Four things we'd rather tell you upfront than bury in fine print.
CritterKey is free for owners, full stop. Shelters and vets fund verification on their side — that's the business model that lets owners stay free.
No upsell pressure to keep your pet's identity active. No annual fee to "renew" a record that should never expire. We plan it this way on purpose.
Cats come first because they're the species most often lost to indoor-only homes with no reliable ID. Dogs are supported at full parity from day one — same identity, same recovery, same free.
Multi-pet households: every pet in a home shares one owner profile. No per-pet fees. If you have seven cats and a parrot, you register seven animals once — and the parrot is welcome too.
Verification runs on the shelter's or vet's device — not in the cloud. The match happens locally, in seconds, even when the shelter's Wi-Fi is flaky at 2am and a frightened dog just walked in.
We chose reliability over feature-rich onboarding. A pet that can't come home because of a dropped connection is a pet that doesn't come home.
CritterKey works on any nose, face, or iris photo a shelter can take — no proprietary wipes, no proprietary scanner, no locked calibration kits shipped from us.
Any standard pet-safe cleaner works on the verification hardware. If a clinic can sanitize with what they already have, they should never be told they can't.
Free for every pet owner. Register one pet in about two minutes.
Register my pet — free →