KONG Club Vet-Led Guidance & Training App Review 2024: Our Vet’s Opinion
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We give KONG Club a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
About KONG
What Is KONG Club?
KONG Club is their online resource that provides 1:1 vet-led guidance and pet coaching. You might recognize their chew toys, but KONG has gone above and beyond in their pursuit of providing more comprehensive lifestyle support for pets and their owners.
Through use of the app or on the computer, dog and cat parents can enrich their pet’s lives, create engagement, work through troublesome behaviors, and more.
For $9.98 per month, you can have unlimited access to KONG-approved pet guidance via AskVet that combines access to a veterinarian, trainer, behaviorist, and pet toy supply all in one place.
How Did KONG Start?
KONG is a Colorado-based dog and cat toy company founded in the 1970s. Upon noting tooth damage in his dog after chewing hard objects like rocks, the founder of KONG, Joe Markham, designed a chew toy for dogs made of a rubber. The special new toy could hold treats or other appetizing fillers, be safely frozen, and designed to fit the size and chewing strength needs of all dogs.
KONG quickly became a household name by the 1980s due to the unique shape of their chew toy: three balls stacked creating a hollow, snowman-shaped, fillable toy. You would be hard pressed to find a toy more needed in a new dog household, optimal for teething, stress management, distraction, training, and even oral and GI health support.
In recent years, KONG has expanded to produce several other popular dog toys in addition to a line of cat toys and supplies. Following in the footsteps of their founding principles, KONG Club seeks to provide the guidance pet parents need to help maintain a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle for their pet—just like they’ve been providing the physical tools for years!
Which Types of Pets Is KONG Club Best Suited For?
KONG Club provides support for owners of dogs and cats and is a great resource for owners of either or both.
KONG Club Service Overview
Here is an overview of KONG Club. I’m going to go over the basics of the product and its strengths and weaknesses.
Pricing & Plans
KONG Club costs $9.98 as a recurring monthly subscription. This monthly fee gets you unlimited access to their services including unlimited consults with the professionals, for all your cats and dogs. The subscription can also be canceled at any time in the Settings of the app or website. KONG Club has four major sections, each providing a different service so that you have everything you need for comprehensive lifestyle support all in one place.
Lifestyle Support Coach
The Lifestyle Support Coach is a good place to start as you’ll be given a personal, virtual coaching session with an expert who will ask about your pet and help identify your needs for support, whether that be a behavior problem or goals to keep them occupied.
With a Pet Lifestyle Plan, you’ll learn how to use KONG Club to meet your needs. You’ll be prompted to schedule the appointment, and while it varies by time zone, appointments in my area appear to be available 5 days a week with same or next day availability.
You can also utilize this service as often as you want, which is a fantastic resource. It’s impossible to get unlimited access to a trainer in-person, especially not for $9.98 a month! I found this to be a real strength of the program in terms of getting your money’s worth since they’re so knowledgeable, helpful, and accessible.
AskVet
As if unlimited access to a lifestyle support coach for your pet wasn’t enough, the next section is also 24/7 access to a veterinarian via chat. While treatment options via telemedicine are unfortunately quite limited, these vets can do a great job of helping you know if you have a problem, if you need to go to the ER, what might be best to feed, what toys are safe and more.
Don’t hesitate to ask them any questions you have as they will help get you where you need to go, even if it isn’t something they’re actually able to answer. There is also a PetBot function you can start with, which is ready to answer questions about specific topics and can direct you to resources or a veterinarian as desired, based on your responses. I found the provided information by the chat accurate and informative.
KONG Classroom
KONG Club also includes a collection of videos on every aspect of pet care you could think of, known as the KONG Classroom. They separate the videos by sections: training, play, nutrition, wellness, and care. You can access these at any time and get everything from treat recipes, to nail trim walkthroughs, to instructions on how to safely play tug with your dog.
Want to know how to go about fostering pets in your home? There’s a video for that. Need to know what steps to take to transition your pet into their senior years? That’s covered too. I found the quality of the videos to be super clear, encountered no buffering issues, and every video comes with a brief written description in addition to background information about the instructor in the video.
Online Library
Lastly is the massive library of written information available to you as well. Unlike the KONG Classroom, this information isn’t sorted quite as usefully in my opinion, but you can still filter by eight different topics, which mostly breaks down by species, breed, and then some basic categories. That being said, you can also use a search function to find what you’re looking for, and you’ll quickly realize they have information on anything you could think to search, including on additional species such as fish.
