CheekyWags: A Kenya-first pet services marketplace

CheekyWags is a Kenya-first digital marketplace that connects pet parents with verified pet service providers and veterinarians. Live at cheekywags.com, the platform serves Nairobi pet owners with vendor bookings, pet health records, and a Pesapal-powered payment system for vendor subscriptions.

The Challenge

The Kenyan pet industry was growing fast but remained structurally fragmented. Pet parents relied on informal WhatsApp and Facebook groups to find groomers, walkers, trainers, and vets with no vetting, ratings, or accountability. Service providers had no professional digital storefronts or booking tools. Veterinarians had no structured way to communicate health updates or vaccination reminders to clients. Pet health records were paper-based, easily lost, and impossible to transfer between vets or owners.

The brief was ambitious: build a marketplace that solved all four problems in one platform, in two months, with a stack that could scale across Kenya without depending on Google Maps, Stripe, or any other foreign service that complicates Kenyan deployments.

Our Approach

We built CheekyWags as a full-stack Next.js 15 application with PostgreSQL and Prisma. Every architectural decision was made with Kenyan infrastructure realities in mind. Here is what shipped:

• Pet Passport system as the platform's core differentiator: a secure digital health record that stores vaccination history, vet visits, and service notes, transferable between owners and authorized vets
• Vendor marketplace with searchable directory, profile pages, photo and video galleries, ratings, reviews, and Rover-style booking flows
• Veterinary integration giving licensed vets free accounts to issue Pet Passports, log visits, and message pet parents directly
• Pesapal v3 integration for vendor Pro subscriptions (KES 1,500/month) via M-Pesa and card payments, fully PCI-compliant
• Leaflet + OpenStreetMap for vendor maps, avoiding Google Maps API costs and dependencies
• Cloudinary for image and video hosting with automatic optimization
• Brevo for transactional email delivery (vendor notifications, vaccination reminders, booking confirmations)
• Hetzner VPS deployment with Nginx reverse proxy and Let's Encrypt SSL, kept costs low while delivering production performance
• ODPC-compliant data handling with full Privacy Policy and Data Protection Policy aligned to the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019

The Result

CheekyWags launched in April 2026 and is live at cheekywags.com. The platform ships with all four core systems operational: Pet Passport issuance, vendor marketplace, vet integration, and Pesapal subscription billing.

Year one targets are 200 active Pro vendor subscriptions, 5,000 registered pet parents, and 1,000 Pet Passports issued. National expansion to Mombasa, Kisumu, and Nakuru is planned for Q4 2026, alongside the launch of a self-hosted Discourse community at community.cheekywags.com.