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For digital nomads looking for accommodation and home and pet owners looking for affordable alternatives to kennels, TrustedHousesitters used to feel like a godsend.
Until the day their 2023 private-equity buy-out resulted in the inevitable enshitification of the site.
As most savage corporate gougings begin, it started with an email…
You know the ones.
They come into our lives like the modern equivalent of a bear or tiger crashing through the doors, as far as our nervous system and level of stress and rage are concerned.
”Fee increase,” something-something ”better-service for you,” something-something.
But all I read was, ”OK, SO’S, the greedy suited mfers at the top are going for an all-out cash grab for their shareholders, so now YOU GOTTA PAY US MORE, PEASANT!’
As if a digital gloved hand flies through the screen, grabbing and shaking you by the neck to wring the last frayed nerve you’ve got left after years of global corporate gouging and greedflation since the Covid pandemic.
Ensitification had come for TrustedHousesitters
Oh, dear reader, the rage that welled up in me! THE RAGE!!!
The RAGE at their ridiculous $18 AUD new ”booking fee” for both sitters and home owners in addition to the annual fee!
And its arrival right before the holiday season, when they know thousands of digital nomads across the globe were locking in and confirming their petsits and housesits for the season!
I know I’m perimenopausal and hormonal AF…
But something about this fee increase eviscerated something deep inside me.
This email sent me into a tailspin of angry commenting alongside hundreds of other users of Trustedhousitters Australia and its thousands of international pet sitters and homeowners alike.
It deregulated TF out of my mind and body.
It threw my focus off.
Made it hard to get that week’s podcast out on time.
And it took me a few days of intense self-coaching to identify what was happening at the subconscious level of my brain that would provoke such indignation and distraction.
But, cygnets, I worked it out in the end…
And because this issue of software enshitification is endemic to my experience working as a marketing mentor (and especially over the previous 9 years I freelanced as a social media manager), I feel compelled to share the exact nuances of this particular fine blend of rage and indignation.
Because it’s a specialty blend many will relate to: the kind of rage at late-stage capitalism and economic pressure we’re all feeling here at the finale of this Year of Epic and Unmatched Global BULLSHIT that is 2025.
This wasn’t a price rise. It was a freedom tax.
It’s not about a new booking fee.
This is about FREEDOM being quietly taxed, piece by piece, by private equity enshittification and endless corporate greed around the world.
So please sit back as I relay the following unhinged rant against TrustedHousitters.
But also against private equity, hyper-capitalism, and the cost of living crisis. Especially here in Melbourne, Australia.
It’s a rant about our sense of safety and injustice.
And the daily struggle to stay emotionally regulated in a world hellbent on strangling us with an onslaught of new stressors that all derive from a rising inequality and unbrideled GREED.
Don’t worry — this isn’t only a rant.
I’ll share alternatives to TrustedHousitters that you can check out, and list some impactful ways we can fight back against this ongoing corporate greed.
Continue reading, OR if you prefer listening because you’re saddling up your horse to ride at dawn, click below for the podcast version 🪄 🎧💫
Prefer to watch instead of read? Watch the YouTube version here (Comment ”HEX, YEA!” and I’ll return the engagement on any of your latest posts or listings I find!😘) 🪄 📺💫
Luxury Travel Sites VS Relief, Barter-Based Travel Sites
House and petting sites based on the exchange of free services are not a part of the luxury travel industry, the same way Airbnb is, for example.
Short-term rentals like Airbnb are a huge part of the explosive rise in rental costs and demand in many major cities around the world. In Melbourne alone, over 14% of all available rental houses are short-term rentals.
Unlike luxury travel-based sites, free exchange-based pet and housing sites exist as a part of RELIEF travel: relief from accommodation fees for travelers and relief from kennel and caretaker fees for pet and homeowners.
RELIEF from adding to the housing crisis. And from being a part of all that.
