Pricing
Priced for your operation. Never per person.
You already spend six figures a season moving people and freight. This costs a fraction of that, stays predictable, and never charges more for putting one more judge in the system.
- Free for up to 5 events
- No setup fee
- Unlimited seats on every plan
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Unlimited seats on every plan — the free one included. Put everybody in it.
Alley Cat
Free. Not a trial.
No card, no clock, no surprise invoice
Up to 5 events per year
The real product, capped by event count:
- Unlimited staff, coordinator, and driver seats
- Event hub with edit history
- Roster, roles, swaps, travel tracking
- All six starter playbooks
- Staff and driver portals
- Bulk import from CSV, Excel, or PDF
House Cat
A regional season, one brand.
Priced to how you run, not who you hire
Up to 15 events per year
Extra events available — inquire
Everything in Alley Cat, plus:
- Text-message notifications, per-person preferences
- Custom fields on events and people
- Venue and hotel directories with autofill
- Flight confirmation email parsing
- Profile approvals, notes, comments
- Season setup and import help
Kitten Kaboodle
A full national tour.
Priced to how you run, not who you hire
Up to 40 events per year
Extra events available — inquire
Everything in House Cat, plus:
- Season board — staff the tour in one sitting
- Travel booking radar across every event
- Your own editable playbooks
- The AI assistant, season allowance included
- Company knowledge base
- Priority support, named contact
The Whole Herd
40+ events, multiple brands.
Quoted to your brands and your scale
Unlimited events
Everything in Kitten Kaboodle, plus:
- No event counting, ever
- Multiple brands with one shared staff pool
- Consolidated cross-brand reporting
- An expanded AI assistant allowance, included
- White-glove onboarding and data migration
Something we didn't price?
Franchises, unusual seasons, more than a handful of brands — let's build the right shape for it.
Design partners
Help us build it. Pay a lot less.
We're looking for a small number of competition companies to build this with us properly — not a beta mailing list, a working relationship. Design partners get the people writing the code on the other end of the email, and the problems you hit on a Saturday tend to become the thing we ship that month.
In exchange, the price drops steeply on whichever plan fits your season. Tell us what your tour looks like and what currently hurts.
Who answers when you call
100% USA-based support.From the family that builds it.
Herding Cats is a US-based, family-run small business. There is no offshore call center and no ticket-queue purgatory — the people who answer your email are the people who build the product, working the same time zones your season runs in.
- Every message read and answered by a human in the USA
- Answers come from the people who wrote the feature
- Support included on every plan — the free one too
Add-on modules
Turn on the parts you actually run.
Not every company trucks its own gear or sends debrief surveys. Modules are priced separately so you're not subsidising a capability you'll never open.
Finance
InquirePer-event P&L that fills itself in as the season runs — revenue, costs, and margin per weekend, budgets against actuals, season roll-ups by brand, the show-day settlement sheet, and a QuickBooks-shaped journal file your accountant can import without re-keying anything.
Available today — per-event P&L to QuickBooks-ready journal files
Freight & Trucking
InquireFreight zones mapped to states, warehouses, primary and override drivers, per-event load plans, and the driver portal with dock-time countdowns.
Available today
Debriefs & Surveys
InquirePost-event survey templates, scheduled campaigns, per-recipient tracking, feedback about individual staff, and CSV export of every response.
Available today
Registration
InquireStudios register themselves: live validation, instant returning-studio access, reservations, change requests instead of locked forms, and card payments straight to your own Stripe account.
Available today — you are the merchant of record
Tour Website
InquireA hosted, always-current tour dates page plus a one-line website embed — statuses like Sold Out flip themselves from live registration capacity, and your web person never edits the schedule again.
Available today
Live Flight Pricing
InquireReal round-trip fares beside every shortlisted candidate while you staff an event — availability and proximity filter first, so you compare actual travel costs for the three people in the running, not the whole roster.
Available today
Media & Awards
Not priced yet
Photo and video deliverable tracking per event, media team assignments, and awards inventory against what each session actually needs.
