Volunteer and foster coordination for animal shelters.

The problem

An animal shelter runs on volunteer time: dog walkers, kennel crews, adoption-event handlers and the fosters who take animals home. Coordinators were filling shifts by group text, retyping applications from email, chasing foster updates and tracking vaccine dates by hand.

What we built

Shift coverage

Volunteers claim primary and backup spots themselves. Coordinators see gaps at the start of the day, broadcast them, or assign people who have worked that team before.

Foster care

A roster synced read-only from ShelterLuv: animals, photos and vaccine records. Fosters post photo check-ins and book vaccine appointments. The vet team has a private thread per foster, and managers get a daily 8 AM vaccine summary.

Onboarding

One join link, verified email and phone, the shelter's own form (drafted by Claude from a plain-English description), and program tags for court-ordered, FFA and college volunteers. ShelterLuv application emails become applicants automatically.

Hours and records

Hours are logged from completed shifts, verified by staff and exported as PDF or CSV.

How

A Next.js App Router front end acts as a backend-for-frontend in front of a FastAPI service on Cloud Run with PostgreSQL. The iOS and Android apps are Capacitor wrappers around the same web bundle, so every screen ships to all three platforms at once. Sign-in is passwordless (Firebase, with one-time codes by text or email). Chat runs on Stream and billing on Stripe. Claude reads application emails and drafts forms. Two-track releases go to staging and to TestFlight and Play internal testing, then to production and the stores.

Where it is

Live at app.voluntails.com and in the App Store and Google Play. Release 1.16.0 (November 2026) added privacy-respecting product telemetry and masked session replay to find problems faster.