Support
Households, from the first code to the last one out
Where it lives in the app, what an invite code will and won’t do, what moves in when somebody joins, and what every refusal on that screen actually means.
The short version
Five people, one pack, five separate sign-ins
Households sit in the app under Settings → Account & plan → Household. Free on every plan, the free one included. Five people is the ceiling: the sixth join is refused by the server rather than politely discouraged.
Everything about the dog is shared — the pack, every read, the keepsake album and the whole health journal. Everything about you isn’t: your sign-in, your theme, your bones, your streak and your daily read allowance stay yours. The one thing about you the household does see is the name on your account — it sits on the members list, and it’s the “Captured by” line on every read you take. What a household is walks through that split properly. This page is the one to read mid-setup, or when something has just said no.
Starting one
One of you creates it, and then invites
Creating one, and getting somebody in
- Create itYour pack, reads and health move in, server-side
- Mint a codeGood for 24 hours, and for exactly one person
- They joinBringing their dogs, or leaving them behind — their choice, once
- One shared packUp to five people, each with their own sign-in
Create it
Household → Create our household, and give it a name. Three lines go by while it works — Creating your household…, Moving your pack, reads & health in…, Copying photos across…. They name the phases the server really runs, and the last one is real work: the photos are copied server-side, never re-uploaded from your phone. Don’t read the line as a position, though — it isn’t a progress bar, so a slow copy simply sits on the last line until it’s done.
New invite code
Inviting is the owner’s job, and the button — New invite code — is only drawn on the owner’s screen. One code is live at a time, and making a fresh one kills the last. It’s single-use, good for twenty-four hours, and drawn from an alphabet with no O, no zero, no I and no 1 in it, so nobody has to squint at a group chat. The live code is held server-side only, never on anything the other members can read — nobody in the house can quietly widen it.
Send it, and the house finds out
Share invite sends the code with a dogoos.com link. The moment somebody uses it, a notification lands in every existing member’s in-app inbox — that one ignores notification settings on purpose, so nobody can turn it off — and on their phone too if they’ve allowed push. A code that ends up in the wrong chat can’t quietly add a stranger. If one goes astray, tap New invite code: that alone kills the old one.
Joining
One switch to decide before you press Join
Join with a code opens a sheet with one switch on it, on by default: Bring my dogs, reads & health with me. Leave it on and your pack, your reads, your keepsake photos and your health journal move into the household where every member can see them — and they stay there if you later leave. Turn it off and they sit in your own account, untouched and out of sight, until you leave the household again. It is much easier to decide this on the way in than on the way out.
Type the code however you like; the app upper-cases it for you. Then two lines go by — Checking the invite…, Joining the household… — naming the phases rather than measuring them, and the code is spent.
The dogoos.com link that comes with a code is a web page, not a door. It shows the code and says where to type it. Nobody is ever added to your household by opening a link.
If the photo copy doesn’t finish. You’ll see “Your household is secure and its photos are still finishing.” — the join itself has already committed, so you are in, and there’s no need to ask for another code (the old one is spent anyway). The app picks the copy back up next time it syncs, and a scheduled job on the server sweeps anything still outstanding. Both are safe to run twice; neither duplicates a photo.
Said plainly
A household shares the dog, not the allowance
Reads are not pooled — a decision we’d rather explain than leave you to discover. Every member reads at their own allowance, one a day on free, and a subscription belongs to the account that bought it rather than to the address. Breed checks come out of your own count too, and Story Mode and the weekly report need Whisperer on your account, not on somebody else’s down the hall. So, as it stands, there’s no family plan and no household tier — and pooling the free reads would be worse rather than better: one household, one read a day, spent before the second person is awake.
When it refuses
What each of those messages is actually telling you
The household screen says short things. Here is the longer version of each, because the server deliberately gives the same answer to a dead code and a mistyped one — it can’t tell them apart, and pretending otherwise would hand a guesser a hint.
One message really does mean email us. If removing a member says “That member’s secure household move is inconsistent — please contact support before removing them”, stop and send us that sentence. It means the only copy of somebody’s photos is somewhere the app won’t risk cutting loose, and it wants a person to look rather than guess.
Leaving
Out of the household, and what stays behind
Anyone can leave whenever they like; only the owner can remove somebody else. Either way the person going keeps their own account and simply stops seeing the shared pack. What they contributed stays — the dogs, the reads, the keepsake photos, the health journal. There is no take-mine-back switch, which is the single thing most worth knowing before you join rather than after.
