The $380M SaaS Hiding in Veterinary Clinics (Nobody's Building This)

There are 35,000 veterinary clinics in the United States alone. The average clinic generates $1.4 million in annual revenue. And the software most of them rely on was designed in the early 2000s, looks like it, and costs a fortune.

I spent the last week going deep into the veterinary industry — reading vet tech forums, scanning complaints on Veterinary Information Network threads, combing through G2 reviews of the major players, and talking to the actual workflows that happen between a pet walking through the door and an owner paying the bill. What I found is a market that's simultaneously massive and neglected, where the incumbents are so hated that clinic owners openly fantasize about alternatives on public forums.

This isn't a market that needs to be created. It's a market that's begging to be disrupted.

Why Veterinary Software Is Stuck in 2005

The veterinary practice management software (VPMS) market is dominated by a handful of players: IDEXX (which owns Cornerstone and Neo), Covetrus (which merged with IDEXX in 2023 in a $7.4 billion deal), eVetPractice, and Shepherd. These companies control the vast majority of the market.

And vets hate them.

I'm not exaggerating. Go read the reviews. On G2, Cornerstone — the most widely installed veterinary practice management system in North America — hovers around 3.5 stars. The complaints are remarkably consistent:

• The interface feels like it was built for Windows XP (because it was)
• Pricing is opaque and escalates aggressively after onboarding
• Integration with labs, imaging, and payment systems is clunky or nonexistent
• Customer support wait times regularly exceed 45 minutes
• The software crashes during peak hours
• Cloud migration has been "coming soon" for years

The IDEXX-Covetrus merger made things worse, not better. When a single company controls both your diagnostic equipment and your practice management software, they have zero incentive to innovate on the software side. The software becomes a lock-in mechanism for selling diagnostics, not a product that needs to stand on its own merits.

This is the exact pattern that creates opportunity for smaller, focused players. When incumbents get fat and stop caring about user experience, the door opens.

The Market Is Bigger Than You Think

Let me size this properly.

The global veterinary software market was valued at approximately $380 million in 2023 and is projected to reach $700 million by 2030, growing at about 9% annually. That's the practice management software slice alone — it doesn't include the adjacent tools I'll get to in a minute.

But raw market size isn't what makes this interesting for a solo developer or small team. What makes it interesting is the structure:

High willingness to pay. Veterinary clinics are businesses. They already pay $300-$600/month for practice management software. They're not consumers you need to convince that software has value. They have budgets, they understand recurring costs, and they'll pay more for something that actually works.

Fragmented customer base. Those 35,000 US clinics aren't controlled by a few massive chains (though consolidation is happening — more on that later). The majority are still independent practices with 1-5 veterinarians. Independent business owners make buying decisions fast.

Switching costs are real but not insurmountable. Yes, migrating patient records is painful. But clinics switch software all the time because the pain of staying is worse than the pain of moving. The Veterinary Information Network forums are full of threads titled things like "Finally leaving Cornerstone — what should I switch to?" and the replies are always disappointing.

Recurring revenue is built into the model. Clinics need this software every single day. Churn in veterinary practice management is extremely low once you're installed — typically under 5% annually. This is the kind of SaaS where customers stick around for years.

If you captured just 1% of US veterinary clinics (350 clinics) at $400/month, that's $140K in monthly recurring revenue. And 1% is a modest target in a market this underserved.

The Five Gaps Nobody's Filling

I didn't just look at the core practice management opportunity. The more interesting play might be in the specific workflow gaps that even the newer entrants are ignoring. These are the micro-SaaS opportunities that a solo developer could build and ship in weeks, not months.

Gap 1: Post-Visit Client Communication

When your dog gets surgery, what happens next? In most clinics, you get a printed discharge sheet with handwritten notes, maybe a phone call the next day if the vet remembers, and then silence until the follow-up appointment.

This is insane. In human medicine, patient communication platforms are a multi-billion dollar category. In veterinary medicine, it barely exists.

What clinics need is dead simple: automated post-visit check-in messages ("How is Bella doing after her spay? Any concerns?"), medication reminders, photo-based wound monitoring (owner snaps a photo, vet reviews it asynchronously), and a simple way for owners to ask questions without calling the clinic and clogging the phone lines.

A few tools are attempting this — PetDesk does appointment reminders, and Otto is working on client communication — but neither handles the post-surgical monitoring workflow that vets tell me they desperately want.

