Windows 10 & 11
Free, and drawn from photographs of your own cat or dog rather than picked off a list of somebody else's characters. It lives in the system tray and your pet lives on the desktop.
Download for Windows Or make one in your browser first
Download the .exe and run it.
Windows will show a blue box the first time — see the next section, it takes five seconds.
Add your photos, check the likeness, and your pet walks onto the desktop.
SmartScreen shows that blue box because the build is not yet code-signed. A code-signing certificate costs money this project does not take in, and unsigned installers have no reputation with SmartScreen no matter how harmless they are. That is the honest reason.
You only have to do this once, and if that trade does not sit right with you that is a completely reasonable place to stop — you can still make a pet in your browser, where nothing gets installed at all.
In the system tray, as a small paw — you may need to click the arrow to show hidden icons the first time, and it is worth dragging it out to pin it. Click the paw to add another pet, open Settings, resize them, hide them for a while, or quit. Your pet floats above your other windows and settles down when they have had enough of walking. Right-click the animal itself to ask them over, to stretch, to wash, or to nap.
Very little, on purpose. It is a small drawing on a canvas and it idles: full frame rate while your pet is moving or talking, a trickle once they have settled, and you can set both rates yourself in Settings. The expensive part is building the pet, and that happens once.
Your photographs never leave the machine. There is no server in this product, no account, and nothing is uploaded — the app works out the drawing locally and the pictures are discarded when you are done.
Yes — Still Around for Mac, same app, in the menu bar.
It is built for Windows 10 and 11 and is not tested on anything older.
Yes. No paid tier, no trial, no advertising, MIT licensed. The rest is on the questions page.