Why Choose MethodPet as Your Dog Grooming App? 

“Who do we go with?”..

“Well, option “M” Looks OK.”…

“No, they charge for each groomer to access the schedule from their phone, option “T dog grooming app” might work though”…

“I tried getting hold of them, voicemail wasn’t even set up. I read they charge for data migration too”…

“Ohh, right…Option Y dog grooming app?..”

“Didn’t they crash and lose data last year… multiple times?”… 

 

As groomers, these are conversations we’ve all had. It felt like picking the lesser of the evils, rather than the best solution for our company. Some scheduling systems looked good from the outside, until you read the reviews, or stories. Others looked affordable but then charged you for every little item after you bought in. 

 

In the past we just stayed where we were, overpaying for underperforming dog grooming app. 

 

So when we built MethodPet, we decided to

A.) Fix everything we didn’t like about the available dog grooming apps and..

B.) Make sure there was as little trouble as possible in selecting the MethodPet dog grooming software. 

 

So what makes a great dog grooming app?

 

Here are a few of the criteria we think makes a good dog grooming app: 

 

  • Features
  • Price
  • Service
  • Security / Data Integrity

 

So let’s go through these 4 main points and see where we can highlight MethodPet among them. 

 

Dog Grooming App Features:

Obviously you need to get what you pay for and groomers expect a lot from their scheduling software. We won’t go through every little detail, but we will say that there is no up-charge for any of our features.

We’re currently offering the most robust platform on the market, utilizing data and algorithms to provide you with smart, usable functionality – not gimmicky buzz words. I’ve written an article here about usable functionality. 

If you want more, like a website SEO, marketing or maintenance, we’ve got someone in-house to help. 

 

Price:

As mentioned above and elsewhere on this site, pricing can be deceiving. The less valuable the product, the more trickery has to be used in marketing that product to an end-user. Luckily MethodPet doesn’t run into this issue. Our prices are straightforward and easy to understand – there is no bait and switch, there is nothing else to unlock. You pay for the service, you get the service, you use the service. Easy! 

 

Upfront our prices may look like they’re maybe about the middle of the road as far as monthly subscription and you may notice we don’t have an ‘entry level’ offering. Once you dig into it however, our prices are actually lower-middle of the pack. 

 

Here’s an example: 

 

When our previous grooming company signed up for a 3rd party scheduling system we were happy. Decent rate (about $100/mo), seemingly a lot of features. Then we realized no one could use the service on their phone – come to find out, there is a $15-20 up-charge PER GROOMER to be able to use a mobile device. As a mobile grooming service, we had to let our groomers use their phones to check their schedule and get to appointments and so on. So we had no choice, now we’re at $150+/mo. 

 

Next, we learned that while we enabled “remote access” and exceeded a certain threshold of groomers ( I think we had 6 at the time ), we needed to turn our own personal computer into some sort of server that serves the data to the groomer’s phones. What!?

 

Yep, so if the internet went down – nobody had remote access to their schedule. Want to shut down your computer? Nope. Want to go on vacation? Better hope the computer doesn’t update itself or otherwise need to restart. 

 

Which leads to the question, if my computer is running this data, why am I getting charged so much? Even to this day, I’m not sure if this was the process because the structure of the software is so old, or it was to cut costs but it still frustrates me. 

 

Many other scheduling software services also charge a fee for mobile access and I still don’t know why… Maybe it’s just one more thing they can charge for. 

 

How is MethodPet different in this regard?

MethodPet is currently what is referred to as a “PWA” or “Progressive Web App” this is a newer technology that is gaining popularity in the development world and preference with the big tech manufacturers. There was an article published this year (2021) that proposed that Apple is encouraging PWA’s over traditional “apps” in the current iOS versions. 

 

Essentially this means that MethodPet is a super fast, high-performance application that runs in the cloud. It looks and behaves like a website when you load it up on your computer and behaves just like a traditional “app” when you open it on your phone. Traditional websites don’t run right, or as quick or look / behave as nice on your phone – so for a long time it was required to have a separate app, MethodPet breaks this mold. The good news is that for our users, there aren’t any extra steps to use the service, there are no fees and we don’t have to recoup the costs of app development. 

 

This also means that on whatever device, whatever place and whatever time, as long as you have internet access, you and your employees have access to MethodPet. 

 

Speaking of price, one company wanted $400 to migrate clients to their platform. No pets, history, notes, appointments: just clients. Did I mention we do that for you for free? If you’re interested about how this is done, I have a short write up here. 

 

Service 

Over the course of our grooming career, we’d been in touch with just about every other grooming scheduling system there is, trying to find something that fit us. I don’t think we need to tell anyone reading this about the state of customer service in this day and age, but we will say that we were let down by the quality of service we received as prospective customers and as current customers with the current range of grooming scheduling software providers. 

 

    • If a grooming scheduling software’s emails, marketing and responses are littered with spelling errors and poor grammar – it is just unprofessional. 
    • Does it take a week to get a response? Unprofessional. 
    • How does the representative on the phone sound? Are they terse, short, dismissive? 
    • But you already knew that :) 

 

At MethodPet we do our best to provide professional, courteous service. We’re a small company and honestly we’ve been overwhelmed by the volume of groomers reaching out to us, but we’re doing our best to provide better service than anywhere else in the industry. 

 

Us being so small still, you may even get one of the founders on the phone for a sales question or one of us who built MethodPet from the ground up on the line for a tech question. 

 

Security / Data Integrity 

If you’re a part of groomer forums or groups (as we are), you don’t have to look too far or think too hard to recall some data breaches, hacks or plain data loss in this industry. Plainly stated, it’s awful and it shouldn’t have happened. I feel for people who have lost data, appointments and more – and the loss of clients that is sure to happen over something like this. 

 

That is why security is a priority for us. 

 

We run a tight ship top to bottom. We use enterprise-level encryption, SSL, firewalls, CDNs, rate-limiting and all the features Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers out of the box. Not only that, but your data is backed up on an automated schedule to a separate database in case something happens at AWS. 

 

Do you recall when a different scheduling company needed to “upgrade” and everyone had to basically start their app over again from scratch??

 

That won’t be happening with MethodPet. 

 

We’ve actually got the ability to push changes & updates live with NO interruption of your service. It’s really cool!

 

In the end 

 

In the end, I sure hope you give us a try. We’ve been in the grooming industry for over 18 years, over 30 years combined and we think we’ve made something really nice. A common phrase around here is “By groomers, for groomers” and I think that stands. I hope you’ll find that it does.