The pricing model writes itself: $99-$199/month per clinic, positioned as a client retention and satisfaction tool. Clinics lose clients constantly to competitors, and a post-visit communication system directly addresses that. The ROI argument is trivial — if it retains even two clients per month, it pays for itself.

Search volume signal: "veterinary client communication software" gets modest direct search volume, but "vet appointment reminder software" and "pet owner communication app" are growing steadily. More importantly, this is a category where the buyers (practice managers) search for solutions on veterinary-specific forums and Facebook groups, not Google.

Gap 2: Inventory Management for Veterinary Pharmacies

Every veterinary clinic is also a pharmacy. They stock medications, surgical supplies, vaccines, and controlled substances. And most of them manage inventory with spreadsheets or with the barebones inventory module built into their practice management system.

The problem is acute with controlled substances. The DEA requires detailed logging of every controlled substance — every dose of ketamine, every fentanyl patch. Clinics get audited. When they fail audits, the consequences are severe. And the tracking tools available to them are genuinely terrible.

A purpose-built veterinary inventory management system that handles controlled substance logging, automates reorder points, integrates with major distributors (Patterson, Covetrus, MWI), and generates DEA-compliant reports would solve a problem that keeps practice managers up at night.

Pricing potential: $149-$299/month. The compliance angle alone justifies the cost — a single DEA audit failure can result in fines exceeding $10,000.

I track opportunities like this at SaasOpportunities — markets where regulatory requirements create non-optional software needs. Compliance-driven SaaS is one of the most reliable categories because customers can't choose to not solve the problem.

Gap 3: Veterinary-Specific Telemedicine

COVID accelerated telemedicine adoption in human healthcare by a decade. In veterinary medicine, it barely moved the needle — and the reason is regulatory, not technological.

Most US states require a valid Veterinarian-Client-Patient Relationship (VCPR) before a vet can practice telemedicine. The rules vary wildly by state. Some states allow establishing a VCPR via telemedicine; others require an in-person exam first. Some allow prescribing via telemedicine; others don't.

This regulatory patchwork has scared off the big telemedicine platforms. They don't want to deal with 50 different state rules for a market that's a fraction of human healthcare.

But that regulatory complexity is exactly the moat. If you build a veterinary telemedicine platform that handles state-by-state compliance automatically — knows which states allow what, manages VCPR documentation, handles prescription rules — you've created something that's genuinely hard to replicate.

The market timing is right because regulations are loosening. Multiple states expanded telemedicine permissions during COVID and haven't rolled them back. The American Veterinary Medical Association has been pushing for more uniform telemedicine standards. The trend line is clear.

A clinic-branded telemedicine add-on at $199-$399/month with per-consultation fees on top could be substantial. The key insight is that this shouldn't be a consumer-facing app (those have been tried and mostly failed). It should be a tool that existing clinics use to extend their services — same vet, same client, virtual visit.

Gap 4: Multi-Location Consolidation Dashboards

This is where the macro trend makes the opportunity obvious.

Veterinary practice consolidation is accelerating rapidly. Private equity firms have been buying up independent clinics at a staggering pace. Mars Veterinary Health (which owns Banfield, BluePearl, and VCA) operates over 3,000 locations. National Veterinary Associates has over 1,400. Dozens of smaller consolidators are rolling up 10-50 clinics each.

When a PE firm buys 30 independent clinics, each running different software, they face an immediate problem: they can't see unified financial or operational data across locations. Revenue per visit, average transaction value, staff utilization, inventory costs — all siloed in different systems.

The big practice management systems are terrible at multi-location reporting. They were designed for single clinics. Bolting on multi-location dashboards has been an afterthought.

A standalone analytics and reporting layer that sits on top of existing practice management systems (via API integrations or even database-level connections) and provides consolidated multi-location dashboards would be extremely valuable to these consolidation groups.

Pricing here shifts dramatically upward. Consolidation groups are sophisticated buyers with real budgets. $500-$2,000/month per organization (not per location) is reasonable, and the total addressable market of consolidation groups is growing every quarter.

This is the kind of boring SaaS idea that prints money — nobody wants to build dashboards for veterinary PE firms, which is precisely why there's almost no competition.

Gap 5: AI-Assisted Clinical Decision Support

This one is more forward-looking, but the timing is approaching fast.

Veterinarians face a unique clinical challenge: they treat dozens of species, each with different physiologies, drug sensitivities, and disease presentations. A dog's dose of meloxicam will kill a cat. A treatment protocol for a Labrador might be wrong for a Chihuahua. And exotic animal medicine (reptiles, birds, pocket pets) is a whole separate universe of complexity.

