Terms of Service

TalkToAVet is a place to ask a question about your animal and get a written answer from a licensed veterinary professional. You describe what is happening, an assistant asks the follow-up questions and writes your case up, and a licensed professional reads it and replies to you by chat.

What you get is information and guidance. It is not an examination, not a diagnosis and not a prescription. Nobody here sees your animal, so nobody here can examine it, tell you what is wrong with it, or tell you what to give it. No veterinarian-client-patient relationship is created by your use of this service, and nothing you read here replaces having your animal looked at in person.

We do not prescribe medication, we do not fill prescriptions, and we do not offer video calls. If what you describe needs a clinic, we say so plainly and tell you to go.

The person who answers you is a licensed veterinarian working as an independent contractor. They are not our employees. They choose which cases to take: paid cases sit in a queue, oldest first, and a professional claims the ones they are willing and qualified to answer. Nobody is assigned to you, and no professional is obliged to take your case.

The professional is responsible for their own service: their license, their professional judgement, and everything they say to you. We are responsible for the platform: the software, the intake assistant, the queue, the billing, keeping your conversation safe and answering your support email.

Your payment is for the professional’s service. We collect it, we pay the professional their fee for your conversation, and we keep the remainder as our platform fee for running everything above. Ask us and we will tell you what the professional was paid for your conversation.

Before anyone can take a case, an administrator checks their license against the state board’s own lookup. We never show a license we have not verified and we never show one that has expired. Every answer you get carries the professional’s name, credential and license state, how to request a copy of your records, and where to complain about them. If the founder is the person answering, that same card says he owns the company.

You must be 18 or older and in the United States, including the District of Columbia. You tell us which state you are in before the conversation starts. That answer decides what we are allowed to do, so give us the state your animal is actually in.

States we cannot take questions from

We do not operate in Texas, North Carolina, Alabama and Minnesota. If you start a conversation from one of them we close it without charge, and there is no way to buy your way past this. We are stricter than we have to be here on purpose, and we will not make an exception for an individual case.

• We cannot take questions from Texas yet. Texas began requiring remote veterinary services to run from a state-registered facility on 1 September 2026, and the rules for registering one are not written until 2027. We would rather wait than put a vet's licence at risk.
• We cannot take questions from North Carolina. State rules do not allow a vet to take on a patient there over the internet at all, whoever the vet is.
• We cannot take questions from Alabama. State law counts any electronic veterinary service to an Alabama pet owner as practising there, and it also requires an in-person relationship first.
• We cannot take questions from Minnesota just yet. Minnesota requires a specific kind of company to be paid for veterinary services, and ours is being set up now. Please check back.

States where the professional must hold that state’s license

In Colorado, Idaho and Virginia, only a professional who holds that state’s license may answer you. Your case is offered only to those professionals, so it can wait longer than it would elsewhere. If we cannot match you to one, email us and we refund you in full.

Everywhere else, any professional on our roster may answer you, because general information that is not specific to a particular animal is not the practice of veterinary medicine. Every professional who answers you holds a current license that we have verified. We never put an unlicensed person in front of you.

The intake assistant checks for emergency signs before it does anything else, and before you are shown a price. If what you describe looks like a real emergency, we tell you to go to a clinic now and we close the conversation there.

A case that ends that way is never charged. No price appears on that screen, the payment page refuses the case if you try, and we never offer you a paid phone call on it. We would rather lose the sale than take money for telling you to leave. If we ever do charge for one, that is our mistake and we refund it without being asked.

We are not an emergency service and we cannot come to you. If your animal is in danger, stop reading this and go.

You see the whole price before you type a card number: everything charged that day, anything that recurs, and when. Nothing is charged while the assistant is asking you questions.

Membership

Membership is $70 today — a one-time $5 joining fee plus your first month at $65 — and then $65 every month until you cancel. Here is the exact wording from the payment page, which is also the wording we store as the record of what you agreed to:

You are paying $70 today. That is a one-time $5 join fee plus your first month at $65. We will then charge $65 every month until you cancel. We will email you 3 days before each monthly charge. You can cancel yourself from your account page in one step, at any time, without speaking to anyone.

Membership covers conversations about the animals in your household. It is described as unlimited and that is real: there is no charge per conversation and no limit on how many a membership includes. What it buys is access to the platform and the ability to ask. It does not buy a particular professional, a particular answer or a particular response time, and “unlimited” means one household’s own use. If we ever think a membership has gone beyond one household, we work through the three steps set out in our Fair Use Policy, beginning by writing to you, and nothing about your service changes at that first step.

We sometimes test a different way in — $1 for seven days and one conversation, or $5 to join with access straight away — each followed by $65 a month from day seven, with an email on day five before that first monthly charge. Whichever offer you are shown, the payment page states it in full before any card field, and the version you were shown is the one that binds.

We email you before we charge you

Three days before each monthly charge, and on day five if you started on one of the seven-day offers. We keep a record that each of those emails went out.

Cancelling

One step, from your account page, at any time, on the same site you signed up on, without speaking to anyone. There is no retention screen, no number to call and no offer designed to talk you out of it. It works with JavaScript switched off.

Cancelling stops future charges. Your access runs to the end of the month you have already paid for, and that month is not refunded.

A phone call with the professional handling your case costs $19. It is a one-time charge on top of whatever you have already paid, it is not part of any membership, it is not a subscription, and there is nothing to cancel. You are shown the price and asked to agree to it before any card field, the same way as everything else here.

A call is only offered once a professional is holding your case, and never on a case we sent straight to a clinic. The professional dials out from a TalkToAVet number: they never see your number and you never see theirs. Calls end automatically after half an hour.

