Serenity Vet Lets Relief Vets Build Their Own Networks, Cutting Marketplace Fees

Serenity Vet expanded its network-building feature to relief veterinarians, allowing them to invite clinics they already work with onto the platform and manage scheduling, shifts, and invoicing in one place — without paying per-shift marketplace fees. The update pushes relief staffing further from transactional marketplaces and toward a relationship-driven model — one that eliminates per-shift commissions for established working relationships.

What Happened

Previously, Serenity Vet’s network feature was available only to clinics. The new release flips the invitation flow: relief veterinarians can now bring their existing clinic relationships onto the platform, centralizing scheduling and automated invoicing for those relationships. Shifts booked within an existing network carry no marketplace commission.

The platform charges clinics a subscription starting at $299 per month for up to three relief veterinarians from their existing network. Relief vets use the platform for free. Beyond network management, Serenity Vet offers income planning tools, local market rate insights, negotiation features, and a marketplace for connecting with new clinics.

“Most relief veterinarians already have practices they enjoy working with, but coordinating shifts often still means juggling messages and keeping track of multiple invoices,” said Dr. Andrew Ciccolini, co-founder at Serenity Vet. Ciccolini, a veterinarian with over 13 years of clinical experience including medical director roles in nonprofit and academic settings, built the platform to address the administrative overhead that makes relief work harder than it needs to be.

The feature builds on a recent release that gave clinics the ability to invite relief vets to their networks, track real-time availability, and manage payments within the platform.

Why It Matters

Relief staffing is moving from gig economy to structured operations. The dominant model in veterinary relief has been marketplace-driven: platforms like Roo and IndeVets connect clinics with available vets, typically charging placement fees or taking a cut of the shift rate. Serenity Vet is betting that most relief vets already have established clinic relationships and would rather manage those directly than route them through a middleman. The no-fee network model undercuts marketplace economics and positions relief work as a recurring operational relationship rather than a one-off transaction.

The economics matter for clinics facing margin pressure. Marketplace fees on relief shifts add meaningful cost for practices already dealing with rising labor expenses. A subscription model at $299 per month for managing existing relief relationships could represent significant savings for clinics that regularly use the same two or three relief vets. For operators running multi-location practices, centralizing relief management across locations reduces administrative overhead.

Burnout data supports the relationship-driven approach. Serenity Vet’s own burnout survey, conducted in collaboration with Talkatoo, found that burnout levels among relief veterinarians have increased 25% since 2022. The leading contributors included income unpredictability and high administrative workload. Vets who work repeatedly with the same clinics reported feeling more financially stable and lower levels of burnout. If the data holds, platforms that facilitate ongoing relationships over transactional matches may have a retention advantage.

What to Watch

Whether Serenity Vet can build enough two-sided adoption to compete with better-funded marketplace players. IndeVets, which operates a W-2 employment model rather than a platform model, has scaled to roughly 200 employees and $15 million in annual revenue. Serenity Vet’s network-first approach is fundamentally different — lower overhead, but dependent on both vets and clinics choosing to adopt the same tool. Watch for adoption numbers in the next six months.

Also track whether the subscription-vs-marketplace fee model forces competitors to adjust pricing. If clinics start pulling their regular relief vets off marketplace platforms and onto Serenity Vet’s no-fee network, the marketplaces will need to respond — either by cutting fees or adding enough differentiated value to justify them.

Source: Company press release