Pet founders are building the software they used to buy.

10 of the 40 pet companies in this survey built at least part of their own software stack.

3 went as far as building their own CRM with Claude or Cursor. Others built dashboards, attribution systems, customer portals, content tools and entire operating applications. That is 25% of the group handling work the software industry has spent 20 years turning into subscriptions.

Founders tend to more easily recall the software they open every day, while Meta pixels, behavior scripts like Hotjar and half-forgotten integrations collect digital dust in the background, needing almost no interaction after install. So we combined the submitted answers with a scan of their sites. 19 of 40 named a paid-media or attribution tool. The scan found a specific advertising or conversion platform on 12 more sites, taking the combined count to 31 of 40.

The completed stacks push the most obvious AI finding out of the way, which is 38 of 40 companies use AI. Shocker, I know. The real question is what in the world they are actually trusting it to do with their business. In this group, AI is managing projects, producing weekly analysis, building software and connecting systems that were never designed to work together.

That creates a different software market, and the public markets have spent all year trying to price it. When Anthropic shipped plugins for its Cowork agent on February 3rd, Salesforce fell about 7% in a single session inside a broad software selloff. Figma dropped roughly the same in April, on the day Anthropic launched a design tool. Three weeks after the February slide, Anthropic announced Cowork integrations with Slack, Intuit and Docusign, and the same names rallied. Nobody selling software has settled on whether the model is the competitor or the channel.

The systems holding orders, invoices and customer records remain. Some of the subscriptions and dashboards surrounding them are being rebuilt from inside the company.