In development
Side by side
Everything in every plan.
| Feature | Alley Cat | House Cat | Kitten Kaboodle | The Whole Herd |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | ||||
| Events | Up to 5 | Up to 15 | Up to 40 | Unlimited |
| Staff, coordinator, and driver seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Additional events | — | Inquire | Inquire | Included |
| Multiple brands, one staff pool | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
| The event hub | ||||
| Worksheet panels with inline editing | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Notes, comments, and field audit history | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Custom fields and per-panel layout | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Venue and hotel directories with autofill | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Staffing | ||||
| Roster, roles, day rates, swaps | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Ranked suggestions for an opening | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Bulk import from CSV, Excel, or PDF | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Season board — batch-staff the tour | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Travel | ||||
| Flights, hotels, rooming, ground transport | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Arrive-by times per person | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Confirmation email parsing | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Booking window radar | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Disruptions & knowledge | ||||
| Disruption center + six starter playbooks | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Ranked call list with outreach links | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Edit and write your own playbooks | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Company knowledge base | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| AI assistant | ||||
| Staff and driver assistant | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Coordinator tools with approval cards | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Season allowance included | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Expanded allowance with automatic re-planning | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Notifications & admin | ||||
| In-app and email notifications | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| SMS with per-person preferences | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Granular per-event permissions | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Data export | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Support | ||||
| Email support | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Season setup and import help | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Priority support, named contact | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
Do the arithmetic
What a season already costs you before software.
Set the sliders to your season — how many events you run and roughly what you spend on flights, hotels, and coordination. The calculator shows what that adds up to, and what trimming even a few percent of it is worth. That saving is what a plan should be judged against.
Your season
What you already spend
$318,120
per season, on travel and freight alone
- Flights and hotels
- $252,120
- Freight
- $66,000
Saved per season
$15,906
At 22 events you'd be on Kitten Kaboodle — a fraction of the number above.
Where that comes from
- Book before fares climb — The radar flags every event at 28 days and calls anything inside 21 overdue, so you stop buying last-minute seats.
- Stop paying for empty beds — Room blocks, rooming, and release dates sit on the event — you release what you don't need before rack rate kicks in.
- Fill last-minute gaps without last-minute fares — When someone drops, the call list ranks by who's easiest to get there — often a drive instead of a same-day fare.
- Share the rides you're already paying for — Arrivals inside the same window get grouped into one car instead of four separate airport runs.
Your numbers, computed in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere. The point is the order of magnitude, not the decimal.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Something not covered here? Email us — a real person answers.
- Is the free plan actually free?
- Yes. Alley Cat is the real product capped at 5 events a season — not a trial, no card, no clock. Plenty of smaller operations can live on it indefinitely; we make our money when you're running 15 weekends and want the season board.
- What counts as an event?
- One competition weekend at one venue is one event. A Friday-through-Sunday stop counts once, however many sessions run inside it.
- Do you charge per staff member?
- No, and we won't. The product is only correct when everybody is in it — every judge, emcee, scorekeeper, driver, and backup. Charging per head would tax the behavior that makes the data trustworthy. Seats are unlimited on every plan, including the free one.
- What happens in the off-season?
- Nobody should pay full freight during the months your tour isn't running. Hibernate parks the workspace for the quiet stretch — your season, your roster, and every note wait for August and come back exactly as you left them.
- Does this replace my registration or scoring software?
- It can replace registration — the Registration add-on gives studios live validation, instant returning-studio access, and payments straight to your own Stripe account. Competition-day tools — scoring, tabulation, judging, and routine scheduling — are in active development and not something you can run on today, so for now scoring stays where it is. And if you'd rather keep registration where it is too, that's fine: the platform runs your season either way, and reading entry counts straight from the platform you already use is on the roadmap.
- Does this replace QuickBooks?
- No, and it shouldn't. Your books stay in QuickBooks — the Finance module captures every cost and payment while the event is still running, then hands your accountant balanced journal entries coded by brand and event so nobody rebuilds the P&L from spreadsheets in October. You get operational truth in here; the ledger of record stays where your accountant already works.
- What if I add events mid-season?
- Alley Cat stops at 5 — upgrade when you outgrow it. On House Cat and Kitten Kaboodle, extra events are available; ask and we'll size them. And when the math says the next tier up is cheaper, we'll tell you to switch rather than let the overage run.
- Is there a setup fee?
- No setup fee, no implementation charge, no onboarding package. We'll help you import your staff list and your season calendar because we'd rather you actually use the thing.
- How long is the contract?
- No multi-year lock-in and no price that auto-escalates on you. Whenever you leave, you can export everything you've put in.
- What if we run more than one brand?
- That's The Whole Herd: separate branding per tour, one shared staff pool, consolidated reporting. Beyond a handful of brands or a franchise setup, talk to us.
No card, no call
Try it on one event before you decide anything.
Alley Cat is free and permanent. If it isn't obviously better than the spreadsheet, don't upgrade.
- Free for up to 5 events
- No card required
- Cancel any time