It’s an ethical way to travel because it does not add to the housing crisis many cities currently face, including Melbourne, where renters have been getting financially suffocated by short-term rental services like Airbnb.
Free pet and housesitting sites are built on a huge win-win core value for home and pet owners.
For homeowners, pet and housesitting services mean their homes are safer, their lawns are cared for, and their pets enjoy time at home instead of in kennels.
For sitters, they are an escape valve for those of use seekng to enjoy a change of scenery that does NOT cost us a fortune in accommodation fees.
And for many travelers and digital nomads across the globe, it’s their entire lifestyle.
Which is what Hexotica is all about and why I’ve covered pet and housesitting many times here in Hexotica’s world.
But for me, TrustedHousesitters meant freedom.
Many sits I did when I was a full-time petsitting digital nomad were for a minimum of 2 weeks. The longest I ever did was 3 months.
These days, I petsit on average of one week or weekend every quarter.
I do petsits to have a place to stay overnight that is closer to the Melbourne CBD when events I want to attend are happening. Or just to have some peace and quiet and spend some time alone.
It’s something I love to always have planned in my calendar because I believe happiness is always having something to look forward to.
It’s one of the most joyful aspects of my current lifestyle.
I love caring for different kinds of animals, getting to know a pet’s personality, taking dogs for walks, and exploring new areas. Earlier this year, I spent two weeks exploring Adelaide, just because I had never been there before. I sat for an elderly cavoodle in Glenelg. It was wonderful!
The last sit I did before the new booking fee was introduced was the previous weekend. And I did it mainly to help the pet owner out, as I’ve sat for her 3 times before and she needed someone asap.
I was loyal to TrustedHousitters because I love how easy and enjoyable it is to find available sits all around the world. So I was building up my references there in hopes that I could one day sit in foreign countries.
But they were not loyal to me.
The annual fee should be enough, but the platform got greedy. A booking fee that amounts to $18 AUD for both the sitter and the homeowner makes no sense for short sits like the last one I did for just 2 nights.
And with how easy it can be to secure petsits on completely free places like Facebook groups or through referrals, I can’t see how these excessive fees are sustainable.
Why Enshitification Happens And How It Ruins Sites Like TrustedHousesitters
This isn’t about one software platform going bad or one user-diregarding fee introduction. It’s a repeatable pattern that we see happening all across the internet: corporate gouging, aka greedflation.
Greedflation is corporate price gouging.
It’s when big companies excessively raise prices on goods and services well fn beyond normal cost increases.
They do it during crises like the COVID pandemic, during big disasters, or due to market power. All in pursuit of fat profits with malicious disregard for consumers.
Greedy, blatant exploitation.
Here’s how this pattern plays out:
Community-based platforms start and grow on trust, reciprocity, and mutual benefit.
Then they get bought out by private equity.
And suddenly the goal shifts from service to extraction.
Features that once reduced friction now monetize friction.
Prices creep up. Value leaks OUT.
Both sides of the marketplace get squeezed—not because the platform is “failing,” but because it’s working exactly as designed.
They are designed for MAXIMUM EXTRACTION.
Now here’s what you need to know about private equity’s part in enshitification…
I’m going to throw some different terms out for you that will help arm you with understanding why these things happen.
Private equity is ”a short-term focus on aggressive profit extraction, often at the expense of long-term company health, including job cuts, stalled innovation as an asset stripping, and heavy debt burdens rather than a focus on sustainable growth.”
So, an example in the US is what happened to Red Lobster, Toys R Us, or Jo-Ann’s Fabrics.
These are BIG companies that got bought by private equity and then had the life squeezed out of them.
Now, critics see this model as turning successful businesses into nothing more than a cash cow for the return for their investors.
They do not give a shit what happens to the brand, to the employees, or to the buyers.
Purely shareholder benefit.
The people at the top are the only thing they want to serve.
Extraction is the only thing that matters to private equity.
It is just a giant vacuum cleaner.
