The Independent Software Pledge

4 min read Published 2026-04-18 By The Animal Friends OS Team

A public commitment from the founder of Animal Friends OS to every pet care business owner who uses our software — or is considering it.

The pet care software industry has a trust problem. Platforms get acquired by private equity firms and prices go up. VC-backed companies hit their monetization phase and fees appear. Annual contracts lock you in. Payment processing cuts eat your margins. Features get moved behind paywalls. Support gets outsourced.

This pledge exists because promises made on a pricing page can change with a new CEO, a new investor, or a new board meeting. A public pledge is harder to walk back. It is a commitment in writing, signed by a real person, that you can hold me accountable to.

The Pledge

I, Chase, founder and sole owner of AFPC Industries LLC, publicly commit to the following principles for as long as I own and operate Animal Friends OS:

1. No Outside Investors — Ever

Animal Friends OS will never accept venture capital, private equity investment, angel funding, or any form of outside capital that gives another party ownership, control, or financial influence over the company. AFPC Industries LLC is and will remain 100% founder-owned. This is non-negotiable and permanent.

Why this matters: Investors demand returns. Returns come from your subscription. No investors means no pressure to raise your prices to satisfy someone else’s portfolio.

2. No Payment Processing Cuts — Ever

We will never take a percentage of your credit card transactions. We will never build our own payment processor to skim revenue from your sales. We will never require you to use a specific payment provider. You choose your processor, you keep your margins, and we stay out of your revenue stream entirely.

Why this matters: Payment processing cuts are the largest hidden fee in pet care software. A facility processing $20,000/month can lose $2,000-4,000/year to inflated processing rates. That money belongs to you.

3. No Per-User Fees — Ever

Every Animal Friends OS subscription includes unlimited staff accounts. We will never charge per-user, per-seat, or per-employee fees. Hire as many people as your business needs without your software bill increasing. Growth should be rewarded, not taxed.

Why this matters: Per-user fees punish hiring. A facility with 10 staff members can pay $200-500/month in seat fees alone at competitor platforms. That is a hidden cost that scales against you as you succeed.

4. No Annual Contracts — Ever

Animal Friends OS is month-to-month. Always. You can cancel anytime without penalty, without fees, and without having to call a “retention specialist” who tries to talk you out of it. If we are not earning your business every month, you should be free to leave. Contracts are for companies that are not confident you will stay voluntarily.

Why this matters: Annual contracts with auto-renewal are a retention mechanism, not a value proposition. They exist to keep you paying even when you are unhappy. We would rather earn your business 12 times a year than trap it once.

5. No Selling Customer Data — Ever

Your client data, pet records, appointment history, and business metrics belong to you. We will never sell, share, license, or monetize your data in any way. We will never use your data for advertising. We will never provide it to third parties for marketing purposes. Your data exists to serve your business — period.

Why this matters: Data monetization is a tempting revenue stream for software companies, especially those under pressure to show additional revenue sources to investors. We eliminate the temptation by eliminating the investors.

6. Full Data Portability — Always

You can export your complete data — clients, pets, appointments, invoices, notes, everything — at any time, in standard formats, with no restrictions. If you decide to leave Animal Friends OS, your data leaves with you. We will never hold your data hostage to prevent you from switching.

Why this matters: Some platforms make data export deliberately difficult or incomplete. That is vendor lock-in masquerading as a technical limitation. Your data is yours, and accessing it should be trivial.

7. No Feature Paywalling After Launch

If a feature is included in your plan today, it will still be included tomorrow. We will never move existing features behind a higher pricing tier. New features will be added to the existing plan, not used as leverage to upsell you. The product gets better over time without your price going up.

Why this matters: Feature paywalling — moving previously-included features into premium tiers — is one of the most common tactics used by investor-backed software companies to increase revenue per customer without delivering new value.

Chase

Founder & CEO, AFPC Industries LLC

Florida • 2026-06-04

Why This Pledge Exists

Every company says the right things on their website. “Customer-first.” “Transparent pricing.” “No hidden fees.” And then they get acquired, and everything changes.

This pledge is different because it is tied to a structural reality, not a marketing promise. Animal Friends OS is 100% owned by one person. There are no outside shareholders who can vote to change direction. There is no board that can replace the CEO with someone who has a different philosophy. There is no acquisition clause that triggers when revenue hits a certain threshold.

The commitments in this pledge are not aspirational — they are architectural. The company is built so that breaking them would require dismantling the entire ownership structure. That is by design.

Hold Me Accountable

This pledge is public. It is indexed by search engines. It is timestamped. If Animal Friends OS ever violates any of these commitments, you will have a written record to point to. Share it on social media. Post it in Facebook groups. Forward it to every pet care business owner you know.

Accountability only works when it is public. That is why this page exists.

Software you can trust.

Animal Friends OS. $45/month. No investors. No hidden fees. No compromises. Start your free 14-day trial.

$45/mo flat — no per-user fees, no contracts
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Chase
Founder & CEO, AFPC Industries LLC
Chase has owned and operated a busy multi-service pet care facility in Florida for over a decade. After years of running a grooming, boarding, and daycare shop — and paying too much for software that didn’t work — he built Animal Friends OS to give every pet care business owner a better option. No investors. No private equity. Just software built by someone who actually does this work.