PracticeCore's 1% model: when it saves money, when it doesn't

We charge one percent of what your practice collects each month. No per-seat fees, no module upsells, no annual contracts. The bill is the bill.

This pricing shape isn't actually as foreign as it sounds. Most practices already pay several percentage-of-collections fees: two and a half to three and a half percent to the credit card processor, four to nine percent to an outsourced billing service if you use one, plus revenue-share to your patient financing partner, your online booking platform, and sometimes your marketing vendor. Percentage-of-collections is one of the most common pricing shapes in your accounts payable file. We're just the cheapest one of the bunch.

Most people who hear about it for the first time assume there must be a catch. The next question, asked less often but more honestly, is: when does this model lose? For some practices, traditional per-seat pricing genuinely costs less than one percent of revenue.

We're going to spend this post on that question. We are doing this because we think buyers deserve to be able to do the math themselves, and because we built this pricing for the eighty percent case — not for everyone. If your situation makes one percent the wrong answer, you should know that before you talk to us.

The line

Per-seat pricing for a mainstream dental PMS — Dentrix, Eaglesoft, CareStack, Curve, Adit — typically lands somewhere in the range of $500 to $1,200 per month base, plus per-user fees of $100 to $250, plus per-module fees ($100-$400 each) for imaging, online booking, ePrescribe, claims, and sometimes payment processing. Multi-location pricing is a separate, usually larger conversation.

For our model, the math is simpler: take your monthly collections and multiply by one percent. That's the bill.

The line where the two models cross looks roughly like this:

One percent saves you money when your monthly per-seat-plus-module bill is greater than one percent of your collections.

This is obvious arithmetic, and it's also where things get interesting. The per-seat bill is mostly fixed — it depends on staff count and module choices, not on revenue. The one percent bill is purely variable. So the comparison changes month to month, and it changes when your practice grows, hires, or adds modules.

Where one percent loses

There are practices where per-seat is cheaper. Specifically:

Very high collections per staff member. If you're running $1.5M+ in annual collections with a two-person admin team and a single provider, your per-seat bill is small relative to your revenue. A practice doing $200K/month with two admin seats, one provider, and a tight module set might pay $1,100/month on a competitor. We'd charge them $2,000. They save $10,800 a year by staying on per-seat.

Lean shops at high revenue. Similar dynamic. Two staff, one provider, $1.8M annual gross. Modules include imaging and ePrescribe but not online booking or marketing. Per-seat: $1,200/month. Us: $1,500/month. Margin to per-seat: $3,600/year.

No-module practices. If your imaging is fully external, your ePrescribe is on a separate system you already pay for, you don't take online bookings, and your claims volume is low enough you don't need a denial engine, then per-seat without modules is genuinely cheap. We bundle features you may not need. If you don't need them, you're paying for them on us.

Single-provider, lean-staff, no-growth-planned. The scenario where one percent's worst case lives. Your revenue is high relative to staff, your team is stable, you're not adding locations, and the modules you have on your current PMS are sufficient.

For these practices, our pricing is the wrong answer. We will tell you so on a sales call. If you ran the numbers and per-seat saves you four thousand a year and your situation will be the same in three years, take per-seat.

Where one percent wins

The math reverses fast in any of these scenarios:

Growth mode. Every new hire on per-seat is a new $100-$250/month line item. Every new module is another $100-$400. If you're hiring or adding modules over the next two years, the per-seat bill grows faster than your collections in many cases. Our bill grows with collections by definition, so the ratio stays constant.

New practices. A practice doing $40K/month in its first year on per-seat pays the same $1,000-$1,500 in fixed software cost as one doing $200K/month. That's a brutal percentage on low collections. Our bill in that first year would be $400/month — almost a third of per-seat. The savings shrink as the practice scales, which is exactly when you can afford them less.

Multi-provider, large-staff practices. Six staff, three providers, two hygienists: per-seat costs add up fast. A practice with that headcount typically pays $1,500-$2,200/month on per-seat before modules. At $200K/month collections, we charge $2,000. Even, or slightly cheaper for us.

Hygiene-heavy practices. Each hygienist is a per-seat fee on most competitors but doesn't move our bill at all. A practice running four hygienists in three operatories saves real money on us.

