Pricing
Priced for your operation. Never per person.
You already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars 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.
Free forever — no annual plan to buy
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 that tailor themselves to each person's job duties
- Bulk import from CSV, Excel, or PDF
House Cat
A regional season, every brand you run.
or $2,999/year
For smaller dance competitions
Up to 15 events per year
Extra events available — inquire
Everything in Alley Cat, plus:
- Multiple brands with one shared staff pool
- iOS staff app (TestFlight beta) with push notifications
- 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
Show Cat
For the national tour.
or $4,999/year
For larger touring competitions
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
- Company knowledge base
- Priority support
Kitten Kaboodle
For multi-brand producers.
or $14,999/year
Every brand, every event, every add-on, one bill
Unlimited events
Everything in Show Cat, plus:
- Every add-on included — Finance, Gear & Trucking, Live Flight Pricing, Debriefs & Surveys, Tour Website
- No event counting, ever
- Consolidated cross-brand reporting
- The AI assistant, with automatic re-planning when a weekend changes
- White-glove onboarding and data migration
Something we didn't price?
Franchises, unusual seasons, multiple brands — let's build the right shape for it.
Quarterly billing is available on request.
Side by side
Everything in every plan.
| Feature | Alley Cat | House Cat | Show Cat | Kitten Kaboodle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Included | 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 |
| Automatic re-planning when a weekend changes | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Notifications & admin | ||||
| In-app and email notifications | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Text-message notifications | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| iOS staff app (TestFlight beta) with push notifications | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Data export | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Add-ons | ||||
| Finance | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| Gear & Trucking | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| Live Flight Pricing | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| Debriefs & Surveys | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| Tour Website | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| Support | ||||
| Email support | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Season setup and import help | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Priority support | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
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 — and Kitten Kaboodle includes every one of them.
Finance
$99/moor $999/yr
A per-event P&L — the profit-and-loss for each weekend — 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 that reconciles the weekend's cash and revenue, and a QuickBooks-shaped journal file your accountant can import without re-keying anything.
Available today
Gear & Trucking
$49/moor $499/yr
Freight zones — the groups of states you quote one trucking rate for — plus warehouses, primary and override drivers, per-event load plans, the driver portal with dock-time countdowns, and numbered gear cases with manifests and QR labels, so the truck and what's on it live in one place.
Available today
Debriefs & Surveys
$29/moor $299/yr
Post-event feedback that captures exactly how each event went — scheduled sends, per-recipient tracking, and CSV export of every response — so what you learn becomes institutional knowledge instead of living in someone's head.
Available today
Live Flight Pricing
$29/moor $299/yr
Real 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
Tour Website
$29/moor $299/yr
A hosted tour-dates page, plus a tiny snippet you paste into your own website or tour pages once — it stays in sync with the latest dates and statuses in Herding Cats, so nothing gets edited by hand twice.
Available today
Registration
Coming soon
Studios register themselves: live validation, instant returning-studio access, reservations, change requests instead of locked forms, and card payments straight to your own Stripe account.
Coming soon — you are the merchant of record
- 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. On an annual plan the quiet months are included — you pay for ten months and get twelve. Month to month, cancel whenever you like; 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?
- Not yet. Registration is built — studios get live validation, instant returning-studio access, and payments straight to your own Stripe account — but it isn't on sale yet, so keep entries where they are for now and we'll tell you the moment it opens. Competition-day tools — scoring, tabulation, judging, and routine scheduling — are in active development too. The platform runs your season either way, and reading entry counts straight from the tool 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 Show Cat, 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?
- Every paid plan runs multiple brands from one shared staff pool — House Cat up, with separate branding per tour. Kitten Kaboodle adds consolidated cross-brand reporting, drops event counting for franchise-scale operations, and includes every add-on. Running many brands? Talk to us.
Design partners
Built around your season. Pay a lot less.
No generic template. Tell us how your season runs and we build it that way: your sequence, your vocabulary, your defaults, refined by a 25-year veteran UX and product designer. A bespoke system most companies could never justify commissioning.
In exchange, a steep discount on whichever plan fits your season, for as long as you're a partner.
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
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 Show Cat — 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.
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