Now this enshittification in its purest form is rent-seeking behavior dressed up as ‘growth,’ where the product becomes a tollbooth, and the community becomes the resource being strip-mined.
Enshitification is an inevitable outcome of hypercapitalism. And the drive to extract maximum profit for shareholders.
Now, ‘hypercapitalism‘ is an extreme, advanced stage of capitalism.
It’s where profit becomes the central organizing principle and commercializes every single aspect of life. For example, it commodifies birth, childhood, dating, marriage, divorce, post-divorce, retirement, and death.
Every aspect of life can be monetized.
Hobbies get monetized. Social interaction, all cultural aspects, all cultural niches, interests, everything possible gets monetized.
It’s driven by deregulation, globalization, new media, and intense commodification of experiences.
And it leads to widespread inequality, alienation, and to corporate powers being able to have more power and money than even governments.
Sometimes even leads to individuals (billionaires) having more power and money than governments.
Hyper-Capitalism and ‘Rent Seeking Behavior’
Hyper-capitalism is when individuals or groups use political influence to gain wealth or advantages without creating any more value.
So they’re essentially manipulating the system for a bigger slice of existing wealth rather than growing the economic pie.
And it leads to economic inefficiency, stifled competition, and misallocated resources.
All the energy is spent on lobbying and legal maneuvering rather than on making products and services better.
It’s extraction over service every single time.
Private Equity is a Broken Business Model That Is FAILING
The good news is that private equity is a business model that, TF, is already beginning to lose favor.
Private-equity fundraising slid to a seven-year low in the last year, and with ‘a record number of firms chasing this dwindling pot of capital.’
It was behind 70% of U.S bankrupcies in the first quarter of 2025.
So, most big companies that are going bust are going bust because they’re getting bought up by this huge private equity vacuum cleaner.
They’re getting sucked dry of everything.
Private equity is a broken AF business model.
Now, I can pretty much assure you that with all the people who are angry at TrustedHousesitters, this is what we’re going to see happen to TrustedHousesitters.
They are going to go bankrupt with what they’ve done.
But they don’t care because the people at the top bought it and now they’re makinga profit.
They don’t give AF about all the people that have been using it and building it for years, building their reference models.
This always happens because private equity is more concerned with stakeholder profit than the people using their software.
To learn more about the problem with private equity, I recommend reading journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
Why Long-Term Users Are Now Seeking Alternatives To TrustedHousesitters – And Why They SHOULD
On the morning that I received the email regarding the new booking fee, I found myself among hundreds of other users complaining on this post on the TrustedHousesitters Facebook page.
Here are just a few of the top complaints:
I have been using TrustedHousesitters for over 2 years and I’ve always valued the platform. Thanks to it, I’ve met wonderful people and adorable pets, even caring for some just 20 minutes away from my home. What I love most is the bond that grows and the joy of helping a host who needs to travel but sometimes struggles to find support because their home isn’t in a “top destination.” For this reason, I’ve ended up caring for the same dogs many times, which makes the connection even stronger and highlights the true spirit of community.
That’s why I find it unacceptable that members on Standard or Basic plans are now required to pay an extra $12 booking fee for each sit. According to you, this fee covers processing and security costs, but in reality neither hosts nor sitters receive any additional benefit. So why should we pay more when we already cover an annual membership that supposedly includes access and platform services?
This measure feels ridiculous and unfair, undermining the very essence of the community: connecting people in a trustworthy and accessible way. Instead of building confidence, it creates frustration and discouragement.
As a committed and active member, I urge you to reconsider this decision and respect those of us who have supported the platform for years. ~Agus Ramirez
We completed 27 x 5-star sits through TrustedHousesitters last year. Ranging from 2 days to 3 weeks. We loved every single sit, but we’ll look for our sits elsewhere now. The only benefit to being with THS is the volume of sits, but if enough people go elsewhere and join the competition then that will quickly change. Thank you again THS for showing us exactly the kind of company you are. Oh and the shady move with T’s & C’s won’t wash – I have reported you to Trading Standards. ~ Nicky Mackenzie
And what she’s referring to there is that they gave users no choice about this booking fee.
