Every platform has to answer one question: who pays, and when. The answers in circulation — a monthly listing fee, a price per lead, a share of every booking — look like variations on a theme. They are not. They put the risk in different places and they reward the platform for different things, which is why the model matters more than the headline number.
The three ways platforms charge
Listing fees. You pay a fixed amount per month to appear. The platform is paid whether you get one enquiry or two hundred, and whether any of them book. This is the directory model, and it is the oldest one in the industry. Its incentive is to sell listings, not to send you patients.
Pay-per-lead. You pay a fixed price for each contact passed to you — commonly €15 to €60 in this sector, more for high-value procedures. The platform is paid on delivery of a name and an email. Whether that name answers the phone, has a budget, or is even in the right country is your problem. The incentive here is lead volume, and the pathology it produces is exactly what you would expect: the same lead sold to four clinics, and enquiries about procedures you do not perform.
A share of the booking. You hand over part of every confirmed booking. It sounds fair — the platform earns when you earn — until you look at what is actually being priced. The software does the same work for a €1,200 case and a €12,000 one: route the request, carry the offer, run the payment, keep the thread alive. Under a share model the second case is billed ten times the first for identical work, and every price rise you win for your own clinic turns into a rise in someone else's invoice.
What we charge instead
GetClinic charges for the software, not for a slice of your treatment. There are two lines on the bill and nothing else: a monthly subscription for the portal — lead inbox, offers, chat, calendar, payments and analytics — and a flat fee for each booking workflow that completes. Three fees exist, they are published, and they are identical on every plan:
- Core Booking Workflow — $200. The patient request lands in your inbox, you send an itemized offer, the booking is confirmed, and the payment workflow runs through to your payout.
- Enhanced Booking Workflow — $400. Everything in Core, plus a video consultation, document exchange with the patient, and revisions to the offer.
- Advanced Digital Workflow — $675. Everything in Enhanced, plus multiple consultations, the advanced document workflow, the refund workflow, and a longer active period on the case.
Which package a booking falls into is set by the GetClinic workflow your team actually used: how many consultations ran, how many times the offer was revised, whether documents moved through the portal, what the payment workflow had to do, and how long the case stayed active. It is never calculated from the treatment price, the patient's spend, your revenue, or the clinical outcome. A case that took one offer and one payment is a Core workflow whatever the treatment cost, and it is billed at $200.
The arithmetic, on ten bookings
Say you confirm ten bookings in a month and most of them are straightforward — request, offer, confirmation, payment. Ten Core workflows is $2,000. On Growth at $399 a month, the month costs $2,399, and it costs $2,399 whether those ten cases were your smallest packages or your largest. If three of them run video consultations, document exchange and a revised offer, those three move to Enhanced and the month is $2,999. That is the entire calculation, and you can do it before the month starts.
Now compare that with what you cannot forecast: under a share model the bill tracks the value of whichever cases you happened to close, and under pay-per-lead you pay a hundred times for a hundred names and find out afterwards how many were real. Flat fees on completed workflows are the only one of the three you can put in a budget in advance.
On GetClinic: plans are Free at $0, Starter at $199/mo, Growth at $399/mo and Professional at $999/mo, with annual billing charged at ten months for twelve. Workflow fees are flat and identical on every plan: Core $200, Enhanced $400, Advanced $675, per completed booking workflow. The package follows the workflow your team used — never the treatment price, the patient's spend, or the outcome.
What to ask any platform
- What exactly is being priced? The software you use, or a share of the money your clinic takes? Only one of those answers stays the same when your prices go up.
- When is a fee owed? On an enquiry, on a booking, or on a workflow that ran to completion? A fee charged for a patient who never travelled is a listing fee wearing a different name.
- What happens on a cancellation or a refund? Ask which fees survive it, and get the answer in writing before you sign.
- Does it follow the patient? Some platforms bill on every future treatment for a patient you now have a direct relationship with. That is rent, and you should decline to pay it.
- Can you see the calculation? If you cannot download a statement showing each booking and the fee applied to it, you are not being charged a price — you are being sent a number.
The one number to keep watching
Flat fees do not excuse you from the arithmetic. Take the total cost of a channel for the month — subscription, workflow fees, ad spend, and the coordinator hours the channel consumes — and divide it by the confirmed, paid bookings that channel produced. Compare the result against your gross margin on the procedure, not against your revenue. Run it every quarter, on every channel, including the ones you think are free. Most clinics discover that the channel they complain about loudest is their cheapest, and the one they call free is quietly eating a coordinator's entire week.