Vaccine expiry tracking for dog daycares

The idea

If a dog with an expired rabies vaccine bites another dog or a staff member, the daycare is legally exposed, and most facilities track expirations in a binder or a spreadsheet the front desk checks sporadically. The failure mode is discovering the expired record at 7am drop-off, with a queue of impatient owners and no good options.

Gingr and PawPartner cover this inside $100+/mo full POS suites that small facilities don’t want to migrate to. The wedge is being only the compliance layer: expiry tracking, automated owner nagging with an upload link so records renew themselves, and a red-amber-green check-in screen that makes the morning rush safe. It sits alongside whatever booking system the facility already uses.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner or manager of an independent daycare or boarding facility, paying $39/mo per location because it directly reduces liability and eliminates the binder audit. Distribution: pet care industry Facebook groups, IBPSA and The Dog Gurus communities, and pet business insurance brokers, who have every reason to recommend a tool that reduces claims.

MVP scope

• Dog roster with per-vaccine expiry dates and certificate uploads
• Automated 30/14/3-day owner emails with secure no-login upload links
• Staff review queue for submitted certificates
• Red-amber-green check-in screen with logged overrides
• Full certificate version history per dog
• Skip for v1: booking and scheduling, payments, vet system integrations, cat or exotic support, owner accounts

Build VaxGate, a vaccine compliance tracker for dog daycares and boarding facilities. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, storage, magic-link auth), Postmark for transactional email. Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: staff maintain a dog roster: dog, breed, owner contact, and per-vaccine records (rabies, DHPP, bordetella, canine influenza, each with an expiry date and an uploaded certificate PDF or photo). A nightly job finds vaccines expiring within 30, 14, and 3 days and emails the owner via Postmark with a secure upload link, no account needed, where they submit the new certificate and expiry date. Submissions land in a review queue; staff verify against the document and approve, which updates the record. The front-desk check-in screen is a fast search showing each dog as green (compliant), amber (expiring within 14 days), or red (expired), with red blocked from check-in until an override with a typed reason is logged.

Pages: check-in search screen built for an iPad at the desk, dog roster with per-dog vaccine detail and document viewer, review queue, expiring-soon report, email template settings, billing.

Implementation details: expiry state must be computed at read time from dates, never stored as a status flag that can go stale overnight; keep every certificate version, never overwrite, for liability history.

Pricing: $39/mo per location, 30-day trial.