Say you build software for a small business that runs a dog daycare. A customer asks whether your product can connect to the tools other pet companies use, and you realize you have no idea what the pet care API landscape looks like. So you open the Pet Care industry on apis.io and read what it holds.
The first thing you see is a surprise. The industry lists 37 providers and 28 APIs, and 23 of those APIs come from just 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. The retailers, food makers, vet chains and large marketplaces account for the remaining five APIs or publish none at all.
The scores are low across the whole vertical. The top composite is 26.0, and no provider ranks above the emerging band. Twelve providers are emerging and 25 are minimal. PetExec leads at 26.0, with Gingr at 24.2. Chewy sits at 13.2, Zoetis at 11.3, Petco at 8.0, Mars at 7.9 and Rover at 6.8.
You look at what the two leaders actually publish. 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 publish a vaccinations API, which makes sense to you: shot records are the compliance check a kennel has to make before a dog comes in.
Then you check the household names. 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, but its catalog sits behind a sign-in. Zoetis has the most concrete surface in the group: two APIs that connect veterinary practice management systems to its Vetscan analyzers and to direct product ordering, naming Covetrus Pulse, Avimark and Impromed as supported systems. Those are supplier and clinic integrations, not something an app builder picks up.
The consumer companies have nothing. 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. The post points out that insurance claims, telehealth visits and food subscriptions would all benefit from an API, but nobody in this vertical publishes one for those uses.
Here is the part you appreciate, because the catalog turns the same scrutiny on itself. 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. So the numbers you just read are a little generous, and the catalog says so plainly.
You now know where to start. If you are building for kennels, daycares or groomers, the post points you to PetExec's Vaccinations API and Boarding API. If your customers are veterinary clinics, it points you to Zoetis Vetscan Connectivity. If you need to sell into a pet retailer, it points you to Chewy's vendor integration, which is EDI rather than REST.
What you take away is simple. 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. For your customer's question, the answer is that the integrations worth building toward belong to the facility software vendors, and you should verify the stale Gingr links before you count on them.
Read the original: https://apis.io/2026/11/12/pet-care-on-apis-io-is-led-by-two-dog-daycare-software-vendors-not-the-pet-brands/