A call is information and guidance, exactly like the chat. Nobody examines your animal over the phone, nobody diagnoses it and nobody prescribes. If you buy a call and it never happens, tell us and we refund it.

That is the only paid extra today. If we add another, it will carry its own price on its own screen before you buy it, and it will never be bundled into a membership you did not choose.

Email us. We would rather refund you than argue with you, and we would much rather refund you early than late.

If nobody answered your case, if the answer was not the service we described, or if you were charged when you did not expect to be, write to us and we will put it right. Cancelling a membership does not refund a month you have already had access to, but if a charge caught you by surprise, say so and we will look at it.

Please write to us before you ask your bank to reverse a charge. A card dispute takes weeks, locks the money up while it runs, and we can usually settle it the same day by email.

Your conversation is private. We never publish it, never sell it and never use it to train anything. Nothing under your case is put in front of a search engine. If we ever write about a condition on this site, it is written editorially from scratch; it is never somebody’s conversation.

We store your conversation so that you and the professional can come back to it. We review conversations for quality and safety, and automated tools that help the professional write may process what you say. You agree to that in writing at intake, before any price, because veterinary confidentiality belongs to you rather than to us and is not ours to sign away.

After the follow-up week you can ask us to delete the conversation, and we will.

To request a copy of the records of a conversation, email hello@talktoavet.com from the address on your account and quote the case reference. We reply within ten business days. The professional’s own records instructions are on the card underneath their answer.

What we collect, why, and how long we keep it is in our Privacy Policy.

A membership is personal. It covers you and the animals in your own household. You cannot transfer it, resell it, share it, or use it to run a service for other people. These are the things that are not on:

• Asking on behalf of a business, a practice, a rescue or a client base rather than your own household.
• Sending the same question again, barely reworded, to collect a stack of separate opinions.
• Letting other people use your account, or passing on the sign-in link we email you. That link opens your account and your conversations, so keep it to yourself.
• Scripts, bots, scrapers or anything else automated.
• Getting round a step we have already taken under the Fair Use Policy, by opening a second account for instance.
• Uploading anything other than photos and documents about the animal in your case, and nothing unlawful or belonging to somebody else.
• Abuse or threats towards a professional. We will end a conversation and close an account over it.

This is a service for animals. Do not use it for human medical questions.

If we think one of the above is happening, we write to you about it before we do anything to your account. If nothing changes we write to you again, and if that goes nowhere we may end the membership — after telling you, and refunding the part of the month you paid for and did not use. We apply this reasonably and the same way to everybody, never for asking an awkward question, and every step is written down in the Fair Use Policy.

The site, its software and the writing on it are ours. Your own conversation and your own written summary are yours: keep them, print them, show them to your vet. Do not copy the rest.

The professional who answers you is solely responsible for their own professional service. They decide what to say. We do not approve an answer before it reaches you and we never tell a professional what to conclude about an animal.

We also keep money out of the room, deliberately. A professional working on a case is not shown what that case pays, is not given a countdown, is not held to an acceptance quota, is not nudged to close faster and is never asked to sell you anything. Waiting time is shown to them as plain information so the oldest case gets picked up first. What they earn appears on a separate statement, after the fact, the way a contractor invoices. A payment mechanic that could bend somebody’s clinical judgement is the one thing we most wanted to design out of this, and that is why your answer costs the professional nothing to give you honestly.

If nobody has picked your case up within about three minutes, everybody on call is paged. We do not promise a response time, and we will not invent one.

If you are unhappy with a professional, tell us. You can also complain to the state veterinary board directly: the board’s name and its complaint form are on the card underneath their answer.

The service is provided as it is. We do not promise that it will always be available, that a professional will always be free, or that any particular professional will answer you.

We do not promise an outcome for your animal. What you get here is general information from a licensed professional who has not examined it: no diagnosis, no prescription, no veterinarian-client-patient relationship, and no substitute for an in-person examination. Decisions about your animal stay yours, taken with a clinic that can put hands on it.

As far as the law allows, we exclude the implied warranties that would otherwise attach to the platform, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Some states do not allow that exclusion; if yours does not, this paragraph does not apply to you.

As far as the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising out of your use of the platform, and our total liability to you for everything connected with it is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Three things that limit does not touch:

• Anything the law says cannot be limited or excluded.
• Fraud, or death or personal injury caused by our own negligence.
• The professional’s own responsibility for their own professional service. That is theirs, and this section does not move it to you or take it away from them.

We can change these terms. When we do, we change the effective date at the top of this page. If a change affects what you pay or what you get, we email the address on your account before it takes effect, and we do not make that change retroactive.

A change here never rewrites what you already agreed to. The exact words you were shown before you paid are stored as their own version and your agreement points at that version, so we can always show you what was in front of you on the day. Your account page lists them, and you can ask us for a copy.

If you keep using the service after a change takes effect, that is your agreement to the new version. If you would rather not, cancel: one step, from your account page.

These terms contain no arbitration agreement and no class-action waiver. In plain English: if we cannot settle something between us by email, going to court stays open to both of us.

Email hello@talktoavet.com. Write from the address on your account and we will know who you are. A real person reads it.

• A copy of your records: same address, quote the case reference. We reply within ten business days.
• A refund, or a charge you did not expect: same address, and please write to us before your bank.
• A complaint about a professional: tell us, and you can also go straight to the state veterinary board. Its details are on the card underneath their answer.
• To cancel: you do not need to email anybody. It is one step on your account page.