Which dental software actually publishes its prices?

We set out to build a price comparison of US dental practice management software and hit a problem immediately: most of the market does not publish prices.

So the first thing worth publishing is the audit itself. We checked all 14 systems we track, on their own websites, on 1 August 2026. Here is what we found — and why the review sites filling the vacuum should not be trusted to fill it.

The result: 5 out of 14

Five vendors publish a real monetary figure on their own site. Nine publish nothing and require you to request a quote.

The five that publish

Vendor	Published entry price	Basis
tab32	$125/month (year 1, start-up)	per practice, up to 3 providers
Practice-Web	$179/month for 12 months, then $129	per office, up to 3 dentists
Open Dental	$199/month for 12 months, then $149	per location, up to 3 providers
Oryx	$650/month (Pro), rising to $1,399 (AI tier)	includes 2 providers; +$100–200 each beyond
CareStack	$829/month (Essentials), $1,299 (Intelligence)	“starting at”, per location

The nine that don’t

Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Eaglesoft, Curve Dental, Denticon, Adit, DentiMax, ABELDent and iDentalSoft all require a sales conversation before you can learn what they cost.

That group includes the three products with the largest installed bases in US dentistry. If you want to know what the market leader costs, you cannot look it up.

The bigger problem: the substitutes are wrong

An opaque market creates demand for someone to fill the gap, and a large industry of review and comparison sites has grown up doing exactly that. When we cross-checked their numbers against vendor sources, they did not hold up.

Case one: four sites, one wrong number

Searching for Open Dental’s pricing returns a consistent answer across multiple review sites: $179 per month for the first year, dropping to $129.

Open Dental’s own published fee schedule says $199 per month per location for the first 12 months, then $149.

The $179/$129 figures are real — they are just Practice-Web’s prices, for a different product from a different company. The two systems share a codebase lineage and near-identical pricing structure (both charge per location, both add $20 per month per dentist beyond three), which appears to have been enough for the numbers to migrate across.

The practical consequence: a practice budgeting from those figures would be $20 to $30 per month per location short, and would have shortlisted the wrong product on price.

Case two: a unit that does not exist

Another widely republished figure puts CareStack at “$698 per user per month” on a Basic plan.

CareStack’s own pricing page lists Essentials at $829 per month and Intelligence at $1,299 per month — and neither is priced per user. For a ten-person practice, “per user” versus “per location” is not a rounding error; it is the difference between $829 and $6,980 a month.

Case three: a support fee nobody charges

A third claim we found: Open Dental practices “pay $350 a month for customer support”. No tier on Open Dental’s published fee schedule is $350. Support is the $199/$149 line; there is no separate $350 charge.

Why this happens

None of this requires bad faith. It is a predictable outcome of the structure:

• Vendors do not publish, so writers cannot cite a primary source.
• Aggregators publish estimates, framed with hedges like “starting from” or “typically”.
• Other writers cite the aggregators.
• The hedges fall away in each retelling, and an estimate becomes a fact.

Once a number is repeated in five places, it looks confirmed. It is just five copies of the same guess — or, in the Open Dental case, five copies of the same mix-up.

What we do instead

We adopted one rule when building this site: we publish a price only if we can see it on the vendor’s own page. Every published figure on this site carries a link to its source and the date we read it. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so, and we do not substitute an estimate.

That makes our data less complete than sites that estimate everything. We think incomplete-and-checkable beats complete-and-wrong when you are making a five-figure decision. Our full methodology sets out the rest of it.

The sticker price is not the bill

Transparency about the headline number is only half the problem. The cheap end of this market is cheap because it unbundles, and the add-ons are where budgets actually go.

Using only each vendor’s own published add-on rates, a single-location practice with three dentists:

Open Dental — $149 base, plus eClipboard forms $45, eConfirmations $25, integrated texting $5, Web Sched online booking $75. Realistic total: $299/month — double the headline, before per-message texting fees or the server you have to buy.

Practice-Web — $129 base, plus texting $90, online scheduling $119, tablet forms $65, online reviews $69. Realistic total: $472/month — 3.7× the headline, and now more expensive than several “expensive” all-in-one cloud platforms.

This is the trap. A $129 on-premise system and an $829 all-in-one cloud platform are not six times apart once you switch on what a modern practice actually needs — and the cloud price includes the server you would otherwise buy, run, patch and back up. Our full cost breakdown works through both examples line by line.

Also easy to miss:

• Data conversion. Practice-Web publishes $1,195. Most others quote per source system. Budget four figures.
• Transaction fees. tab32 publishes $0.20 per claim, $0.50 per attachment and $1.25 per eligibility check. At 400 claims a month that is a real line item.
• Per-provider uplifts. Open Dental and Practice-Web both add $20 per month per dentist beyond three. Oryx adds $100 to $200 per provider beyond two.

Is quote-only a red flag?

Not automatically, and it would be lazy to treat it as one.

For genuine enterprise products — Denticon selling to a forty-location DSO, for instance — configuration and pricing legitimately vary so much that a published rate card would be meaningless. Negotiated pricing is normal in enterprise software generally.

The argument is weaker for products sold to solo practices, where the configuration barely varies between customers. And it is weakest where a vendor markets on transparency while publishing nothing: Curve Dental’s site promises “affordable and transparent pricing” and does not print a number anywhere.

Practice-Web, whose own pricing page asks why competitors “don’t even disclose pricing on their websites”, has a point — even if it is a self-interested one.

