How FeedPups actually funds real shelter meals

People ask us the same question every week: a browser game feeds real dogs — how? Fair question. Here is the whole flow, without marketing language, from the moment you tap a bowl of kibble to the moment a shelter volunteer scoops it into a dish.

Two revenue streams, one bank account

FeedPups has exactly two ways to bring money in. The first is display advertising on the site itself. Every time an ad renders next to the game, a tiny fraction of a cent lands in a Google AdSense balance. The second is optional in-game credit purchases — small one-off payments for players who prefer to skip the ads or who just want to send more meals per session. Both streams settle into a single non-profit-purpose bank account we do not touch for anything else.

Where the money is not spent

Before we describe what the money funds, it is worth being explicit about what it does not fund. FeedPups has no office, no salaried employees, no paid marketing, and no equity investors. The domain, hosting, and payments processing together cost about US$47 a month. That figure is boring on purpose — it is the ceiling we have committed to. If infrastructure ever exceeds 5% of monthly revenue, we publish the reason on this blog before spending the money.

The monthly reconciliation

On the first business day of every month we do a reconciliation. Ad revenue for the previous month is exported from AdSense. Purchase revenue is exported from Stripe. Payment processing fees and the flat infrastructure cost are subtracted. The remaining number is the fundable balance — the pile of money that must leave the account and turn into food this month.

Partner shelters send us an invoice each month for a fixed dollar amount of kibble they are willing to accept, based on their current intake numbers. We fulfil those invoices in the order they arrive until the fundable balance is exhausted. Whatever is left carries into the next month as a rolling reserve, capped at three months of median revenue so the account never becomes a savings vehicle.

How a "meal" is defined

On the homepage counter, one meal equals US$0.18 of delivered food, invoiced at wholesale bulk pricing from our two current kibble suppliers. That number is not aspirational or rounded for marketing — it is the actual per-serving cost on our most recent invoice, updated whenever a supplier changes their price. When you see the counter tick up, that is money already committed against a specific shelter’s next delivery, not a projection.

Why we chose kibble over cash grants

Cash grants would be simpler for us to distribute and would let each shelter buy whatever they need. We chose bulk-food delivery for two reasons. First, food is one of the shelter expenses that scales linearly with intake — every extra dog is another mouth — while overhead is comparatively fixed. Directly reducing the food line-item is the most predictable way to free up cash for veterinary care and adoption programs. Second, food is auditable in a way cash is not: we get delivery receipts from the supplier and confirmation photos from the shelter, and we publish those on our impact page.

What the game has to do with any of this

Honestly, the game is a hook. It exists because a plain "donate here" button raises very little money from casual internet traffic, whereas a calming little browser toy that people return to and share with friends drives enough ad impressions to matter. Every design choice in the game is optimised for two things: keeping the experience gentle and non-manipulative, and keeping sessions long enough that a single ad impression is actually served and viewed. We do not use dark patterns, streak guilt, or push notifications to inflate those numbers.

What you can do beyond playing

Play as often or as rarely as you like. Share the link with someone who likes dogs. If you can afford to, buy a credit pack — those convert to meals at a higher rate than ad revenue, because there is no advertiser in the middle taking a margin. And if you run or volunteer at a shelter that could use recurring bulk food deliveries, email us; the partner list is intentionally small so we can keep the relationships personal, but we open it up as revenue allows.

Questions we still get

“Is FeedPups a registered charity?” Not yet. We are structured as a mission-locked LLC with a written commitment to distribute revenue as described above. Registering as a 501(c)(3) is on the roadmap once monthly revenue is stable enough to justify the legal and filing overhead.

“Can I get a tax receipt?” Not currently, for the same reason. If tax-deductibility matters to you, please consider donating directly to a local shelter.

“Can I see the actual invoices?” Monthly totals go on the impact page. We do not publish per-shelter invoice PDFs because they contain address and account details of small organisations, but we will show them, redacted, to any prospective partner or journalist on request.