The clinical references veterinarians use are scattered across textbooks, apps like Plumb's Drug Guide, and institutional memory. There is no unified, AI-powered clinical decision support system that a vet can query during an exam and get species-specific, weight-adjusted, interaction-checked recommendations.

This is where large language models become genuinely useful — not as a replacement for clinical judgment, but as a reference layer that's faster and more comprehensive than flipping through three different apps and a textbook.

The regulatory landscape here is actually simpler than human medicine. Veterinary clinical decision support tools don't face the same FDA scrutiny as human medical devices. The liability framework is different and less restrictive.

A subscription-based clinical reference tool with AI-assisted querying, priced at $49-$99/month per veterinarian, could capture significant market share quickly. Plumb's already charges $35/month for a static drug database — an AI-enhanced version with broader clinical coverage could justify a premium.

Why the Timing Is Right Now

Three forces are converging that make this the right moment to enter veterinary software:

Force 1: The IDEXX monopoly is creating resentment. The IDEXX-Covetrus merger consolidated too much power in one company. Clinics that feel trapped are actively looking for alternatives. This is the same dynamic that drove the rise of independent CRMs when Salesforce became too expensive and too complex for small businesses. When the incumbent overreaches, the market opens up.

Force 2: AI tools have collapsed development timelines. Building practice management software used to require a team of 10 and 18 months. With tools like Cursor, Claude, and modern frameworks, a solo developer can build a focused, vertical SaaS product in a fraction of that time. The gap between what one person can build and what the market needs has never been smaller.

Force 3: Consolidation creates new buyer personas. The PE-backed consolidation groups are a new category of buyer that didn't exist at scale five years ago. They have different needs (multi-location, analytics, standardization) and different budgets (much larger) than independent clinics. The existing software vendors haven't adapted to serve them because they're still focused on the single-clinic buyer.

The Competitive Landscape (And Where It's Weak)

Let me be honest about who's already in this space, because understanding the competition is critical for evaluating whether a SaaS idea is worth pursuing.

IDEXX (Cornerstone, Neo): The 800-pound gorilla. Massive install base, terrible user satisfaction, increasingly focused on using software as a lock-in for diagnostic sales rather than as a standalone product. Vulnerable to anyone who builds a better user experience.

Shepherd: The most interesting new entrant. Cloud-native, modern UI, well-funded. But they're going after the full practice management replacement, which is a massive undertaking. They're still early, and their focus on the whole enchilada means they're not deeply solving any of the five gaps I identified above.

eVetPractice: Cloud-based, been around for a while, decent but not exceptional. Positioned as the affordable alternative but hasn't invested heavily in innovation.

PetDesk: Focused on client communication and appointment booking. Good at what they do but narrow. Recently acquired by ALLYDVM, which was then acquired by Covetrus (now IDEXX). So they're being absorbed into the monopoly.

The pattern is clear: the big players are consolidating, the mid-tier players are getting acquired, and the specific workflow gaps I identified remain wide open. Nobody is building a dedicated veterinary inventory management system with DEA compliance. Nobody is building multi-location analytics dashboards for consolidation groups. Nobody is building AI-assisted clinical decision support that's actually good.

What I'd Build (And How)

If I were entering this market tomorrow, I wouldn't start with a full practice management system. That's a multi-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking with entrenched competitors.

I'd start with Gap 2: Veterinary Inventory and Controlled Substance Management.

The reasons are strategic:

Compliance creates urgency. Clinics don't choose whether to track controlled substances. The DEA mandates it. This means the sales conversation isn't "would you like this nice-to-have tool?" — it's "are you confident you'd pass a DEA audit tomorrow?" That's a fundamentally different conversation, and it converts at much higher rates.

The MVP is small and well-defined. The core product is: log controlled substance transactions, track inventory levels, generate compliance reports, alert when discrepancies appear. That's a focused product you can build in 60-90 days.

It's a wedge into the broader market. Once you're managing a clinic's inventory, you have a relationship and a data connection. From there, you can expand into broader practice management features over time. This is the classic land-and-expand strategy that works in vertical SaaS.

The distribution channel is clear. Veterinary practice manager Facebook groups are incredibly active. State veterinary medical associations have newsletters and conferences. The veterinary industry has a small number of trade shows (VMX, WVC) where you can get in front of thousands of decision-makers. And because the industry is tight-knit, word of mouth spreads fast.

