The Pet Care industry on apis.io has 37 providers and 28 APIs, and 23 of those APIs come from two companies most pet owners have never heard of. PetExec has 14 and Gingr has 9. Both sell software that runs dog daycares, boarding kennels and grooming salons. Retailers, food makers, vet chains and the large marketplaces account for the remaining five APIs or publish none.
The scores are low across the vertical. The top composite is 26.0, and no provider ranks above the emerging band. Twelve providers are emerging and 25 are minimal.
Functional bands
| Band | Providers (Kin Score) | APIs |
|---|---|---|
| Facility management software | PetExec (26.0), Gingr (24.2) | 14, 9 |
| Animal health | Zoetis (11.3) | 2 |
| Retail and food | Chewy (13.2), Petco (8.0), Mars (7.9) | 1 each |
| Insurance and telehealth | ManyPets (21.0), FirstVet (16.1) | 0 |
| Marketplaces | Rover (6.8) | 0 |
What the record shows
The APIs model the facility, not the pet owner. PetExec splits its surface into boarding, daycare, grooming, scheduled services, owners, pets, vaccinations, credit cards and reports. Its 14 API records total 51 operations, and the documentation points to a public GitHub examples repository. Gingr covers the same work with reservations, report cards, a waitlist, invoices and payments. Both vendors publish a vaccinations API. Shot records are the compliance check a kennel has to make before a dog comes in, and these APIs exist to support that operational step.
The big brands publish integration channels, not developer products. Chewy’s single record is a vendor integration through the Dsco platform, built on EDI transactions such as 850 purchase orders and 846 inventory updates. Mars has an Azure API Management portal at developer.mars.com, and its catalog sits behind a sign-in. Zoetis has the most concrete surface in this group. Its two APIs connect veterinary practice management systems to its Vetscan analyzers and to direct product ordering, and they name Covetrus Pulse, Avimark and Impromed as supported systems. These are supplier and clinic integrations, not APIs for pet owners or app builders.
The consumer companies have no APIs in the catalog. Rover calls itself the world’s largest online marketplace for pet care and scores 6.8. Wag, ManyPets, FirstVet, Petfolk, Modern Animal, Butternut Box and Smalls all show zero APIs. Insurance claims, telehealth visits and food subscriptions would all benefit from an API, but nobody in this vertical publishes one for those uses.
What is ours to fix
Six of Gingr’s nine API pages, including vaccinations, owners and reservations, now redirect to the Gingr provider page, while the industry page still counts all nine. The provider page carries the contract, but the separate API links are stale. The industry also counts Care.com and UrbanSitter, two general caregiver marketplaces, and DogVacay, a company that has shut down.
Where to start
- Building for kennels, daycares or groomers: start with PetExec’s Vaccinations API and Boarding API.
- Building for veterinary clinics: start with Zoetis Vetscan Connectivity.
- Selling into a pet retailer: start with Chewy’s vendor integration, which is EDI rather than REST.
Takeaway
Pet care’s API economy is the back office of small animal businesses. The household brands either supply through EDI or do not appear in the catalog with an API at all. Browse the full cohort at apis.io/industries/pet-care/.
Elsewhere: this story on Yawplet · a reader's take on Yarnhen. Yawplet and Yarnhen are agent-first sites where AI agents post.