Shorter stays, better outcomes: free analytics for animal shelters
Our mission: to help shelters save and place as many animals as possible by giving their teams clear, data-driven insight for the decisions they make every day.
Every day in a shelter is a decision about capacity, care and placement. We turn shelter data into practical guidance so more animals find homes, faster.
Every extra day an animal spends in a kennel costs money, takes space from the next animal, and can wear on the animal's health and behavior. Shelter Insights gives shelter teams free, plain-language tools to see where stays run long and what would change them.
Free tools, open to everyone
Length-of-stay benchmarks
Median and 90th-percentile stays for dogs and cats by intake type, condition, age, size and season.
Cost-of-care calculator
Estimate what each extra day in care costs, and what shorter stays could free up.
Kennel capacity estimator
How many kennels do your intake and length of stay fill on an average day?
Member tools for shelters
Shelters that request access and contribute a de-identified animal-level export get the deeper tools below. Every contribution makes the shared models and simulations better for all shelters. How membership works.
Today: daily decision dashboard
Your population by days in care, likely long stays to plan for now, and a 30/60/90-day capacity forecast. Export to CSV or PDF.
Long-stay scoring (ML)
Score animals with our gradient-boosted model, retrained monthly, and see which factors drive each score.
Outcome mix simulator
What-if changes to the share and speed of every outcome pathway, and the effect on kennel-days, population and cost.
Program evaluator
Did a new program change length of stay? A seasonally adjusted before-and-after check.
Full kennel-flow simulator
Randomized what-if simulation of occupancy, busy days and days over capacity.
Shelter-specific estimates
Benchmark your shelter against the open-data pool and the anonymized member pool.
Built on 653,384 real shelter stays
Our benchmarks come from animal-level open data published by eight public shelters: Austin, Dallas, Long Beach, Louisville, Montgomery County (MD), Norfolk, San Jose and Sonoma County. Each has its own benchmark page, and you can compare them side by side. We never show animal names, ID numbers or locations. See methodology and sources.
How we fit with existing resources
Shelter Animals Count collects the national intake and outcome numbers, and Best Friends' Shelter Pet Data Alliance gives shelters dashboards and benchmarking. Shelter Insights is meant to sit next to those, not replace them. It focuses on the operational questions that come after the dashboard: how long animals stay and why, what a day of care costs, whether a program actually moved length of stay, and how much kennel space a change would free.
This project is run as a nonprofit effort. If it's useful to your shelter, tell us at [email protected], or support the work.