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The Defra-compliant microchip database & the MyVet practice platform
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A question that often comes up when talking to customers considering a move to us and buying their microchips from us is “How can you give registration, updates and transfers away for free when our current provider can’t do that. Is it sustainable?”

In this article I’ll break down how it’s sustainable, why we’re doing it and how we can afford to do it. 

Our pricing model

Our pricing model when we initially started assumed somewhere between 15% and 20% of pet owners would want to pay for added features. This allows us to offer a tiered pricing system 

MyPet Basic: This is our free offering which around 80% of pet owners choose. It gives the essentials of a microchip database. It allows a pet owner to get their details stored against the microchip using our online platform. 

MyPet Protected: (£12 a year) This gives a range of additional features, like adding vet details, emergency contacts, added lost pet features, premium support and more

MyPet Pampered: (£26 a year) This is everything in Protected along with our smart pet tag, with a customisable online pet profile and notifications

Our assumption was right. somewhere between 15 and 20% of our pet owners choose 1 of these premium packages every month. Improving these packages will be our core pet owner focus to increase the number of customers that choose a premium package.

When you compare this to the offering of many other databases our premium packages still offer remarkable value, so we still need savings in other areas. 

What does your database of choice charge

Take a look and see how your customers feel about the price your database provider charges. Many people are sensitive to the price which is why our free offering along with premium packages meet all customers needs.

Our customer Service costs

As you may know there are around 22 compliant databases in the UK. Many of these look after a very small number of microchips or they focus on a market segment we’re not interested in servicing and we don’t count them among our true competitors. We count 6 databases as true competitors.

Many of these businesses have existed for a long time and we believe they have bloated customer service teams because of poor technology. Our estimates show that they have a dedicated customer service team member at a rate of 1 person per 15,000 microchip registrations (annually). 

With good technology, an easy to use platform and a good self service help centre we’ve maintained a rate of 1 person per 60,000 microchip registrations. An improvement of 4 x. This is a huge cost saving for us helping maintain that offering of MyPet Basic. We also believe we can move this further while still maintaining a 4.9 out of 5 satisfaction rating.

Our technology costs

Another thing we can assume from our market assumptions is many of our competitors have bloated and old technology stacks that have lacked investment. (This feeds into the added customer service costs)

We’re lucky to have a co-founder who has spent his career in technology and who has focused on building a state of the art technology platform while rigidly controlling our platform spend. We’re not bogged down by legacy technology like those competitors who started in the 90’s. It’s also worth mentioning that all our technology is built by our team. With all of this in mind we estimate we spend around 3 x less per 50,000 microchips on our technology. 

A fair price for microchips

We believe we sell microchips at a fair price. We sit in the middle of the market. This allows us to make money on the microchips.

We are cheaper than some of our compeititors and the pharma providers like Virbac or Tracer.

You can get free microchips from some providers which then charge a registration fee or a annual plan just for updating details to your pet owners. We believe very rigidly that this goes against what a database should be doing. It’s from the outset making around 30% of microchips useless. These microchips will never be registered because of the high cost just to get the microchip registered.

A changing market

The market has consolidated dramatically over the last 2 years and private equity money is now in the market.

This is putting pressure on a group of databases to dramatically increase their earnings. (As we’ve heard a lot about in the veterinary space recently) 

Because of this many of these databases have increased their prices by a fair amount and make it impossible to do anything without a paid subscription. (5 of these databases are now owned by one parent company.)

Our offering summarised

In summary we can allow a free offering for pet owners because:

  • Around 20% of customers want to pay for premium features and choose to do so. The rest benefit from our free plan. 
  • Our focus on an easy to use, well built and maintained platform reduces our costs dramatically on customer service and technology. 
  • We’re wholly owned by our team, and our team become owners through an EMI scheme. We don’t have to hit earnings for investors or a parent company. 
  • We make a fair margin on our microchips, allowing you to benefit from our free plan for your customers. 
Did you know?

Over 50 vet practices, 30 rescues and 100 microchip implanters have moved to MyPet this year. Get free samples and more information by adding your details below.

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