Tinies is a pet care marketplace. Pet owners in Cyprus book sitters, walkers, and carers through the platform. A commission is charged on each booking. And the overwhelming majority of that commission goes directly to animal rescue.
That is the entire model. There is no complexity hidden behind it. No secondary revenue stream. No venture capital subsidy. A booking fee funds a sanctuary. Here is how the numbers work.
The 12% Commission
When a pet owner books a sitter through Tinies, the platform charges a 12% service fee on top of the sitter's rate. The sitter receives their full listed rate. The pet owner pays the listed rate plus 12%.
On a typical booking — say, five days of cat sitting at €15 per day — the total is €75 to the sitter and €9 to Tinies. On a two-week dog boarding booking at €20 per day, the total is €280 to the sitter and €33.60 to Tinies.
These are small numbers per transaction. That is intentional. The commission is set low enough that it does not discourage bookings, and high enough that it generates meaningful revenue at volume.
Where the Money Goes
Approximately 90% of Tinies' commission revenue is directed to animal rescue operations, primarily to the Gardens of St Gertrude sanctuary and to other rescue organisations across Cyprus.
This is not a rounding-up scheme. It is not a seasonal campaign. It is not a "percentage of profits" after salaries and operating costs have been deducted. It is 90% of the commission, allocated to rescue before anything else.
The remaining 10% covers the minimum operating costs of the platform itself: hosting, payment processing, and essential maintenance. Tinies operates with no paid staff, no office, and no marketing budget beyond organic content. The platform was built to be as lean as possible, specifically so that the maximum possible percentage of revenue could flow to the animals.
What the Funding Covers
The rescue funding from Tinies covers three categories of expense.
Daily feeding. The Gardens of St Gertrude sanctuary and associated feeding stations support approximately 90+ cats. Daily feeding runs require bulk food purchases, transport, and the physical labour of preparing and distributing food across multiple locations. Tinies revenue covers a significant portion of this ongoing cost.
Sterilisation. Every unsterilised cat that enters the system is spayed or neutered as soon as they are old enough and healthy enough for surgery. At €40–€80 per surgery, sterilisation is the single most impactful expenditure in stray cat management. Tinies funding is directed toward sterilisation as a priority, because it is the intervention with the highest long-term return.
Veterinary care. Rescued cats frequently arrive with injuries, infections, parasites, or chronic conditions. FIV-positive cats require ongoing monitoring. Kittens rescued from the street often need intensive care — bottle feeding, treatment for respiratory infections, flea and worm treatment. Emergency veterinary bills — a cat hit by a car, a kitten with a broken leg, an abscess that requires surgery — are unpredictable and can be substantial. Tinies revenue provides a baseline of veterinary funding that reduces the need for emergency fundraising.
Why Marketplace-Funded Charity Works
The traditional model for animal rescue funding in Cyprus is donation-based. Rescues post on social media, describe an urgent situation, ask for money, and hope enough people respond. This model works, in the sense that it keeps rescues alive. It does not work in the sense that it is unpredictable, exhausting, and structurally fragile.
Donation fatigue is real. The same supporters are asked repeatedly, and their capacity is finite. Emergency appeals compete with each other. A rescue that posts a fundraiser for a cat with a broken jaw is competing for attention — and donations — with every other rescue posting a fundraiser at the same time. The emotional labour of constant public fundraising burns out the people doing the asking and the people being asked.
Marketplace-funded charity operates differently. Revenue is generated through a commercial transaction that people are already making. Pet owners need sitters. Sitters want clients. The booking happens because both parties want the service, not because either party is being asked for charity. The charitable component is embedded in the transaction, not layered on top of it.
This creates several structural advantages.
Predictability. Revenue scales with bookings, which are relatively predictable on a monthly and seasonal basis. Summer and holiday periods generate more bookings. Quiet months generate fewer. But the baseline is consistent enough to plan around, which is something donation-based funding rarely provides.
No donor fatigue. Pet owners using Tinies are not being asked to donate. They are paying for a service they need, at a price that is competitive with other platforms. The fact that their booking also funds animal rescue is a benefit, not a burden. There is no emotional labour involved in the transaction for either party.
Sustainability. A marketplace generates revenue as long as bookings occur. It does not depend on a single large donor, a viral social media post, or a seasonal giving campaign. If the platform grows, revenue grows. If it plateaus, revenue is stable. The only scenario in which revenue drops to zero is if no one books a pet sitter — and pet sitting demand in Cyprus is consistent year-round.
Alignment of incentives. Tinies grows by providing good pet care matches. Better matches lead to repeat bookings. Repeat bookings generate more revenue. More revenue funds more rescue work. The commercial incentive (grow the platform) and the charitable mission (fund animal rescue) are not in tension. They are the same thing.
Transparency Reporting
Tinies publishes where its money goes. This is not a legal requirement — it is a choice rooted in the belief that people who contribute to a system, even indirectly through booking fees, deserve to know what their money does.
Transparency in animal rescue funding is rare. Many organisations operate on informal accounting, and donors frequently have no visibility into how their contributions are used. Tinies takes the opposite approach: the revenue is tracked, the allocations are documented, and the outcomes — cats fed, cats sterilised, cats treated — are reported.
This matters not because Tinies is uniquely virtuous, but because the rescue sector in Cyprus has a trust problem. Too many well-meaning people have donated to organisations that turned out to be disorganised, mismanaged, or, in the worst cases, fraudulent. Transparency is the antidote to scepticism, and scepticism is one of the biggest barriers to increased funding for legitimate rescue work.
The Limits of the Model
The Tinies model is not a solution to the stray cat crisis in Cyprus. No single organisation's funding model can be. The scale of the problem — an estimated 1.5 million stray cats — requires government investment, systematic national sterilisation programmes, and policy changes that are far beyond the reach of any marketplace platform.
What the model does is demonstrate that sustainable, non-donation-dependent funding for animal rescue is possible. It proves that a commercial platform can be built with charity at its structural core, not as an afterthought or a marketing angle. And it provides a reliable, growing stream of funding to the rescues and sanctuaries that are doing the daily work of keeping cats alive.
Every booking on Tinies is a transaction between a pet owner and a sitter. It is also, indirectly, a meal for a cat at a feeding station, a sterilisation surgery that prevents another litter of kittens born into the street, or a veterinary visit for a sick animal that would otherwise go untreated.
The model is simple. The impact is tangible. And the cats, ultimately, do not care where the money comes from — only that it arrives.