Doing what you love for a living means you never have to work another day for the rest of your life. This is especially true for anyone that loves pets like cats and dogs. There are actually a lot of different side hustles and businesses that are the perfect fit for people that love animals.
The internet has made it really easy to start making money by taking care of pets for other people. There are numerous websites that cater to this exact purpose – connecting pet owners with people that do this type of work for a living. You can quickly sign up on one or more of these websites to find your first client, and continue to use them to gain as many clients as you can handle.
In this guide, I’ll be teaching you about four specific sites that you can use to find work taking care of pets. Some pet owners will come to you and bring their animals to your home, while others want you to visit or even sleep at their house to provide in-home care services. No matter what kind of pet care business you want to create, you can get started building clients on these sites.
Rover.com
Pet lovers can apply to set up a profile on Rover.com to offer a variety of pet related services to customers.
This site does house sitting in the pet owners home like other sites talked about elsewhere in this guide, but Rover users can also offer boarding in their own home, dog walking, doggy day care and drop-in visits at the pet owners home. Overall, there are simply more services that you can sell on Rover, so it will work as a side hustle for a wider variety of pet lovers and can even maximize earnings if you want to offer all services.
Many of these services allow you to provide services for more than one pet at a time too. Instead of house sitting to care for one pet, you could board multiple pets at your house to increase your earnings for the same amount of time. Rover does not seem to publicly advertise their fees or costs, so it’s unclear exactly how revenue will work on this site. It’s still a recommended side hustle over other related services for it’s popularity and extra services.
Care.com
Take care of kids, seniors and pets by running a side hustle on Care.com. In some cases, licenses will be necessary and sometimes even a brick and mortar business location for particular categories on this site. However, you can also run daycares in your home for kids or pets and often not have any kind of special licensing or training.
If you run a daycare, preschool, pet daycare, in-home senior care, senior living facility, kids camp, activity center or in-home daycare, you can list your business on Care to get extra exposure and to gain more clients. To sign up as a Care Provider, you must be a resident of the United States and Puerto Rico. The homepage of their site lists some subsidiaries and affiliates that operate in other countries, so you may still be able to work in this field on other websites.
Background checks and identity verification is also required to get approved as a Provider. You cannot be a registered sex offender, have a felony, or have any kind of criminal offense that involves violence, abuse, neglect, theft or drugs. Violations at previous workplaces that would be documented and also criminal offenses for acts relating to safety, fraud, neglect or dishonesty can also cause your application to get declined. These checks also extend to any member of your household as well, so spouses or roommates of those with offenses can’t get approved either.
HouseSittersAmerica & CatInAFlat
House sitting and in-home pet sitting are side hustles that can be done in the USA and UK with ease by utilizing HouseSittersAmerica (USA) and CatInAFlat (UK). The concept for the side hustle is quite simple. You visit homes or potentially even stay overnight to offer additional home security and pet sitting services. Other things in the home may also need to be cared for, such as plants, so you can also offer these types of services.
By creating an account on one of these sites, you’re able to list a profile that home and pet owners can find by doing local area searches. Arrange your services and get paid for them. This type of side hustle will require a combination of online work, driving and in-person work, so it at least offers a variety of things to do instead of repetitive tasks.
HouseSittersAmerica charges a $49 annual fee to create and maintain a profile, but they don’t take any cut of your earnings. CatInAFlat operates on the opposite business model – you can sign up there for free but they’ll take a cut of your earnings. If you get paid to be a live-in housesitter and don’t have to do much work at the house, you could actually get paid double by doing other online work on a laptop while you’re on the job housesitting.