Maya needed stitches. Wick had a cough that would not clear. Benny had a grooming appointment I had booked weeks earlier and forgot about until the reminder text landed the morning of. All three, the same week. I had nothing written down for any of them: no weight history, no med schedule, no note about which vet said what. I was reconstructing my own dogs' health from memory in three different waiting rooms in five days.
I have written about that same week before, for a different app, in the context of tracking Benny's medication schedule specifically. This is the other half of it. Medication is one column in a much bigger sheet. The bigger sheet is everything else: how much Wick has been eating, whether Maya's energy dropped before anyone noticed a limp, whether Benny's weight is drifting in a direction that matters before it becomes a vet visit instead of a food adjustment.
That is what Pawformance tracks, and it is the app I built out of that same bad week: activity, food, weight, general wellness, over time, for all three dogs, in one place I can actually open in a waiting room instead of trying to remember it out loud.
Three dogs changes the math on this in a way one dog never would have taught me. With one dog, you can hold most of it in your head, because there is only one appetite, one energy level, one set of quirks to track against. With three, Wick, Maya, and Benny each have a separate baseline, and a change in any one of them only reads as a change if you know what normal looked like for that specific dog a month ago, not what normal looks like for the other two. A single shared notebook page does not scale to that. A single app screen per dog, checked in thirty seconds each, does.
The objections I hear are all reasonable, so I will take them straight. My vet's portal already stores records: it stores what the vet recorded, not what I noticed on a Tuesday that never became a visit. My dog is healthy, I do not need to track anything: that was true of Wick's cough for about four days too, until it was not. 11pets and PetDesk are free: they are, and neither one is built around the day to day pattern noticing that catches a problem before it is a problem. I would forget to log things after the first week: that is the actual risk, and it is the one I designed the app to fight by making the log take seconds, not minutes. I do not want another subscription just for my dog: fair, which is why the core tracking is free, and the $6.99/mo Pro tier only matters once you want the deeper history and trend view.
What I would do differently, if I were starting over: build the three dog profiles and the shared household view before anything else, instead of after. I built Pawformance the way most solo builders build things, one dog's data model first, then realized a real household has more than one animal and more than one person checking in on them, and went back to rebuild the foundation. Faster to design for the actual waiting room from day one than to retrofit it in later.
The free tier does the daily job on its own: log activity, food, and weight, no cap on how many entries or how far back you look at that level. The $6.99/mo Pro tier is for the moment the vet asks a question that needs history, not just a snapshot: unlimited dogs instead of one, health trends going back months instead of the last entry you happened to remember to make, and a vet prep report you can hand over or export instead of narrating it from memory in the exam room. That last one is the exact moment that started this whole thing: standing in a waiting room with three separate stories in my head and nothing to hand anyone that proved any of them.
I did not build the vet prep report as a feature to round out a pricing tier. I built it because I was the guy verbally reconstructing a cough timeline for a vet tech while she waited, and a printed page would have taken thirty seconds instead of the two minutes I actually spent second guessing my own memory.
Wick's cough is the clearest example of why the "my dog is healthy" objection does not hold up under its own weight. He seemed fine for days. The cough was there before it was a symptom worth calling anyone about, and the only reason I caught the pattern at all was noticing it again on day three, not day one. A tool that only matters once something is already wrong misses the entire window where catching it early is still cheap and easy. That window is short, and it closes quietly.
Track your dog's health like a vet does, free: pawformance.app
Top comments (0)