We built this because we love house-sitting

Our first sit

The reply came from Warburg, a small medieval town in rural Germany — a woman who needed someone to look after her four cats. We had no reviews and nothing to show. Later she explained her choice: she pictured every applicant, and when she came to us, her spirit animal — a fox — nodded.

The town was beautiful, and it was May, with the garden full of birds and the house ours for ten days. When the owner came back from Italy, she thanked us with a ritual. She was a yoga teacher and, it turned out, a bit of a shaman. She drummed and sang 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 gave them up for a sit in Paris. We were hooked.

Warburg, Germany, May 2017

Real homes, real people

Over the next nine years we sat in more than a dozen countries, and it never got boring. A villa fifty metres from the sea in Kalkan, Turkey, that we loved so much we stayed there four times. Four cats in Transylvania, a few kilometres from "Dracula's castle," with bears in the hills above. A dog in Marseille, and walks in the Calanques almost every day. Cats in Antwerp, Munich, Bonn, Milan, Catania, Valencia, Barcelona; dogs in Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Turin, 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.

Kalkan, Turkey

Măgura, Romania

The animals we fell in love with

We don't have a pet of our own, so the animals we look after mean a great deal to us. For weeks at a time, theirs become ours.

Nenette, a nineteen-year-old cat in Paris with the most beautiful eyes we have ever seen — still a kitten when we came back two years later. Smokey and Otis in Kalkan, who kept their distance at first, and in the end wanted to be with us all the time. Popeye in southern Spain, who looked like a small, short-legged donkey and slept on our laps like a cat. Malu in Brussels, a Rhodesian Ridgeback and a true gentle giant, who played basketball with us in the garden.

Nenette — Paris

Daisy, Candy and Picasso — Cyprus

We still talk about them. You go for the places; the animals are what bring you back.

Why we built HouseSit

We also saw the hosts' side. We once sat for a couple in Erstein, a small 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, France

There are millions of pets and people 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, hosts who save what boarding costs, and sitters who get to discover new places. 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. Everything we charge for is optional: a one-time ID check with Stripe that shows you are a real person, and a couple of small extras for when you want to stand out. 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. We left Belarus after the 2020 protests and have lived in Warsaw since 2021. Dzmitry is a software developer who builds and runs the platform. Natallia found most of our sits over the years, and today she shapes how HouseSit looks and reads. We have no investors, 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.

Dzmitry, building HouseSit

We test every flow ourselves

The promise

As long as we are running this, the core platform is free. When something costs money, we will tell you exactly what you pay for and why.

If you are here, welcome. Find a sit. Find a sitter. See the world the way we did — and meet animals you will never forget. Let us know how it goes.