Someone in a daycare and boarding group asked this week what everyone charges for their membership programmes and what is included. A few of their clients had asked about it, so they were doing their homework before answering.
The replies went the way these threads always go.
One owner had sold a buy-ten-get-one-free daycare pack, hoping people would pay up front and start coming more often. Instead they had clients who bought in April and were still halfway through their days by August. The pack now only goes to people already coming several days a week.
Another owner said a customer had suggested a monthly membership to them. Their first instinct was that people would abuse unlimited access, bringing the dog as often as they liked for one flat price, so they had decided getting paid per visit was safer.
The person who started the thread pushed back. For every dog that over-uses a membership, there are probably three or four who will not use it enough.
And then the same owner who had raised the abuse worry made the better argument against their own position. The reason their twenty-day pack holders only came two or three days a week was that they only had twenty days. Same families, roughly the same money, take the cap off, and plenty of them would come four or five.
Both halves of that are true at once, which is why "should we do memberships" is not a yes or no question. It is a question about which clients you already have.
What a membership is, and what it is not
A membership is a recurring payment that buys an allowance which refills. The client pays every week, fortnight or four weeks. Each period their included services come back, and when they book something covered, the benefit applies itself at checkout. Unused allowance does not roll over.
A prepaid pack is the other thing entirely. One payment, a balance that counts down to zero, then a decision about whether to buy another one.
Those two get talked about as rivals. They are not, and that argument has its own article: prepaid packages or monthly memberships. What follows is about the membership on its own.
The case for
The money arrives whether it rains or not
This is the obvious one and it is still the best one. A daycare with forty members on a $480 four-weekly plan starts every cycle knowing roughly $19,000 is coming, before a single casual booking is taken.
That changes what you can do. You can sign a lease, hire a second groomer, or take a Tuesday off, because the floor under your revenue is a real number instead of an average of last winter.
The cap comes off your best clients
This is the argument from that thread, and it gets skipped over a lot.
A twenty-day pack does not just discount twenty days. It also tells the client they have twenty days. Somebody who would happily bring their dog four days a week starts rationing at two or three, because the balance is visible and finite and they are trying to make it last. You sold them a discount and accidentally sold them a limit.
A membership with a weekly reset does the opposite. Three days a week, refilling every Monday, no balance to protect. The client stops rationing. Your Tuesday fills up.
Use it or lose it actually changes behaviour
Allowance that does not roll over is the engine of the whole model. A member with one groom a month books that groom, because it is paid for either way and it disappears at the reset.
That sounds cynical written down. In practice it is the thing that keeps a doodle out of a shave-down, because the owner stops stretching six weeks into ten.
You stop selling the same thing over and over
Every pack you sell, you have to sell again. Somebody has to notice the balance is low, have the conversation, take the payment, and do it every few months for every client.
A membership is sold once. After that it renews on its own and the only conversation left is about the dog.
Nobody has to be chased
A small in-home boarder in that thread had a client raise the idea unprompted, because the client wanted to stop getting behind on payments. That was the client's reason, not the business's.
Worth remembering when you are pricing this. Some people want the direct debit, and a recurring charge is not universally experienced as a trap.
The rhythm is better for the animal
Shorter grooming cycles mean less matting and fewer shave-downs. Regular daycare means a dog that settles instead of arriving over-excited every fortnight. Both are easier to deliver and both are genuinely better outcomes, which is why the maintenance grooming model works as well as it does.
Rostering gets easier
Forty members on three days a week is a demand curve you can build a roster against. Two hundred casuals who might turn up is not.
The case against
The over-user is real, and smaller than you fear
Take the boarding owner's worry seriously for a moment, because it is not silly. Sell unlimited daycare at $480 and somebody will bring their dog every single weekday. Twenty-two days at $480 is under $22 a day against a $55 casual rate. That client is now costing you money.
The maths usually still works, because most members do not behave like that. But "usually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and you do not get to find out until you have sold thirty of them.
The fix is to stop selling unlimited. Three days a week with a weekly reset gives the client the feeling of unlimited without handing you an unlimited liability, and extra days can still be discounted rather than blocked.
The under-user is the bigger problem
Somebody paying $480 a month who used four days is not a happy client quietly funding your business. They are a cancellation with a delay on it, and often a refund request first.
One of the replies in that thread described exactly this. They had offered plans billed twice a year and annually, and then had people asking to be reimbursed after the auto-renewal went through, which gets awkward when services have already been delivered against the new period.
A term saying all payments are non-refundable is not automatically enforceable in Australia, because unfair terms in standard-form consumer contracts can be struck out under Part 2-3 of the Australian Consumer Law. The unfair trading practices reforms due to take effect from 1 July 2027 add obligations around pre-renewal reminders and easier cancellation on top of that. The practical version: a member who is not redeeming needs a phone call in month two rather than a refund argument in month seven.
The money is not yours yet
It lands before the service does. Until the visit happens, it is deferred revenue, which is a debt in services rather than income.
That distinction stops being academic the first time you have a quiet month, spend the float, and then everybody books. We wrote this one up properly in memberships and packages are debt on your balance sheet, including where Australian Consumer Law sits on selling more than you can deliver.
It can collide with your busiest day
Your council permit says thirty dogs. You have fifty members on three days a week, which works fine until the first week of the school holidays when thirty-eight of them want Thursday.
Memberships concentrate demand rather than spreading it. Somebody who used to come when it suited them now comes because they are paying for it. That is the point of the model, and it is also the thing that will find the ceiling in your room faster than casual bookings ever did.
If your clients come twice a year, this fixes nothing
A short-coated dog that needs a bath in November and again in March does not need a subscription. Neither does the owner. Selling one to them creates a monthly reminder that they are not using something, and a cancellation about four months in.
