Why stay on Rover (as a sitter)?

According to Rover, the amount of resources available to dog sitters would cost dog sitters 5 times as much if they were to establish their own dog sitting business on their own. There’s no cost breakdown provided, and frankly their assertion isn’t strictly true. Sure, if you sit a couple of dogs a month or a week maybe that makes sense. You don’t necessarily want to mess with buying your own pet sitter insurance for a couple of clients. Here’s the deal though: Rover offers almost nothing to dog sitters besides an app to manage bookings and a ranking system to connect sitters with clients. All of the resources they refer to don’t truly exist. Rover charged me $6,250 in fees in 2023 and the purpose of this article is to dive in to whether they provided value of $6,250. Rover claims to offer three main things: 1) insurance 2) the app itself and 3) phone and message support.

Let’s talk about insurance first. Rover offers insurance coverage of up to $25,000. You can read their full Rover Guarantee here. To break the terms down to what they actually mean, Rover is not going to cover anything related to damage to your property as the sitter and excludes any pet accidents unless they happened specifically because of things that happened during the stay. Which is mostly reasonable but the list of exclusions is very long and if the adjudicator of the claims decided to decline any claim, they could probably find something to support that. Yes, I understand how insurance works. I’ve worked extensively in the professional/corporate world in the realm of health insurance and various other types of insurance so I understand that insurers don’t like to pay claims. Claims must also exceed $250 and be caused by the pet sitter doing something wrong. I don’t know about you but I am not ok with being accused of doing something wrong. Sometimes things happen regardless of how good your dog sitting skills are. To summarize, the Rover insurance will cover the damage to the client’s dog or property if the sitter does something wrong but generally doesn’t cover any of the pet sitter related liabilities or losses. This insurance policy is pretty much worthless so I will give it a fair value of $-0 to me.

Moving on to the app. The app is ok. The Apple store shows a rating of 4.9/5 stars. I believe this higher rating is due to the fact that most people not sitters and are just using it to book care for their dogs a couple times a year. My main grievances with the app are that it can be very slow at times, certain buttons will just disappear and I have to re download it, and the phone number system that they use has sometimes randomly linked to random people’s cell phones so that they are receiving and responding to my messages instead of my client. I wasn’t able to get a good explanation for why this happens but it is unsettling. With all of that said, the app still is decent. They seem to push out changes every few months, most of which are improvements.

The last thing that Rover claims to provide is support for the sitters and the clients. On the sitter side, this support has been limited to refunding cancellation fees and changes booking requests manually that could not be changed in the app by either me or the client. Rover also has a trust and safety team who I have reached out to twice in the past and was not impressed with their responses. One of the situations involved a client claiming that their dog contracted parasites while at my house which ended up being completely untrue. When I contacted Rover to see if they had a protocol or steps that I needed to take given this accusation they pretty much said you’re on your own. So I would the trust and safety line is not necessarily the best. I think the majority of the times I’ve reached out to Rover for phone support, I could’ve done as much as they did if they would just update the functionalities of the app. I would say the support has been close to worthless thus far.

The main value of Rover in my opinion is customer acquisition and to a lesser degree the app itself. Rover has some limited support that they supposedly provide and some very restrictive insurance that I have never really heard of anyone successfully using. Should customer acquisition and an app cost 20% of revenues? Probably not. In any other business line, customer acquisition is a one time not ongoing cost so continuing to charge that amount seems kind of arbitrary. Even with its drawbacks though and what I feel are exorbitant fees, Rover has gotten me a ton of clients and for that they certainly deserve something.