They had a pop-up that forced users to agree to the new terms and conditions before they were able even able to cancel confirmed sits or tocheck in with pet owners pet owners and homeowners.
They couldn’t use the siteuntil they agreed to these new terms and conditions.
So, if you had three petsits lined up for December and January – peak holiday season – then suddenly you’re forced to agree to these terms and conditions and have to pay $18 fees for each of those sits (or whatever it is in your exchange rate).
That’s the first one by a pet sitter, Nikki McKenzie.
Here’s another one.
I RAVE about TrustedHousesitters all the time however I just got the email about the new fees and I am appalled!!People already pay your annual fee and this is just a way to nickel and dime your tried and true customers. I’m a host, but I think this is even worse for the housesitter!! I will offer to pay my housesitter’s fee if this indeed the sticks. However this should NOT stick!!!! ~ Courtney Elmendorf Faust
So, that’s from a homeowner who’s also pissed off AF. And she’s pointing out here that she can just pay us directly rather than have to book through a site that’s going to nickel and dime you.
Here it is, TrustedHousitters: there are a lot of other sites.
There are a lot of alternatives to TrustedHousesitters where we can meet homeowners, and we can meet pet owners without you.
You only offered volume, and there are going to be other sites that are going to take your place.
Why This Matters And What CHOICES We Have
If you’re not a TrustedHousesitters user, you might be wondering why any of this matters.
It matters because this isn’t really about one platform.
It’s about principles and an ethical line being crossed.
There comes a point where convenience stops being worth it. Where a service no longer deserves our loyalty because it has violated the very values it was built on. The values we bought into.
Values that made us show up, contribute, and trust something in the first place.
What we’re seeing right now with TrustedHousesitters and countless other platforms is that line being crossed over and over again through private equity extraction and enshittification.
And the truth is: we don’t have to put up with it.
We have people power.
We don’t have to choose convenience. There are plenty of alternatives.
Or we can decide we don’t actually need them at all.
You can see this happening clearly with streaming services right now.
Massive enshittification across the board. Price hikes. Ads. Feature removals. Locked ecosystems. And more and more people are simply saying, “You know what? I’m out.”
No Amazon Prime, no Netflix, no more endless subscriptions draining money every month.
And FYI, pirate streaming services are getting very good, very fast!😉
Other options always emerge when companies forget who they’re supposed to serve.
So now you’ve heard what happened with TrustedHousesitters.
You’ve heard why I’m angry.
You’ve seen how these systems are designed to extract your time, your energy, and your money.
At this point, you might be thinking:
Okay, Christine — what the hell do I actually do about it? Why should I even care?
Because there is something we can do — and quite a lot of it, actually.
What We Can Do About Private Equity And Enshittification
First, we protect ourselves: our nervous systems, our wallets, our attention.
Second, we refuse to normalize this behavior.
I’m putting this out there so that the people at TrustedHousesitters — and the many users who are angry just like me — can find this when they’re Googling alternatives and realize: you’re not overreacting!
This was never about a £9 or $18 fee. It’s about trust and consent.
And it’s about being quietly strip-mined after being promised community.
We can learn to recognize the pattern early.
If I had known back in 2023 that TrustedHousesitters had been bought by private equity — and truly understood what that usually means — I would have jumped ship immediately.
Knowing what I know now, that’s my rule going forward: when a company is bought by private equity, I STOP investing my time, money, and energy there.
Is enshittification guaranteed every time? No.
But the odds are high enough that I won’t be sticking around to find out!
From now on, I’m paying close attention to where my money goes and who those companies ultimately serve.
I would love to see software companies take an explicit ethical stance and publicly commit to never selling to private equity.
