Terms of Service

1. Who we are

CityPet (“CityPet”, “we”, “us”) operates a marketplace connecting pet owners in Manchester with independent, self-employed pet sitters for drop-in visits, extended day visits, and in-home overnight stays. CityPet is a marketplace and payment intermediary — sitters are independent contractors, not CityPet employees or agents, and CityPet is not a party to the pet-sitting arrangement itself.

[Registered company name, company number, and registered office address to be added here.]

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account, whether as an owner or a sitter. We rely on our identity verification provider to confirm this at the point of ID verification.

An account can act as an owner, a sitter, or both (a “dual-role” account) — each role is switched between explicitly in the app and is subject to the rules for that role below.

3. Becoming a sitter

To be listed and bookable as a sitter, you must:

• Pass identity verification.
• Hold valid public liability insurance, verified by us — this is a hard requirement to be listed at all, not optional.
• Complete phone number and billing address verification.
• Pay the one-off onboarding fee, where applicable.

A DBS (criminal record) check is optional but affects your ranking in search results if not provided. If your insurance lapses or fails re-verification after you’re listed, your profile is hidden from search until it’s resolved.

4. Bookings, cancellations, and payment

A booking must be requested at least 24 hours before its first visit. Sitters have a confirmation window to accept or decline a request; some first bookings require the owner to separately confirm within 24 hours of a completed meet & greet before the sitter can accept.

Payment is taken via Stripe, generally 48 hours before the first visit in a booking (or immediately, if the booking is made inside that window). If a payment attempt fails, we retry on a fixed schedule; a booking is automatically cancelled for payment failure after repeated failed attempts.

Cancellation by an owner: free of charge more than 48 hours before a given visit day; inside 48 hours, that visit day is non-refundable. This applies per visit-day, not to the whole booking at once.

Cancellation by a sitter: a sitter may cancel a confirmed visit or booking, but repeated cancellations are tracked and affect their ranking. Where a sitter cancels, the owner is refunded in full for the affected visit(s), and — where the visit is still upcoming — the visit is made available for another sitter to pick up.

Commission: CityPet charges a commission on each booking, deducted from the sitter’s payout, not added on top of what the owner pays. The standard rate reduces for a sitter with sustained completed-booking volume over time, down to a floor rate.

Payouts: a sitter is paid out 3 days after a visit is marked complete, to allow time for an owner to raise a dispute. A dispute must be raised within 7 days of a visit’s completion.

5. Verification and safety features

Full home-access details (entry instructions, alarm codes, and similar) are only released to a sitter once they’ve accepted a specific booking, never before — and are encrypted at rest. A completed visit produces a structured report (feeding, toileting, behaviour, and species-specific detail, alongside photos or a short video) which the owner can view on the booking and in their conversation with the sitter.

During an active visit, a sitter can call the owner or the owner’s emergency contact through our call-masking service — neither party’s real phone number is exposed to the other. The owner is notified whenever their emergency contact is called this way, regardless of outcome.

6. Content and conduct

Photos and videos uploaded to a visit report or sent in chat are automatically scanned before they’re shown to anyone else. This scanning serves two distinct purposes, and we don’t conflate them:

• A legal reporting duty. CityPet is legally required to detect and report child sexual abuse material to the National Crime Agency. Content matching this is never shown to anyone and is reported as required by law. We don’t notify a user when this happens to their content, for reasons that should be self-evident.
• Our own content policy. Separately, we block general nudity/inappropriate content as a platform standard, not a legal requirement — a user affected by this is told plainly that content was removed, without detail that could help someone work around the check.

Harassment, discrimination, or anything that makes another user feel unsafe can be reported directly, and is handled separately from an ordinary billing or quality dispute. A conduct finding against an account can result in a temporary suspension or permanent removal from the platform.

7. Disputes

Certain narrow categories of dispute (a no-show, a duplicate charge, a missing refund, or a cancellation timing disagreement) may be resolved automatically against clear account data — this is always labelled to you as an automated decision, and can be escalated to a person. Every other kind of dispute is reviewed by a person from the start.

8. Your data

How we collect, use, and protect your data — including what we share with Stripe, our identity verification provider, and our other processors — is covered in our Privacy Policy, not repeated here.

9. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Each version is dated, and your acceptance of a specific version is recorded with a timestamp — a later change doesn’t retroactively apply to what you already agreed to without being presented again.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.

11. Contact

[Contact email/address to be added here.]