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.
- Premium — 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 lower than you think
Lead caps are only half the pricing story. The commission rate falls as the plan rises — 18% on Free, 15% on Starter, 12% on Growth, 9% on Premium — and it is charged only on bookings that are confirmed and paid through the portal. That means every upgrade pays for itself at a specific, calculable volume of confirmed bookings.
- Free to Starter ($69/mo, 18% to 15%). Three points of commission saved. On roughly €2,300 of confirmed bookings a month — one mid-sized dental case — the saving covers the subscription. Past that, Free is the more expensive plan.
- Starter to Growth ($139/mo, 15% to 12%). Another three points, for $70 more. Break-even again lands around €2,300 of monthly confirmed bookings. If you are consistently converting more than a case or two a month, Growth is already cheaper than Starter — before you count the extra 30 leads.
- Growth to Premium ($599/mo, 12% to 9%). $460 more for three more points, so break-even sits near €15,000 of confirmed bookings a month. That is a real international practice, not an aspiration — don't take this step to buy the lead cap.
The counter-intuitive result: the free plan is the most expensive plan for anyone who is actually converting. It is priced to let you test, not to run a business on. If you booked patients last month, do the arithmetic before you renew your loyalty to $0.
On GetClinic: plans are Free ($0, 5 routed leads, 18%), Starter ($69/mo, 20 leads, 15%), Growth ($139/mo, 50 leads, 12%) and Premium ($599/mo, 125 leads, 9%) — launch pricing, held until 31 December 2026. Commission is charged only on bookings confirmed and paid through the portal, so an upgrade that doesn't produce bookings doesn't produce a commission bill either.
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 commission line is bigger than the next plan's subscription. Do the three-point arithmetic above.
- 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.