Muttmates
Pet sitters: how to list your business on Muttmates, free
Muttmates has a dog services directory: sitters, walkers, groomers, trainers, day care, kennels, vets and pet shops, searchable by suburb or postcode. If you mind dogs for a living, or on the side, you can put your business in front of the dog owners already using the app. It costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and your email address is never published. Here is how it works, start to finish.
What you need before you start
- A free Muttmates account. You don't need to add a dog to list a service.
- A confirmed email address. We send you a link to click, because enquiries travel to and from that address and both ends need to be real.
- A short description of what you offer. Twenty characters is the minimum, but a couple of honest paragraphs is what actually wins enquiries.
Adding your listing, step by step
- Open the services directory and tap List your service, free. If you're not signed in yet, it walks you through creating the account first.
- Pick your category. Sitter is one of them, and if you also walk or groom, that's a separate listing. One account can hold up to five, so a sitter who also boards is two listings, not one crammed description.
- Add your business name and your suburb, state and postcode. That's all the location we ask for. We never store or show a street address or a map pin, so nobody can tell which house the dogs are at.
- Write the description. Say what you offer, what areas you cover, and anything an owner would otherwise have to ask: your experience, whether you're insured, how many dogs you take at once.
- Optionally add a fees note ("walks from $25, ask for a quote" is plenty), a phone number and a website. The phone number is shown publicly if you add it, so leave it off if you'd rather everything came by email.
- Save it as a draft, or send it in. Nothing is public until a real person at Muttmates has read it. We email you once it has been looked at, and if something needs a tweak it comes back to you with a note saying what.
How enquiries reach you
When an owner finds your listing and sends an enquiry, we pass it on to your account email with their address as the reply-to. Your email is never shown anywhere, and you choose whether to write back. Enquirers need a free account of their own, and there are daily limits on how many enquiries one person can send, so the junk that plagues public directories mostly can't happen here.
Keeping your listing healthy
- Going on holiday? Pause the listing and it disappears from the public list until you resume it. No need to delete anything.
- Still current? Every so often we ask you to confirm your listing is still right. A listing nobody has confirmed in a long while drops out of the public list until its owner taps "yes, still current". That's how we keep the directory free of businesses that quietly closed two years ago.
- Changed your prices or your area? Edit the listing any time. Edits to the public wording go back through the same quick read before they show.
What we don't do, and why it matters to your pitch
We read every listing before it goes up, but we don't check qualifications, insurance or references, and we don't hand out "verified" or "trusted" badges that would imply we had. Owners are told exactly that, and told to meet first and ask questions. So the listings that do well are the ones that answer those questions up front. If you're insured, say so. If you've got ten years with reactive dogs, say that. Fees are yours to set; Muttmates takes nothing and there is no paid tier for listings.
That's the whole system. No commissions, no subscription, no lock-in: a plain listing in front of people who are already organising their dog's week in the app. If you run a dog business in Australia, there's no real reason not to be in it.
This article describes the directory as it works today. Listing rules and limits can change; the directory page itself is always current.