, the first question everyone asked was about pricing. By conventional SaaS wisdom, Chase should have priced high and offered discounts.
He did the opposite.
Three plans: Starter $69, Professional $109, and Premium $169 a month, plus a one-time $49 activation fee that covers carrier registration for texting and moving your data over. The plans differ on how many marketing messages you send and whether you get your own texting number — not on whether you get the software. No transaction fees. No per-employee charges. Unlimited staff on Professional and Premium; Starter includes up to 3. No annual contracts. Month to month. Use your own payment processor. Use your own SMS provider. Cancel whenever you want.
This is not a loss leader. This is not a freemium trap. Animal Friends OS is built by an operator who has been running a pet-care shop since 2013.
AFPC Industries LLC—the company behind Animal Friends OS—will never take investors. No venture capital. No private equity. No outside shareholders. Chase owns 100% of the company and intends to keep it that way. Over a decade of work went into building this. The moment you take outside money, you take on the obligation to generate returns for someone who has never cleaned a kennel.
"I would rather have 10,000 facilities paying $69 a month than 1,000 facilities paying $250. One of those models builds a community. The other one builds a hostage situation."
The math works. $69 a month from thousands of facilities is a real business. A business that does not need to raise prices to satisfy investors. A business that does not need to nickel-and-dime its customers with transaction fees and per-seat charges. A business that can focus entirely on building a better product because its incentives are aligned with its users.
When a private equity firm buys your software vendor, they are not investing in your success. They are investing in their ability to charge you more. Animal Friends OS is the antidote to that model.
Animal Friends OS is not the endgame. It is the engine.
Chase's vision extends beyond software. The long-term mission is Animal Friends in every city—a national network of pet care facilities operating under the Animal Friends brand, each one running on Animal Friends OS, each one held to the standard that operators expect.
The software funds the franchise. The franchise spreads the brand. The brand raises the standard of pet care everywhere it goes.
This is a long-term plan, already in motion. The software is live. The first facility has been proving the model for over a decade. The franchise framework is in development. And every pet care facility that signs up for Animal Friends OS becomes part of an ecosystem designed by someone who started exactly where they are: standing at a grooming table, wondering why the software does not work.
The pet care industry is a $150 billion market served by software companies that treat it as an afterthought. Animal Friends OS was built by someone who has dedicated his career to it. Not because pet care was an attractive market opportunity identified by an analyst—because it is his life's work.
"The mission is simple: help pets and help the people who take care of them. Everything else—the software, the franchise, the brand—is just how we get there."
If you run a pet care facility and you are tired of paying too much for software built by people who do not understand your business, Animal Friends OS was built for you. By someone who does what you do, every single day.
Join pet care facilities across the country running on Animal Friends OS.