The wrong reason to upgrade a plan is that you want more leads. Every clinic wants more leads. The right reason is that you have measured what your team does with the leads it already has, found that they are being answered well and converting, and concluded that the constraint is now supply rather than capacity. Clinics that upgrade before checking that end up with a bigger inbox and the same number of bookings — and then blame the platform.
The only capacity number that matters
A lead is not a message. A lead, handled properly, is a first reply with a real quote, two or three rounds of questions, an itemized package the patient can actually read, usually a video consult, and then follow-ups until they book or go quiet. Across its life that's comfortably an hour of coordinator attention, spread over days — and the spread is the hard part, because it competes with the patients who are already in the building.
As a working figure, one full-time coordinator handles 25–40 active international leads a month at a standard where the first reply lands within two hours and nothing goes unanswered. Below 25 they're underused. Above 40, response times slip, follow-ups get dropped, and your conversion rate falls faster than your lead count rises. If half a person is doing coordination between clinic duties, halve the range and be honest about it.
Map the plan to the person
- Free — 5 routed leads a month. One person, coordination as a side duty. Enough to prove that international patients convert for you at all before you spend anything.
- Starter — 20 leads a month. One dedicated coordinator, or one very organised owner. This is the plan most clinics should be on within their first quarter.
- Growth — 50 leads a month. Two coordinators, or one plus real process: templates, an owner per enquiry, a follow-up cadence that doesn't rely on memory.
- Professional — 125 leads a month. A staffed international department. At this volume the bottleneck is no longer replies, it's surgical calendar and beds.
Notice that the ladder is about staffing, not ambition. The plan you should be on is the one your existing team can absorb — not the one that matches the clinic you'd like to be. Buying a lead cap you cannot staff is the most reliable way to make a platform look like it doesn't work.
The break-even is a fixed number now
Lead caps are only half the pricing story, but the other half got simpler. Workflow fees are flat — $200, $400 or $675 per completed booking workflow — and identical on every plan, so an upgrade never changes what a booking costs you. What it changes is capacity: routed leads, seats, and the features your team works with. The step between two plans is a fixed monthly number, and you should weigh it against capacity you can actually staff.
- Free to Starter ($199/mo). Four times the routed leads, five seats instead of two, patient chat and priority support. Take it when Free's five leads run out before the month does and you are answering all of them well.
- Starter to Growth ($399/mo). $200 more for 30 extra leads a month, 20 seats, custom branding and full conversion analytics. Take it when two people are working the inbox and the cap — not the close rate — is what stops you.
- Growth to Professional ($999/mo). $600 more for 125 leads, 50 seats, video consults, API access and a featured listing. That is a clinic group with a dedicated international desk, not an aspiration.
One old trap disappears with the flat fees: because a workflow costs the same on every plan, staying on Free never costs you more per booking. What Free costs you is the leads you never see. If you hit the cap every month with a team that still has spare hours, the cheap plan is the one quietly capping your pipeline.
On GetClinic: plans are Free ($0, 5 routed leads), Starter ($199/mo, 20 leads), Growth ($399/mo, 50 leads) and Professional ($999/mo, 125 leads), with annual billing charged at ten months for twelve. Workflow fees are flat and identical on every plan — $200, $400 or $675 per completed booking workflow, set by the workflow your team used and never by the treatment price.
Signals you have outgrown your plan
- You are hitting the lead cap before the month ends and your close rate on those leads is holding steady. Supply is the constraint, not quality.
- Your first-reply time is under two hours and stays there on your busiest week. Spare capacity, proven under load.
- Your lead cap, not your close rate, is the constraint. That is the only thing an upgrade actually fixes.
- You have hired or reassigned someone into coordination and they are not yet fully occupied.
And the signals you shouldn't
Don't upgrade because last month was quiet. A thin month is usually a conversion problem or a seasonality problem, and neither is fixed by pouring more enquiries into the same funnel — you will simply lose more of them, more visibly. Don't upgrade because a competitor did. And don't upgrade to fix slow replies: a team that answers 15 leads in two days will answer 50 leads in two days, and the only thing that changes is how many patients book somewhere else while they wait.
Fix the funnel first, then buy the volume. The order matters, and it is the difference between a plan that pays for itself in a fortnight and a plan you cancel in a quarter. The clinics that grow fastest are rarely the ones on the biggest plan — they are the ones whose plan matches the number of patients they can genuinely look after.