The tech stack would be straightforward: a web app (React or Next.js frontend, standard backend) with a mobile companion for scanning and quick logging. Integration with major distributors' ordering systems via their APIs. PDF report generation for DEA compliance documentation.

Pricing: $199/month for a single-location clinic, $149/month per location for multi-location groups. Annual discount to 10 months paid upfront.

Revenue projection: 100 clinics in year one (very achievable in a market this underserved) = $19,900/month MRR. 500 clinics by end of year two = roughly $100K MRR. These numbers are conservative for a compliance-driven product in a market with 35,000 potential customers in the US alone.

The Moat Question

Every SaaS opportunity needs a defensibility story. "Someone else could build this" is true of everything — the question is whether they will, and whether you can build switching costs before they do.

In veterinary inventory management, the moat builds through:

Data accumulation. Once a clinic has 12 months of inventory data in your system, that historical data becomes valuable for trend analysis, forecasting, and audit preparation. Moving to a competitor means losing that history.

Distributor integrations. Building reliable integrations with Patterson, Covetrus, and MWI takes time and relationship-building. Each integration you add makes your product stickier and harder to replicate quickly.

Compliance expertise. DEA regulations change. State pharmacy board rules vary. Building a product that stays current with regulatory requirements creates institutional knowledge that's hard to copy.

Workflow embedding. When a vet tech's daily routine includes opening your app to log every controlled substance transaction, you're embedded in their workflow. Switching means retraining staff, which clinics hate.

This isn't a winner-take-all market where you need a massive network effect. It's a vertical SaaS market where steady execution and deep domain knowledge create durable competitive advantages. That's exactly the kind of market where solo developers and small teams can build profitable, sustainable businesses.

How to Validate This Before Writing a Line of Code

I wouldn't build anything without validation first. The approach I'd use for this specific market:

Step 1: Join the communities. Veterinary practice manager groups on Facebook (Veterinary Practice Managers, VHMA Connect) are where the real conversations happen. Lurk for two weeks. Search for "inventory," "controlled substance," "DEA audit." Screenshot every complaint.

Step 2: Build a landing page. Simple page describing the product, with a waitlist signup. Drive traffic from those Facebook groups by posting a genuine question: "We're considering building a dedicated controlled substance tracking tool for vet clinics. Would this solve a real problem for you?" The responses will tell you everything.

Step 3: Pre-sell before building. Offer founding member pricing ($99/month instead of $199) to the first 20 clinics that commit. If you can get 10 commitments with credit cards on file, you have validation. If you can't, you've saved yourself months of wasted development time.

This validation process maps closely to the framework for testing SaaS assumptions before building, adapted for a specific vertical market.

The Bigger Picture

Veterinary software is just one example of a pattern I see repeating across dozens of industries: an incumbent that's been acquired into a conglomerate, users who feel trapped, and specific workflow gaps that are too niche for the big player to care about but plenty big enough for a focused startup.

Dental software has the same dynamic (Dentrix/Henry Schein dominance, widespread dissatisfaction). So does optometry software, physical therapy clinic management, and dozens of other healthcare-adjacent verticals.

The playbook is the same every time: find the industry where the dominant software vendor just got acquired or merged, read the forums where practitioners are complaining, identify the specific workflow gap that the incumbent ignores, and build a focused tool that solves that one problem exceptionally well.

Veterinary just happens to be one of the most attractive versions of this pattern right now because the IDEXX-Covetrus merger is fresh, the resentment is high, the willingness to pay is proven, and the specific gaps are clearly defined.

What To Do Next

If veterinary software isn't your thing, the research method still applies. Pick an industry you know something about — or are willing to learn — and run the same analysis:

1. Who are the dominant software vendors?
2. Were there recent acquisitions or mergers that created resentment?
3. What do practitioners complain about in their industry-specific forums?
4. Which specific workflows are underserved by the existing tools?
5. Is there a compliance or regulatory angle that creates non-optional demand?

If you can answer yes to questions 2, 3, and 5, you're probably looking at a viable opportunity.

The veterinary market won't stay this open forever. Shepherd is well-funded and moving fast on the practice management side. Other startups will eventually notice the gaps I've outlined here. The window for a solo developer or small team to establish a position in one of these niches — particularly the controlled substance tracking and multi-location analytics opportunities — is measured in months, not years.

The best SaaS ideas aren't the ones that sound exciting at a dinner party. They're the ones where a specific group of professionals has a specific problem, is already paying for a bad solution, and would switch tomorrow if something better existed.

Thirty-five thousand veterinary clinics are waiting. The software they need isn't complicated. It just needs to exist.