How FareVet Is Changing Access to Veterinary Care in a Way That Has Never Been Done Before

The veterinary access crisis is real and a new wave of companies is trying to solve it. Here's what FareVet is doing differently, and why price transparency is the missing piece no one else has built at scale.

Something is broken in the way North Americans access veterinary care.

Nearly half of pet owners in the United States have delayed or skipped care for their animals due to cost. More than 70 percent say they feel unprepared when a large vet bill arrives. Clinic visits have been declining since late 2023 even as the pet-owning population grows. And yet, despite all of this, the information that could help people plan, prepare, and make confident decisions about their pet's care has remained almost entirely unavailable.

The average pet owner walks into a veterinary clinic with no idea what anything will cost until they are already there. That is not a small inconvenience. It is a structural failure that leads to delayed diagnoses, financial shock, and in too many cases, pets going without care they need.

A growing number of companies have started trying to address different parts of this problem. But what FareVet is building sits at the center of it in a way that no one else has approached at scale.

The Landscape: What Others Are Doing

To understand what makes FareVet different, it helps to look at the broader field of companies trying to make veterinary care more accessible.

Telehealth platforms like Vetster and Airvet have expanded access by removing geography from the equation. Pet owners who can't get to a clinic, who want a same-day opinion, or who live in rural areas without nearby veterinary services can now reach a licensed vet by video. Vetster raised a $30 million Series B in 2025 to expand its on-demand consultation platform. Airvet built its network to serve over 100,000 pets and became one of the top-rated pet telehealth platforms in North America. These companies made care more reachable for people who were previously stuck. But they don't address what happens when someone can get to a clinic and still can't afford to go.

Modern Animal took a different approach: redesign the clinic itself. With a published pricing page, a membership model offering unlimited visits with no exam fees, and a design-forward experience built for millennial and Gen Z pet parents, Modern Animal is one of the few clinic networks actively competing on transparency. Their pricing page, updated as recently as February 2026, lists costs for common services in plain language. This is meaningful. But it is limited to the clinics Modern Animal operates, in the markets they serve.

Snout is tackling the financial access problem at its root by offering wellness plans that cover 100 percent of routine care, functioning as an alternative to traditional pet insurance. The premise is that if predictable costs are covered, fewer people delay preventive care. Pawp built a similar model through a membership with an emergency fund backstop. CareCredit and Scratchpay address acute affordability by spreading costs over time. Each of these is a real solution to a real part of the problem, but they rely on pet owners being enrolled in a plan or having access to credit before the crisis arrives.

GuardianVets raised $7 million in 2025 to expand after-hours triage, connecting pet owners with support when their regular clinic is closed. Baxtr helps independent practices build subscription preventive care plans to compete with corporate chains. The ecosystem of veterinary innovation is genuinely active.

But across all of it, one layer has been almost entirely missing: the layer that tells pet owners, before they go anywhere, what care is likely to cost.

The Problem No One Has Solved

A peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in 2026 investigated price transparency on the websites of small animal clinics across the United States. The findings were striking: the vast majority of clinics provided no pricing information online whatsoever. Pet owners searching for cost information before an appointment were essentially starting from zero.

This matters for a specific reason. The access to care problem is not only a money problem. It is an information problem. People who don't know what something will cost make one of two choices: they go and hope for the best, or they don't go at all. Both outcomes are bad. The first leads to financial shock that erodes trust and breeds resentment. The second leads to untreated illness.

The information gap is the upstream cause of a lot of downstream damage. And it is the gap that FareVet was built to close.

What FareVet Is Building

FareVet is a veterinary cost transparency platform operating across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with more than 55,000 verified price records from clinics in its database.

The core function is straightforward: pet owners can search for a procedure or service, filter by location, and see what clinics in their area typically charge. Not estimates pulled from outdated surveys. Not national averages that mean nothing at the local level. Verified, specific pricing data tied to real clinics.

This is the information layer that the rest of the ecosystem has been operating without.

But FareVet has continued to build beyond that foundation. In 2025, the platform launched an AI-powered bill analysis tool, allowing pet owners to upload a vet bill or estimate and receive a breakdown of what each line item means, whether the pricing is typical, and where alternatives might exist. As FareVet's founder Pietro Kabeya described it: "Our AI tool is designed to act like a second set of eyes to help them understand the breakdown, spot red flags, and even negotiate more realistic paths forward."

And for clinics, FareVet is deploying the FareVet Estimator: a dynamic tool that lives on a clinic's own website and lets pet owners build a real cost estimate before they book an appointment. It is not a static price list. It is a real-time experience that updates as a client adds services, giving them a clear picture of expected costs before they walk through the door. The operational benefits flow directly back to the clinic: fewer inbound calls about pricing, fewer cancellations driven by sticker shock, and clients who arrive financially prepared rather than blindsided.

Why the Approach Is Different

Most veterinary innovation has focused on delivery. How do we get care to more people? Through telehealth, through membership models, through financing. These are genuine contributions.

FareVet is focused on decision support. How do people make good decisions about care in the first place? Through information. Through knowing what something costs before committing to it. Through arriving at a clinic as a prepared participant rather than a passive recipient of a bill.

The distinction matters because decision support scales in a way that delivery solutions do not. A telehealth platform can serve more users, but it still requires a licensed vet on the other end of every call. A membership clinic can grow to more locations, but it is constrained by real estate, staffing, and geography. A price transparency platform, built on verified data and deployed across thousands of clinics, creates value everywhere it reaches, for every pet owner who searches, for every clinic that participates.

The other distinction is that FareVet operates on both sides of the relationship. The consumer-facing platform serves pet owners with search and bill analysis tools. The clinic-facing Estimator serves practices by turning price transparency from a reluctant compliance question into an active tool for client acquisition and appointment conversion. Both sides benefit, which is what makes the infrastructure sustainable.

The Bigger Picture

What is happening in veterinary care right now is not simply a cost crisis. It is a trust crisis. Pet owners feel unprepared. They feel that information is being withheld. They feel that the relationship between them and their vet is structurally imbalanced in a way that wouldn't be tolerated in almost any other professional service relationship.

The companies doing the most interesting work in this space are the ones trying to rebalance that relationship by giving pet owners more to work with: more access, more options, more financial tools, more information. Vetster gives them access to a vet from their couch. Modern Animal gives them a clinic that publishes its prices. Snout gives them a plan that removes the financial risk of routine care.

FareVet gives them the ability to know, before any of those other decisions are made, what care actually costs in their market. That is the information that makes all of the other decisions easier.

The access to care crisis will not be solved by any single company. It will be solved by an ecosystem of solutions working on different parts of the problem. But the information layer is not optional. It is foundational. And it is what FareVet is building.

FareVet is a veterinary cost transparency platform helping pet owners across the US and Canada understand what care costs before they approve it. Search verified vet prices near you at farevet.com