Seglo vs Petboost: where each one stops

Full disclosure: we build Seglo. Everything about Petboost here is quoted or costed from their own published pages, August 2026. Where they are ahead of us, it says so.

At a glance

What Petboost is good at

Petboost is Australian and prices in Australian dollars. Their footer says they were “Made by fellow pet services business owners & technology experts in Sydney”, and their Communications Booster gives you a dedicated Australian number rather than a shared overseas pool.

Their booking engine is the strongest thing on their site. It checks a long list of rules before it will offer a slot: who is qualified to do that dog, breed and weight limits, how far you travel, how many baths and drying stations you have, and padding either side of a groom. If your diary lets you book what you cannot actually do, they have solved that.

Around it sits a mature product: prepaid packages, memberships, group courses, digital forms, and automated SMS and email. Four things there we do not match. They track a vaccination to its expiry and flag it; ours is a field on an intake form. Their reports download; ours stay on screen. Every plan carries unlimited team members with no per-seat fee; ours is priced in bands. And past $7,500 of card volume a month they waive the subscription, which no flat fee can beat. If one of those is why you are shopping, take it.

What each one is built to get right

Petboost is built so the appointment is correct and paid: the right dog with the right groomer at a time you can genuinely do, with a deposit or a card behind it and a form on file. They are direct about where that stops. Their own page is titled “What Petboost Doesn’t Do”, and on the books: “We are NOT accounting software (no general ledger, no BAS, no payroll).”

Seglo is built around the day the appointment sits inside: who is calling and what you already know about them, what the floor is doing while a dog is on the dryer, and what the fortnight owes each groomer.

Neither is a longer list. Pick the one that describes your Saturday.

The way Petboost is priced

It is not a flat subscription, and it behaves differently as you grow. Three separate costs, easy to blend together:

1. The subscription. $65 a month on Business Pro, and it can fall to $0.
2. The Petboost booking fee. 1.4% of what you take on a card. This one does not fall.
3. Stripe. 1.7% plus 30 cents, card processing rather than software. You pay it on Seglo too, so keep it out of the comparison.

The waiver is real and it is unusual. Their own headline for it: “Your monthly fee goes to $0. Every plan drops to nothing once your card volume passes the threshold.”

Read each threshold against its booking fee and the model shows itself. By the time a threshold arrives, the percentage has already overtaken the subscription it removes. At $7,500 the 1.4% is $105 against a $65 subscription. On Business Max the two meet to the dollar: $20,000 at 1.2% is $240, the subscription exactly.

The same plan, two different bills

Business Pro at $100 a groom, 22 days open, everything on a card. Illustrative volumes, not a claim about a typical salon.

The subscription is $0. The bill is not.

Four dogs a day is the row to look at. The subscription has gone, exactly as promised, and the month still costs $123.20 before Stripe. Two salons on the same plan with the same features, paying $126.60 and $308.00, because one of them is busier.

Ours is the other shape: a flat monthly price set by team size. $49 up to three, $99 up to six, $199 up to fifteen, $349 up to thirty, Australian, GST included, billed per business rather than per location. Cards run through your own Stripe account and we take no percentage, so the number does not move when you have a good December. Seglo Phone is $149 once and $79 a month with two devices, $29 for each device after that. The AI receptionist is a separate $149 a month plus 40 cents a minute.

Neither shape is automatically cheaper. A quiet month on low card volume is a good month to be on a percentage. A salon putting $20,000 a month across the card machine pays Petboost $240 on Business Max, the percentage having replaced the subscription to the dollar, and pays us the same $99 it paid in winter.

Two hours of drying time

Petboost’s padding blocks the time out. Seglo does something different: a service splits into steps, and a step that needs nobody is a rest step. The dog is on the dryer, the groomer is not, and those minutes go back into the day as time you can sell. Petboost publishes no equivalent.

Across five dogs a day that is not a feature. It is a groomer.

And then the phone rings

Petboost has announced an answer and not shipped it. The Grazi AI Booster page is headed “Closed beta” and says it plainly: “This page describes what we are building, not what you can switch on today.” The price is “To be announced”. What ships today is Grazi AI Assistant, which answers questions about your numbers and drafts messages. It is good. It does not pick up the phone.

Seglo answers on the number already on your shopfront, with the client, the pet and the standing note on screen while it is still ringing. The finished groom goes back as a photograph rather than a link, where their messaging pages describe SMS only. Why that is rare in Australia.

Timesheets, payroll and the ledger

Petboost is straight about this too. Their site says the product “doesn’t offer timesheets (clock in/out) or payroll processing” and recommends you buy Deputy or Tanda for one, Xero Payroll, Employment Hero or KeyPay for the other. Xero itself connects “via Stripe Bank Feeds” in a “clean one-way data flow”. Card takings arrive as bank transactions. Nothing comes back.

For a salon of five that is two more subscriptions and two more things to reconcile at the end of a fortnight. Seglo is not a payroll system either and lodges nothing. It does the part that goes wrong: the hours and the commission come out of the system that took the booking, and export from there. Xero reconciles both ways.

Which should you pick?

Petboost’s prices, thresholds, fees and product limits were read from their own pricing, feature and FAQ pages in August 2026 and quoted rather than summarised. Every dollar figure here is arithmetic on those published rates, shown as an illustration rather than a claim about any particular salon. If something is out of date, tell us and we will correct it. Petboost is a trademark of its owner; Seglo is not affiliated with or endorsed by Petboost.