If the owner is the one leaving, a remaining member inherits on the spot — the app picks, the owner doesn’t, and a household is never allowed to be ownerless. Any membership change at all, a leave or a removal, destroys the live invite code on its way past, so nobody walks off still holding a working key. The new owner makes a fresh one if they still want to invite somebody.
The last member out is the exception, and the whole thing comes home with them: the pack, the reads, the album and the journal land back in their own account, any live code is destroyed, and the household closes.
That carry-home has moving parts, so it can stop part-way and say so. The sentence reads worse than it is: “Moving the family’s history home didn’t finish — nothing is lost, and anything already moved is safe. Tap Leave again to finish.” is literal on every count: the move goes in stages, whatever has already moved is in your account, and tapping Leave household a second time picks it up where it stopped. Same with “Securely closing household media didn’t finish.” — nobody has been removed and nothing has been deleted.
Erasing your Dogoos account is a different operation with different rules — your photos go, the reads you took stay as the family’s record of their dog with your name off them, and deleting your account goes through all of it. And if you’ve already left and want the photos and reads you captured taken out of a household still in use, that isn’t a button: email us and ask.
What happens when somebody goes
- They leaveKeeping their own account, losing sight of the shared pack
- Their work staysDogs, reads, photos, journal. There is no take-mine-back switch
- If it was the ownerThe app hands ownership on at once — a household is never ownerless
- The last one outTakes the whole history home, and the household closes
Still stuck
Tell us which screen said no
No chat widget, no phone line, no ticket number — support@dogoos.com for anything to do with a household, an account or a bug, and hello@dogoos.com if you’re a trainer, vet or shelter asking about a Kennel plan. Our team usually replies within a day.
Three things make a household email answerable in one reply instead of four: the exact words on the screen, whether you were creating, joining, inviting or leaving at the time, and roughly when it happened. The email address on your Dogoos account helps too — it’s how we know which household we’re looking at.
Questions, answered
The ones that arrive mid-setup
Where is it in the app?
Settings → Account & plan → Household. It’s free on every plan, so there’s no paywall in front of it and nothing to buy once you’re there.
My code says it’s expired and I only made it an hour ago.
Then one of three things happened: somebody already used it — codes are strictly single-use — or the owner made a newer one, which kills the previous code instantly, or a character went in wrong. The server answers a mistyped code exactly as it answers a dead one, on purpose, so you can’t tell from the message. Tap New invite code, then Share invite, and send the new one.
Can the five of us share one subscription?
No. A plan belongs to the account that bought it. The shared world — dogs, reads, album, health journal — is free for everyone in the household, and the paid extras follow the person paying: their reads, their breed checks, their weekly report, their Story Mode. As it stands there’s no family plan and no household tier.
Can I be in two households at once?
No — one per account. If you share a dog across two homes, the honest answer is that one household holds the dog and the other person joins it; sharing a dog goes through the awkward parts.
Someone joined and I don’t know who they are.
That notification is the point: every join drops a message into the in-app inbox of everybody already in, whatever their notification settings say. The owner can remove the member from the household screen, and making a new invite code destroys any code still live. Then ask around — a code is only ever shared by the owner, and it only works for a day.
Will the others see my name?
Yes — the name on your Dogoos account goes onto the household’s members list, and every read you take carries a “Captured by” line with it. Your sign-in, your theme, your bones and your streak stay private to you. The household is handed that name once, at the moment you join, and never asks again, so if it isn’t the one you want them reading, change it in Settings → Account & plan → Account first; changing it afterwards updates your own app, not their members list.
I joined with the switch off. Where have my dogs gone?
Nowhere. They’re in your own account, untouched, and the app is showing you the household’s pack instead. Leave the household and yours come straight back, exactly as you left them.
If I leave, do the reads I took come with me?
No. What moves into a household belongs to the family from then on — the dogs, the reads, the keepsake photos and the health notes stay. The one exception is being the last person out, which brings the entire household home with you and closes it.
My dog is on medication. Should I add somebody?
Everyone in a household can read the whole journal — weights, medications, notes, meals, walks and reminders. Add the people you’d already talk to about your dog’s health, not everyone with a phone. And the journal only records what you put in it: Dogoos records a dose, it never calculates one, and anything that worries you goes to a qualified vet rather than an app.
One code, one day,
and the whole house is looking at the same dog.
Open the web app 🦴
Free to use · Live camera reads are on the phone app