I would actively choose and support businesses that make that promise — businesses that prioritize loyalty to their users over extraction.
Maybe that’s rare right now. Maybe it barely exists.
But until it doesn’t, awareness is our strongest tool.
When a company gets bought out, expect the shift. Expect the extraction.
And just leave!
Because convenience is optional, but your values are not.
Practical Rebellion: Alternatives to TrustedHousesitters (Australia)
Finding alternatives to TrustedHousesitters is the only response to their fee gouging for me.
I refuse to pay any tax on the freedom and joy I’ve enjoyed by offering my pet-sitting services in a free exchange of short-term accommodation.
No site is going to be perfect, and some fees to protect privacy and maintain a secure and honest review system and police checks are preferable to sites like Facebook groups, in my opinion.
But we can find sites that are less extractive and provide just as much, if not more, value.
One of the biggest advantages I’ve found in switching to Aussie Houseitters is that instead of getting 2 months membership for free as I did with TrustedHousitters, I know can now earn actual cash from all of my referrals each year! That’s a win for me.
Alternative Petsitting Sites That Do Not Charge Excessive Fees include:
- Aussie Housitters
- MindMyHouse – older, cheaper, no per-booking fees
- HouseCarers – long-running, more no-frills
- Nomador – popular in Europe, reputation-based
- Local Facebook sit groups
Final Thoughts: While petsitting is a more affordable alternative to Airbnb, it is NOT a ‘free holiday’!
I just want to add here that if you’re thinking pet and housesitting are a great way to secure cheap, carefree holiday accommodation, think again.
Petsitting is a SERVICE. Even when you are not getting directly paid for it, you still need to treat it like a professional service in exchange for accommodation.
Petsitting is a service. It is never ‘carefree’.
It includes responsibilities like taking care of the pets that may include long daily walks, administering frequent medications, lots of play time and cuddles, and sometimes even that you allow the pets to sleep in the bed with you. If that is what the pet is used to, the pet owner is going to want a sitter who is OK with that same level of attention and care.
Then there’s taking care of the house. This sometimes goes beyond home security and maintenance such as checking mail, wateringplants, and cleaning the pool. It can also include being home for family members dropping in to pick something up, or for laborers coming by, or it may include some unique responsibilities like drain cleaning or leaf raking. It is NOT an Airbnb, afterall, this is someone’s home.
Sits can include many restrictions, including how many hours you spend away from the house during the day to how often you run the AC or heating. In my last sit, for example, the two small dogs I cared for are not used to the owner being gone for more than 5 to 6 hours a day, so when I sit there, it’s with an agreement to BE in the house with the dogs for most of the sit.
This is why you should never book a sit where you’re planning to be out all day long, as you would on a vacation where you’re entirely free to explore. Plan to be at the house as often as the booking with the homeowner requires.
Pet and housesitting is a lifestyle choice that requires flexibility and a genuine love for animals, rather than a purely relaxing getaway.
I have had to turn down petsits in the past when these requirements are TOO restrictive.
For example, I turned down one that was for 3 weeks because the homeowner did not want her highly anxious dog to spend even one night alone, and I knew there was one night I’d be out for a late night event where I would not be certain I’d return until early morning.
So I chose not to do the sit at all; I’m sure she found a sitter who could be there all night.
This is not about MY needs; it’s about the individual needs of the pets. If you’re a true animal lover like I am, you will always prioritise the needs and comfort of the pets over your own
At the end of the day, this isn’t really about TrustedHousesitters, or even about one badly timed fee increase…
It’s about recognizing the pattern, naming it, and choosing not to participate once the line has been crossed.
When community turns into extraction, when trust becomes a tollbooth, and when freedom starts getting quietly taxed, we are allowed to walk away — without guilt, without apology.
There will always be alternatives.
There will always be new systems, new communities, and new ways to live well outside the grip of hyper-capitalist greed.
Convenience is optional.
Your nervous system, your values, and your sense of freedom are not.
