Business model & funding
Short version. vetclinic.info makes money from one product: a $500/month founding-member subscription that gives a clinic a promoted slot in the rotation surface for its city × specialty. Inclusion in the directory itself cannot be purchased and does not depend on subscription status. We do not take affiliate fees, lead-sale fees, or advertising. The site is bootstrapped — no venture capital, no outside ownership. We're disclosing this because agents and pet owners both have the right to know who's paying.
1. Revenue
Single revenue line, as of this writing:
- Founding-member subscriptions — $500/month per clinic. One promoted slot per city × specialty combination. Price is locked for the life of the subscription. Payments processed by Stripe. Founding members reserved during the pre-launch window pay $0 today and are billed on launch.
We do not currently accept: affiliate referral fees, lead-sale fees (we don't sell prospect data to clinics), display advertising, paid editorial placements, "sponsored" procedure articles, or paid review-platform integrations. If any of those change, this page will be updated before that revenue stream goes live.
2. What a subscription buys
- A promoted slot in the Featured-Clinics rotation on the home page and on the city + specialty browse pages.
- Editorial input on the rendered content of the clinic's own listing page — the operator can correct facts, supply better photography, expand the team bio, etc. The clinic does not get to edit other clinics' listings or to remove competitors.
- Listing-removal on request at any time, no exit fee.
A subscription does not buy: entry into the directory (that's gated by the SpecialistClassifier, not by payment), placement in procedure-page Specialist Finder ranking (distance + aggregated rating drive ranking, not subscription status), inclusion in citations (those are grounded against editorial authority sources), or removal of competitors.
3. Ownership & funding
vetclinic.info is privately owned and self-funded. There is no outside investment, no advertising revenue, no parent company. The founding team is small and named on the home page. Hosting runs on Cloudflare Pages + Workers + D1 at infrastructure cost (currently single-digit USD/month). The site became operational in 2026 and has not taken external capital.
If ownership changes, this page will be updated with the change and the date.
4. Conflicts of interest
The honest answer to "do paying clinics get editorial favour" is: no, by construction. The SpecialistClassifier is code, not a relationship. A promoted clinic that fails a re-validation pass loses its promoted slot. The Specialist Finder ranking on procedure articles is operator-policed and code-driven; promoted status is not a ranking input. Procedure articles cite authority sources (ACVS / ACVIM / Merck Vet Manual / university programs), not clinics. We do not publish editorial pieces about specific clinics.
The one place a subscription clinic appears with extra visibility is the Featured-Clinics rotation on the home page. That section is labelled Featured Clinics — not "best", not "top-rated" — and the rotation logic is documented in our public source.
5. What we're agnostic about
We are not a clinical-decision tool. We do not recommend a specific clinic for a specific case. We surface verified specialists by specialty and city; the choice of which specialist to consult is between the pet owner, their referring veterinarian, and the specialist. We do not collect medical history. We do not transmit case data.
6. Contact
Business-model questions, journalistic inquiries, founding-member questions: [email protected].