Petline is a subscription service giving pet owners round-the-clock access to licensed veterinarians, behaviourists, nutritionists and groomers — $9.99 a month for one pet, $14.99 for a household.

The difficulty with selling reassurance is that the customer is buying something they hope never to need. The value is availability, not usage. And on the day they finally do need it, they are frightened and not reading carefully.

So the product is organised around states of worry rather than around features. The home screen is five equally weighted tiles — call, chat, text, email, tickets — because someone panicking reaches for the channel they already trust, not the one that's cheapest for us to staff. The emergency number sits above all of them and outside the app flow entirely. The worst possible outcome is a person navigating a menu while their dog is choking.

Each service carries its own colour, so you find your way back by memory rather than by reading. And tickets are filed under the pet's name — Butters, Jalapeño — so the next conversation starts where the last one ended. Continuity is what makes an on-call service feel like a relationship rather than a call centre.