Multi-location. This is where per-seat really punishes growth. Most legacy PMS vendors charge a separate base fee per location, which means a five-location group is paying five base fees plus five sets of per-seat fees plus five sets of modules. We charge one percent of group collections, period. Multi-location is where the bill on us is dramatically lower than per-seat.

Practices that need the bundled modules. Imaging, online booking, ePrescribe, claims, perio, patient portal: if you need them, you're paying à la carte on most competitors. We include them. The savings here can be larger than the per-seat math by itself.

Practices with revenue volatility. Summer slowdowns. Insurance backlog. A bad month for whatever reason. Per-seat keeps charging the full bill regardless. Our bill drops with collections. If you've ever cut a software check during a slow month and felt the sting, you know what we mean.

Why we built it this way knowing it loses sometimes

The honest answer is: aligned incentives.

Our cost moves with your collections. If we ship a feature that helps you collect more, we make more. If we ship a feature that drags your collections down, we make less. There is no version of this where we ship slowly, ship features nobody asked for, or coast on contract renewals — our revenue depends on yours every month.

The cynical version of the same observation: vendors with fixed contracts have weak incentives to keep getting better. Why would they? You're locked in for a year, the next renewal is twelve months away, and the cost of switching is higher than the cost of mild dissatisfaction. We chose a model where that argument doesn't work.

There are also two practical advantages we like:

Predictability for growing practices. Hiring a new front-desk person, adding a hygienist, opening a second location: none of these change our bill in a way you have to plan for. With per-seat, every staff change requires a software cost recalculation. With us, there's nothing to recalculate.

No "modules to consider." The decision of whether to take a feature is purely a workflow question, not a money question. You don't have to do an internal ROI on imaging or ePrescribe or online booking before you turn them on. Turn them on, see if they help, turn them off if they don't.

We accept the trade-off: there's a band of practices for whom one percent is more expensive than per-seat. We're OK with that. The pricing was built for the practices that are growing, hiring, adding locations, or wrestling with revenue volatility — which is most dental practices, most of the time.

A sanity check on what software is worth

There's a comparison worth making before you do the math, even though it's the kind of thing you don't expect to hear from a software vendor.

Your credit card processor takes two and a half to three and a half percent of every patient payment that comes in by card. We take one percent of your total collections.

The thing that moves the money costs roughly three times more than the thing that runs the business. The processor swipes the card, verifies the funds, and deposits in two business days. We run the chart, hold the patient record, structure the treatment plan, manage the schedule, validate the claim, track the AR, and answer to HIPAA on all of it.

We didn't set our pricing as a reaction to that math. But the comparison is a useful reality check on what software is supposed to cost. When you think about whether one percent is reasonable for what we do, the next thought worth having is whether three percent is reasonable for what your processor does.

It's also worth noticing that in your AP file right now, the line item for "moving the money" is probably your second- or third-largest software-adjacent expense. The line item for "running the business" is one percent. We think the ordering in that list is upside down, but it isn't something a PMS vendor can fix on the buyer's behalf — it's just worth seeing clearly.

Run the math yourself

The pricing calculator at /pricing takes your monthly collections and returns the bill in seconds. If you want to compare against your current spend, list out every line of your current software bill: base license, per-user fees, per-module fees, per-location fees, payment processing surcharges, support agreements. Add them up.

If the total is more than one percent of your collections, switch when the timing is right.

If the total is less than one percent of your collections, and you're confident your situation will be the same in two and three and five years, stay on per-seat. We mean that.

What we'll add quietly: most practices don't stay static for that long. Staff turnover, growth, new procedures, second locations, slow quarters — these all change the per-seat math under your feet. The one percent model bends to those changes. Per-seat doesn't.

So the real question is whether you'd rather have a bill that flexes with your business, or one that punishes you for growing.

If you've decided that question, we can show you what the rest of the product looks like — the product page is the place to start, or we do 20-minute demos on real data.

If you haven't decided, the calculator runs in the browser. Try a few scenarios. See what the math says when you grow, when revenue dips, when you add a location. Then come back.

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PracticeCore AI is a modern practice management platform built for dental practices. One price (1% of what you collect), no per-seat fees, self-host option available. We talk to dentists every day. We write here when there is something worth saying.