Seglo vs Petboost: monthly costs, scheduling and staff pay

Full disclosure: we build Seglo. Everything about Petboost here is based on 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 work do you need the software to handle?

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).”

With Seglo, plan the people and equipment inside each groom, keep pet notes ready when customers call and review recorded hours and commission for the pay period.

Compare those tasks using a service and pay period from your own shop.

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.

Include the booking fee when the subscription is waived.

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, excluding GST, 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 for two people, $29 for each extra person 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.

Fit another booking while an assistant helps

Set who does each part of a groom and how long it takes. Your groomer can take another dog while an assistant does suitable work. Ask Petboost to demonstrate the same booking: the pages reviewed here did not establish an equivalent setup.

The time you can use depends on your service steps and how much hands-on care each dog needs.

What happens when your team can't answer?

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.

Check what your existing payroll tools already cover. Seglo brings recorded hours and commission into a pay review and can send a draft pay run to Xero. You still post, pay and handle payroll lodgements through your usual process.

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 linked to the source pages. 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.