What to Expect
When starting with KONG Club, the first thing they would like to know is whether you have a cat or a dog. You’ll provide their name and some other general information about them such as their age and breed. You can even upload a photo of your pet!
Next you’ll fill in your name, email address, and phone number and create a password for your account. Billing information comes next and you’ll be able to use a credit card or PayPal account for payment of the monthly $9.98 subscription fee.
Just like that, you’ll have access to all the services KONG Club has to offer, and I recommend starting with scheduling your personal consultation with a Pet Lifestyle Coach to kick things off.
Specs
- $9.98 monthly subscription fee
- App available for all major smartphones
- Website available for any web browser
- Unlimited pets
- Unlimited support
- Respected American company
- Resources include personal Zoom meetings, chats with experts, a video library, and a written resources library
In Summary
- Resources are comprehensive and high quality
- 24/7 access to chatting with a veterinarian
- All resources load quickly and function as expected
- Supports both dogs and cats
- Able to create a profile for more than one pet
- Amount of available information may be hard to navigate at the beginning
- Design is straightforward but not uniform
Key Features of KONG Club
Usefulness
KONG Club has the information you need in whichever form you prefer. Need to check something mid-training session? You have resources on hand immediately. Need to discuss a topic and vet follow-up questions as well? You can schedule that or chat with a vet at your leisure. By providing these resources in so many forms, KONG Club has guaranteed there’s something useful for everyone.
Convenience
Any computer or smartphone can provide access to KONG Club. You can bookmark favorite resources you want to be able to easily find again in the library. Videos don’t appear to be able to be marked for return in the same way, unfortunately.
Design
KONG Club is relatively easy to navigate. From the app or website you can choose between the four to five major options for assistance: Pet Lifestyle Plan, 24/7 Vet Chat (and PetBot), KONG Classroom, and Online Library.
The design of the pages differs a bit, with the home page appearing pretty different from the Vet Chat prompts, which also looks pretty different from the PetBot window.
Everything functions perfectly, and each prompt makes perfect sense as they collect necessary information about your problem or question, but it may be a bit jarring or disorienting for some.
Is KONG Club a Good Value?
I really think the strengths of this service lie in the quality of the information provided, but also the fantastic value you get. There is such a wide array of articles, videos, and person-to-person exchanges available, via chat or virtual meeting, that a pet owner would be hard pressed not to find something useful in the resources, even if they’ve kept pets for decades.
The cost to access this information also can’t be matched by in person services (think veterinary visits, training sessions, nutrition consults). You have access to a wealth of really helpful, high-quality content for less than the cost of a monthly movie/TV subscription.
FAQ
Does KONG Club take Apple Pay or Google Pay?
While KONG Club does not accept Apple or Google Pay, they can take a credit or debit card or Paypal for payment.
Can I video chat with a veterinarian?
You can only speak to a veterinarian via written chat but can send photos as needed as well. You can however have unlimited video appointments with a certified Pet Lifestyle Coach.
Can I use KONG Club for only one of my pets?
You can make profiles for any of your cats and dogs and use the service as much as you need for any of them.
Our Experience With KONG Club
I found KONG Club very easy to use. They collected all relevant information about me and my pets from the jump, before even finalizing the subscription. As soon as you finish the sign up you have access to all of their resources. It took a couple minutes for me to familiarize myself with where everything was and just how much information I could access.
I highly recommend scheduling a Lifestyle Plan consultation as soon as you have access to your account. It’s a lot more than just a lifestyle plan service; it’s a great way to get acquainted with all the ways you can optimize the value of KONG Club.
If you have the time, it’s also worth just scrolling through the content, as I stumbled upon some information that I immediately was interested in, such as several KONG stuffing recipes. The information in the resources isn’t all geared around their own KONG products either; there’s a lot of information for unrelated products because it’s what’s best for your pet, which I really respected.
Conclusion
KONG is a company that was founded on the premise of helping pets, and this KONG Club membership significantly expands the ways in which they can accomplish that. You’ll see for yourself if you give it a test drive. Subscriptions can always be easily canceled anytime from your account, no questions asked.
I was impressed by the quality and accuracy of the information available, the ease of use, and the emphasis on providing that information any way you prefer. I definitely recommend trying out a KONG Club membership to see how it can help enrich your dog or cat’s life.
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