Every guide, breed page, and procedure cost page on The Price of a Pet carries the byline Frankie Ledger. Here's who that is, and how the numbers under that name are put together.
Who is Frankie Ledger?
Frankie Ledger is a pen name, not a single person. It's the shared byline for the small independent team that researches and writes this site. We use one consistent name because the work is a group effort — one person calibrates the cost model, another checks the breed-risk data, someone else edits the prose — and we'd rather stand behind a single voice than pretend each page has a lone celebrity author. We're not veterinarians, and we don't claim to be. What we are is a team that reads the source data carefully and shows its work.
This is the same disclosure you'll find on our About page. We'd rather be upfront about it than dress a content site in fake credentials.
How we handle the numbers
A few rules we hold ourselves to, because cost content is easy to fake and hard to trust:
- Ranges, not false precision. Real vet prices vary by region, clinic, and the individual animal. We publish ranges (for example, "$500–$1,500 for a dog dental cleaning") rather than a single made-up figure that pretends to a certainty that doesn't exist.
- Every figure traces to public data. We don't invent per-breed numbers. Costs come from the sources listed below and from a transparent size-and-lifespan model that mirrors the on-site calculator, so the breed pages and the calculator agree.
- No fake anecdotes or fake experts. We don't stage customer stories or attribute quotes to specialists we didn't talk to.
- We say when insurance math is bad. The site earns affiliate revenue from pet insurance, and our insurance guide still walks through the negative-expected-value reality of it. The conclusion follows the facts, not the commission.
Sources we rely on
The cost figures across the site are built from public, checkable sources rather than a single stat lifted from an old blog post:
- AVMA cost-of-care surveys — the American Veterinary Medical Association's periodic data on average pet-owner spending by category.
- State veterinary medical association pricing — for regional variation in clinic rates.
- Pet-insurance industry filings — actuarial data on average claims, claim frequency, and the incidence of major conditions by breed.
- Veterinary school and teaching-hospital pricing — procedure-specific ranges for major events like cruciate (ACL/CCL) repair, foreign-body surgery, and cancer treatment.
- Pet-food industry and retail pricing data — to calibrate annual food spend.
- Published owner-expenditure surveys — from groups like the ASPCA and Petfinder, used as a cross-check against our model.
- BLS regional price parity data — for the cost-of-living adjustment that scales estimates by metro.
Our full method — including how the calculator combines these — is written up on the methodology page.
Review and updates
Figures are reviewed and refreshed on a regular cadence, and each guide shows an "updated" date so you can see how current it is. When a source publishes new data or we spot an error, we correct the page rather than leave a stale number sitting there.
Corrections and contact
Found a number that looks off, or have a source we should be using? We genuinely want to hear it. Email hello@costcalculator.pet — corrections go to the same inbox as everything else, and we'd rather fix a figure than defend it.