The discount is permanent and awkward to unwind
A pack is priced once and the client moves on. A membership rate is a number that sits in front of them every cycle for years. Set it too low and you cannot quietly correct it, because raising the price of an existing plan means either grandfathering everybody on the old rate or having a conversation with every member you have.
Grandfathering is the right answer and it is genuinely good for retention. It also means the price you pick this month is the price some of your clients will pay forever, so pick it slowly.
Something has to count
Every objection above is manageable. What is not manageable is running this on goodwill and a notebook.
The businesses that get burned by memberships are almost always the ones where nobody knew who had used what. Days get given away, discounts get applied twice, a member insists they have three grooms left and there is no way to check. If your system cannot show issued, redeemed, remaining and overage to both your team and the client, the model will leak.
Grooming and daycare are not the same problem
Everything above applies to both, but the risk sits in a different place.
In daycare, the risk is the room. High frequency, fixed capacity, and a plan that encourages people to come more. Weekly resets rather than monthly ones are what keep it sane, because "twelve days a month" lets somebody take nothing for three weeks and then want twelve days in the last one. Three a week, billed monthly, spreads the same volume across the days you actually built for. The daycare tier guide has the shapes.
In grooming, the risk is the opposite. Almost nobody over-uses a grooming membership. The failure is drift: the client skips a month, the coat gets away from them, and the plan starts feeling like money for nothing. So the membership's job in a salon is to shorten the cycle from six or eight weeks to three or four, and the number to watch is not overage, it is the member who has not booked in seven weeks.
Boarding sits somewhere else again, and honestly it is the weakest fit of the three. Travel is lumpy and seasonal, so a quarterly plan with a couple of stays in it works better than anything monthly, and a prepaid pack often works better still.
Five questions to ask yourself before you build one
Answer these before you touch the plan builder. If three of them make you uncomfortable, that is your answer.
1. What is my median client actually doing now? Not the average, which one four-day-a-week family will skew. The median. If half your daycare clients come fewer than four days a month, a twelve-day plan is a plan for the top quarter of your book and you should price and pitch it that way.
2. If every member turned up on the same Thursday, could I take them? Write down the number of members you would need to hit your permit ceiling on your busiest day. That number is your cap. Selling past it is a decision, not an accident.
3. What happens on the day they want to cancel? Decide now: is there a commitment period, does leaving early cost anything, who is allowed to waive it, and what happens to appointments already in the diary that were priced with member benefits. Write it in the terms and make people tick the box.
4. Would this still work if nobody ever renewed? The classic failure is the client who joins, takes the included groom in week one, and cancels in week two. If the first cycle on its own loses you money, you need a commitment period or a smaller inclusion.
5. Who counts the days? If the answer is you, or a whiteboard, stop here and fix that first.
Then ask your clients, properly
Most of that thread was people arguing from their own experience, which is a small sample and a biased one. One reply gave better advice: survey people before you commit to anything.
The wording is what separates a survey that helps from one that flatters you.
Put real prices in it. "Would you be interested in a monthly membership?" gets a yes from people who will never buy. "Which of these would you buy this month?" with three priced options and a fourth that says "none of these, I would rather pay per visit" gets you something you can act on.
Ask the right people. Send it to the clients who already come most often, because they are who the plan is for. Then send it to twenty people who have not booked in three months, because their answer tells you whether a membership would have kept them or just annoyed them.
A short version you can copy:
- How often do you currently bring [pet name] in? (weekly / fortnightly / monthly / less often)
- How often would you bring them if cost were not a factor?
- Here are three plans we are considering. Which would you buy this month, if any? (list them with real prices and what is included)
- If none, what is the reason? (too expensive / I do not want a recurring payment / I do not come often enough / I prefer to pay as I go)
That last option matters more than it looks. Plenty of people will not buy a subscription at any price, and that is not a pricing problem to solve. It is a signal that they want a prepaid pack instead, which is why most businesses end up offering both. There is more on running surveys that get honest answers in collecting and using customer feedback.
Five signs it is worth building
A client has already asked you for one. Three separate owners in that thread said a customer had raised it before they did. That is the strongest signal you will get, and it costs you nothing.
You can name ten clients who come on a rhythm without being reminded. Ten is enough to launch. You do not need a hundred.
You are re-selling the same pack to the same people by hand. If your week includes chasing top-ups, you are already running a membership badly.
Your quiet days have room your regulars would fill. A plan that makes the marginal visit feel free is how a Tuesday gets busy.
Coat condition or behaviour keeps sliding because people stretch the gap. Grooming especially. If you are having the shave-down conversation regularly, a shorter cycle sold as a plan fixes the thing your clients are actually unhappy about.
Three signs it is not
Your median client comes twice a year. Sell them a pack, or just get better at rebooking before they leave.
You are already turning people away on your busiest days. Memberships will make that worse, not better. Fix capacity or price first, then come back to this.
Nothing in your system counts usage. Build the counting before you build the plan.
If you decide to try it
Start with one plan, not three tiers. Aim it at the clients you can already name. Give it a commitment period long enough that the first cycle is not a giveaway, and set the reset weekly if the service is weekly.
Then watch redemption rather than signups. A member who has not used anything in six weeks is the number that tells you whether this is working, and they are still reachable with a text.
You do not have to publish anything today. Open Memberships in your Petboost account, build the plan as a draft, and see whether the numbers you have been describing to clients for years hold up once they are written down. If they do not, that is worth knowing before anyone signs up.
Book a demo if you want a second pair of eyes on the shape, or read the complete guide to memberships for the mechanics of benefits, windows, overage and billing.
General information for Australian pet businesses, not legal or financial advice. Consumer law obligations depend on your circumstances, so check with a qualified adviser before setting cancellation or renewal terms.