🐾 OnlyPaw
🐾 Our story

We built OnlyPaw because trust was optional in pet care.

Every existing pet care app made verification a nice-to-have. We made it a requirement. Here's what that actually means.

The problem we saw

In 2025, we — a small team of pet owners, engineers, and former pet care operators — kept hearing the same story: "I found a great walker on Rover, but the app never actually verified their ID." Or: "Our boarding host on Pawshake seemed fine at drop-off, but there were no home photos on their profile — no way to know what the space really looked like."

Pet care is one of the most trust-intensive services humans use. You're handing over a living, non-verbal member of your family to a stranger. And yet the biggest platforms in the market had built verification, insurance, and payment safety as optional features you had to hope providers had enabled.

So we built OnlyPaw with those three things as non-negotiable requirements.

Our three requirements

1. Government-ID + selfie verification, mandatory

Every OnlyPaw provider — walker, boarder, groomer, trainer, sitter, driver — submits a government-issued ID and a selfie. The two are matched. If we can't verify the person is who they claim to be, they don't get to list. This is not a checkbox; it's an approval gate.

2. Service-specific knowledge test, mandatory

A dog walker who doesn't know that pavement over 55°C burns paw pads shouldn't be walking dogs in summer. A boarding host who doesn't recognise bloat symptoms shouldn't be responsible for a Great Dane overnight. So we built a knowledge test — different for each service — that every provider must pass at 70% or higher before they can accept bookings. Boarders get boarding-safety questions. Walkers get walk-safety and weather-management questions. Taxi drivers get carrier-security and heat-handling questions. Trainers get positive-reinforcement and welfare-standards questions.

3. Stripe-escrow payments, mandatory in every market

When you book on OnlyPaw, your card is charged, and the funds go into a Stripe-managed escrow account. The provider does the service. You confirm it's done. Only then does the money release. If something's wrong, funds are held while OnlyPaw support investigates — you don't have to chase a refund.

What we don't do

We don't sell your data. We don't push featured providers who paid to be seen. We don't allow aversive training tools (shock collars, prong collars, choke chains) on any Training listing — banned in our Terms. We don't recommend that customers or providers move off-platform to save fees — our chat moderation actively flags off-platform contact attempts because those conversations are where safety and insurance protections break down.

Where we operate

OnlyPaw is a global marketplace. Providers set their own city and service area during signup, and pricing is in their local currency. Coverage grows organically as approved providers list, without waiting for us to "launch" a city. We're strongest in the UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) as our founding market, and expanding across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.

See our language-localized homepages: Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese.

Who we are

OnlyPaw is operated by a small team headquartered in Dubai, UAE. We're pet owners first — every design decision goes through the lens of "would I book this for my own dog?" Our engineering team has previously built payment infrastructure at Stripe and Adyen. Our operations team has run pet care businesses for over 20 years combined. Our safety advisor is a licensed veterinarian.

How to reach us

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