We built this because we love house-sitting

That first sit hooked us

The reply came from Warburg, a small town in rural Germany — a woman who needed someone to look after her four cats. We had no reviews, nothing to prove ourselves; she chose us, she later told us, because as she pictured the applicants her spirit animal — a fox — nodded when she reached us. The fox decided.

Warburg turned out to be a beautiful medieval town, and it was May, with the garden full of birds and the house ours for ten days. When the owner came back from Italy — a yoga teacher, and as it turned out, something of a shaman — she thanked us with a ritual: drumming and singing in her yoga room while we were meant to meet our spirit animals (Natallia fell asleep).

We didn't even go home afterwards. We spent a week with a friend in Berlin, found a five-day sit in Toulouse, booked our flights home — and then lost them, because a sit in Paris came up first. We were hooked.

Warburg, Germany — our first sit: four cats and a medieval town

Real homes, real people

Over the next nine years we sat all over Europe, and the pattern never got old. Four cats in Warburg. A nineteen-year-old cat in Paris. Two cats on a villa fifty metres from the sea in Kalkan, Turkey, that we loved so much we went back four times. Four cats in Transylvania, a few kilometres from "Dracula's castle," with bears in the hills above. A dog in Marseille and the Calanques almost every day. Cats in Antwerp, Munich, Bonn, Milan, Catania, Valencia, Barcelona; dogs in Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Torino, Marseille, Málaga, and many more.

You meet people you would never meet as a tourist — a Sorbonne professor, a children's-book author living in the Romanian mountains — and you stay in places no guidebook sends you. That, to us, is the best way to travel: not the famous sights, but real homes in real towns, and the animals you fall in love with.

Kalkan, Turkey — fifty metres from the sea

Transylvania — bears in the hills above

Why we built HouseSit

We also kept seeing the other side of it. We once sat for a couple in Erstein, a riverside town near Strasbourg — lovely people, lovely cats, a place anyone would want to stay. They tried to get us back again and again, not because no one else could do it, but because too few people were even looking.

Erstein, on the river near Strasbourg

There are millions of pets and millions of people across Europe who would be better off if house-sitting were bigger and easier: pets that stay home in their own routine instead of a boarding kennel, owners who save what boarding costs, and travellers who get to discover the continent the way we did. What stands in the way is mostly that the existing platforms are expensive, dated, or both.

So we are building the one we always wanted. Listing your home, browsing, applying, messaging, and matching are all free. The only thing we plan to charge for is optional — a one-time €29 ID verification through Stripe Identity, the same check banks use — so a member can show the other side they are a real person. A few other optional extras may come later for moments when standing out matters, but you'll never have to pay to find a sit or a sitter.

Who we are

It is the two of us — Dzmitry and Natallia. Dzmitry is a software developer based in Warsaw and builds the platform on evenings and weekends; Natallia is the design and writing sense behind everything that doesn't feel like an engineer made it. We are not VC-funded, and we are not building this to sell it. We are building something we use ourselves, that solves a real frustration, and that respects the people — and the pets — on both sides of the exchange. If it grows, great. If it stays small but useful, that is fine too.

Evenings and weekends

We test every flow ourselves

The promise

As long as we are running this, the core platform is free. We will be honest when something costs money — and when it does, we will tell you exactly what you are paying for and why. We will publish what we change, and listen when you tell us things suck.

If you are here, welcome. Find a sit. Find a sitter. See the world the way we did. Let us know how it goes.