What I Made on Rover.com in 2023

I started dog sitting on Rover in 2022, but since it was later in the year I only had a handful of bookings in 2022, so for the purposes of analyzing my first full year of income, we will look at 2023.

In 2023, I earned gross booking fees of $31,489.42. Of this amount, $956.93 was refunded to customers for cancellations and $6,249.86 was deducted by Rover as their 20% fee for pretax earnings of $24,282.63 (Note: there are minimal expenses for dog sitting so I’ve just left them off for now but will do a full tax breakdown later of what I claimed on my taxes). Not a fortune but definitely a solid first year. Some other key stats are that these earnings are from 139 bookings for an average book price of $226 gross and $175 net cash received. My highest earning month was October 2023 with gross booking fees of $4,190.73 and the lowest was February at 1,382.5.

Rover and other website resources accurately describe dog sitting as a seasonal business; however, for whatever reason my earnings throughout the year were relatively consistent. January 2023 was not especially low at $2,658 in gross booking fees but this is largely due to the carryover from Christmas bookings that ended in January. February of course was low because everyone was back to work from Christmas, school was back in session, etc. Besides that, most months were relatively close to the average gross booking fees of $2,624. I think this bodes well for continuing to grow and scale the business since it’s not a lot of capacity being demanded all at once with a sharp drop offs for most of the year. I have actually found that the bulk of the booking requests are from the same 20-25 clients who book something every 1-2 months.

I pretty rigorously have kept all clients on the Rover app during 2023 so the 1099-K that Rover issued is the extent of earnings besides a handful of cash tips from clients that made up approximately $1,500 during the year. I have had clients asking about Venmo/payment outside the app and am thinking about that for 2023. I do not currently have separate dog sitter’s insurance from the Rover insurance so that is part of the reason I’ve kept all clients on the app. That may change in 2024.
All in all, 2023 was a solid year for dog sitting. I hope to grow the business at least 30% in 2024 which I think is going to happen organically just by only accepting good clients and prioritizing existing clients. Tune in next time for more discussions on my first full year as a dog sitter.