Why the most important decision in this app is something it leaves out

"How long has this been going on?"

The sentence comes up in every practice, and it sounds harmless.

And there you stand. Maybe "a while now." Maybe "a few weeks?" Maybe "actually, hasn't it always been like that?"

Not because anyone was careless. Because you see your pet every day. The dog gets up a fraction more slowly. The cat takes the chair instead of the window sill. Every day looks like the one before – until the shift is big enough for someone who hasn't seen the animal in six months to notice it.

A date would make this so simple. If somebody had written it down.

That's the whole idea. And because it's easy to misread, the most important sentence on this page comes here rather than at the end: some things don't belong in a note, they belong in a practice or clinic right now. Laboured breathing. Pale gums. An animal that suddenly can't get up. A male cat going to the litter box again and again with nothing coming out. This is not a complete list – it's the one where the clock runs fastest. Those are hours, not days, including evenings and weekends. And if a cat eats nothing for more than a day, have that looked at today; for cats this is considerably more critical than for dogs.

Everything else here is about what comes after that.

I'm Marco.

Two things happened in the summer of 2015. I started my first group for dog owners. And I started a job at a pet health insurer.

The groups are still going – five channels of my own by now, focused on dog health, around 120,000 pet owners between them. I've been reading along for eleven years. One story keeps coming back in variations: something was different, and afterwards nobody can say since when.

I stayed four years at the insurer, as Head of Digital Marketing and Business Development – the website and the online side of the business. Not in treatment. Not with the animals.

But four years inside an insurer show you something about pet health you don't see from outside: the whole business only begins once something has already happened. The weeks before that, while something is building, appear in no file. Not because they don't matter. Because nobody wrote them down.

What I don't have: veterinary training. No degree, no licence, no practice.

That isn't small print. It's the most important thing on this page – and the reason VetaSense is built the way it is.

That isn't caution. That's the construction.

Diagnosing and treating animals is reserved to licensed veterinarians – in Germany under § 1 of the Bundes-Tierärzteordnung, in Austria under the equivalent reservation in its Tierärztegesetz. An app that gets around that line by offering "just a pointer" has still got around it.

But the legal part isn't the interesting one.

The interesting one is this: a system that tells you what your pet has will sometimes be wrong. And the expensive mistakes all run in one direction. The false alarm isn't the dangerous one – it costs you a visit you didn't need. The dangerous one is reassurance. Someone reading an app that says "probably harmless" waits. And waiting, for some pictures, is the one wrong answer.

So VetaSense doesn't tell you what your pet has. It records what you observed, with a date. And where a question belongs at the practice, Veti says so, instead of reassuring you.

An app that promises less isn't the more cautious one here. It's the safer one.

Veti is the AI companion inside VetaSense. Software – not a person and not a vet.

She remembers what you've told her about your pet and gives it back to you when you need it. If you have several animals, each gets its own thread and its own memory. The daily check has four short areas – eating and drinking, behaviour, coat and body, toilet habits – and takes one to two minutes.

What she must not do: name diseases or suggest a treatment.

What she doesn't do: push you. There's no chain that breaks, no badges, no line totting up how many days you skipped. That's a deliberate decision, and it has a reason. A pet can fall ill. A pet can die. An app that picks that week to show you a broken chain hasn't understood what it's for.

Attention, not perfection. That isn't the slogan. That's the brief it gets built against.

For pet owners, VetaSense is free. Certainly during the beta, and the plan is for it to stay that way. I don't ask for payment details.

Now the sentence you're thinking at this point – I'd rather say it myself: if it costs nothing, who's paying?

The honest answer is that this isn't settled yet. The direction: partners from the pet industry, not the owners. What won't happen: I don't sell data that traces back to you or your pet.

Inside the app you're asked whether we may learn from your entries in pseudonymous form. You can say no. Say no, and the app works in full – nothing locked, no asking again. That's where a sentence like this proves itself. Which is why it's built that way in the product, and doesn't just sit here.

What you record about your pet sits in a database in Ireland – inside the EU. Your messages to Veti travel to the AI model through a service in the US that does not store them; the conversation itself stays in the EU. You can export and delete both yourself, right in the app – no email to a support desk, no waiting.

If any of that changes, I'll say so beforehand.

VetaSense is a closed beta. A small group trying it in everyday life and telling me what's awkward. Access runs through an invitation.

Dogs and cats. Other species cannot be selected at the moment.

I build this on my own. I can't give you a date for the next round of invitations – I could write one down, but it would be a guess.

If you've read this far, you're probably one of the people I'm building this for: someone who'd rather look once too often than once too late.

If you'd like to be there – join the waiting list.

And if something's missing, if something doesn't sit right, or if you think I've got something wrong here: write to me. veti@vetasense.com