ShelterOS

Admin Dashboard
Animals Directory
Animal's Timeline View
Animal Details
Medical Records
Users & Volunteers Directory
Adoptions Requests Page
Fosters Requests Page
Web Main Page
Fosters animals matching page
Fosters/Adopters Signup Page

Inspiration

Animal shelters do some of the most meaningful work in our communities, but a lot of that work still happens across spreadsheets, chat threads, and paper notes. Animals move from rescue to medical care to foster to adoption, and important details can get lost along the way.

We wanted to build something that treats shelter operations like a real system: one place to track an animal’s full journey, support staff, and help more pets reach the right home faster. That idea became ShelterOS.

What it does

ShelterOS is an operating system for animal rescue organizations. It manages the complete lifecycle of an animal:

Rescue → Intake → Medical Care → Foster → Adoption

For shelter staff, it provides:

Animal intake and profile management
Medical records and checkup tracking
Visual animal timelines
Foster request management
Ai based foster request scoring
Adoption applications
An analytics dashboard with live helpful metrics

For the public, it provides:

A clean animal browsing experience
Foster and adoption applications
Personalized AI-powered recommendations for foster volunteers

The AI matching system compares a foster’s experience, housing, availability, and preferences with an animal’s needs, then returns a match score with clear strengths and concerns. That helps staff make faster, more confident decisions.

How we built it

We built ShelterOS as a full-stack platform:

Frontend: React Router, Tailwind CSS, shadcn for a clean, modern interface, and recharts for admin dashboard charts
Backend: Fastify with JWT authentication and role-based access
Database: PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM
Media: Cloudinary for animal photos and videos
AI: Google Gemini for foster-animal compatibility scoring
Architecture: Turborepo Monorepo

We designed the system around real shelter workflows like intake, medical care, fostering, adoption and focused on making both the admin side and public side feel practical, not just flashy.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was making the product feel useful under real shelter constraints.

Matching fosters to animals sounds simple, but the data is messy: experience levels, housing types, kids, other pets, medical conditions, and animal personality all matter. We had to design a scoring approach that was smart enough to help, but still clear enough for staff to trust.

We also had to balance features carefully. It was tempting to build everything at once like donations, volunteer scheduling, post-adoption tracking, but for a strong hackathon product we focused on the core lifecycle and the AI matching experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that ShelterOS feels like a real product, not just a prototype.

We built:

A complete admin workflow for animal management
Public-facing adoption and foster flows
AI foster matching with scores and explanations
Personalized results for users
A dashboard that shows shelter health and operations overview at a glance

What we learned

We learned that good animal-tech is less about adding more features and more about reducing friction.

Shelters don’t need another complicated tool. They need clarity: where an animal is, where is its medical record history, what it needs next, and who can help.