How to get a real number out of a quote-only vendor

If you are shortlisting an opaque vendor, these questions get you to a comparable figure fastest:

1. “What is the monthly cost per location, and what is the per-provider uplift?” Get both. A per-location price is meaningless without knowing when it steps up.
2. “Which of these are included and which are extra?” Read them the list: texting, online booking, digital forms, eligibility verification, claims, payments, analytics, imaging.
3. “What is the data conversion cost from my current system, specifically?” Naming your current product matters — conversion pricing varies by source.
4. “What is the contract length and what happens at renewal?” Introductory rates are common. Ask what year two costs.
5. “Are there per-transaction fees?” Per claim, per attachment, per eligibility check, per text message.
6. “What does support cost, and is it included?”

Get the answers in writing. Then compare against the five vendors that would have told you all of this without a phone call.

How we checked

So the audit can be repeated rather than taken on trust.

For each of the 14 vendors we visited the pricing page on their own domain — following the site’s own navigation to whatever it calls pricing — and recorded whether any monetary figure appeared. Where a page was inaccessible to a normal request, we fetched it through a third-party scraping service so the page saw an ordinary browser rather than a script.

A vendor counts as publishing only if a specific figure appears. These do not count:

• “Affordable and transparent pricing” with no number (Curve Dental)
• “Request a quote” or “contact sales”
• A pricing page that exists but shows only a form
• A figure quoted by a reseller, a review site or a press release rather than the vendor

We then read the surrounding page text to record the basis — per location, per provider, per user, per practice — because a number without a basis is not usable. That step is what exposed the CareStack “per user” error: the figure being circulated had both the wrong amount and the wrong unit.

Two verification notes worth stating, because they affected the result:

We re-checked figures that our extraction tool reported but we could not see in the page text. An automated read initially returned plan names and prices for two vendors whose pages showed no dollar figures in the extracted content. We refetched both at full length before publishing. One (CareStack) was confirmed — the figures were real, further down the page. Had we not checked, we would have risked publishing invented numbers, which is precisely the failure mode this article is about.

We corrected one plan structure after a second read. Oryx’s page initially appeared to show a $0 and a $400 tier alongside $650, $899 and $1,399. A closer read showed the first two are a start-up promotion with conditions attached, not standard tiers. Both are on the page; the framing matters.

Every figure links to its source on our pricing page with the date read.

What the transparent five have in common

Look at the five that publish, and a pattern appears. They are, with one exception, the challengers.

tab32, Practice-Web, Open Dental and Oryx are all competing against larger incumbents on value. Publishing a price is a competitive weapon for them: it lets a practice owner shortlist without a sales call, and it implicitly accuses the incumbent of hiding something. Practice-Web’s pricing page does this explicitly.

CareStack is the interesting case. It publishes $829 and $1,299 per month — figures well above the cheap end — while selling to groups, exactly the segment where quote-only pricing is most defensible. Publishing anyway is a positioning choice: it signals confidence and filters out practices that were never going to buy at that level, which is efficient for everyone.

The nine that publish nothing include every product with a dominant installed base. When you already have the customers, a price page mostly helps competitors.

None of this tells you which software is better. It tells you what each vendor’s commercial position is, which is useful context when you are reading their marketing.

How to read a “starting at” price

Two of our five publish “starting at” figures rather than fixed rates, and the phrase does real work.

CareStack’s $829 is a floor, not a quote. The real number depends on locations, providers and module selection. Treat it as “you will not pay less than this” and budget above it.

Oryx’s $650 is more concrete — it includes two providers and publishes the uplift ($100 per additional provider, $200 on the AI tier), so you can actually compute a five-provider practice: $650 + $300 = $950 per month on Pro. That is a materially more useful disclosure than a bare “from” figure, and it is the standard other vendors should be held to.

The test for whether a published price is genuinely useful: can you calculate your own bill from it without calling anyone? By that standard Open Dental, Practice-Web, Oryx and tab32 pass. CareStack partially passes. Everyone else does not participate.

The questions that matter more than the price

Price transparency is a proxy for something else — whether the vendor expects you to be able to make an informed decision on your own. But a published price alone does not make a product right for you. Once you have a shortlist, these move the needle more:

What happens at renewal? Introductory rates are common and rarely advertised as such. Open Dental and Practice-Web both publish that their rate drops after twelve months, which is unusual and worth noting. Others go the other way.

What is metered? Per-claim, per-attachment, per-eligibility-check and per-message fees turn a fixed cost into a variable one that scales with how busy you are. tab32 publishes all four. Vendors that do not publish them may still charge them.

What is the provider cap? Almost every published price includes a provider limit — three for Open Dental, Practice-Web and tab32’s start-up tier, two for Oryx, five for tab32’s established tier. A five-dentist practice pays a very different price from the headline.

Who owns the server? On-premise pricing looks cheaper because it excludes hosting, backups and the hardware. That is not a trick, but it is not comparable to a cloud subscription either. Our cloud guide covers the distinction properly.

What does data conversion cost, from your specific current system? This is a four-figure line item that never appears in a monthly price.

A note on our own numbers

We are a comparison site that earns affiliate commission, which puts us in the same category as the sites whose figures did not survive checking. So the rule we adopted has to apply to us too.

Every price on this site links to the vendor page it came from and shows the date we read it. If you click through and find a different figure, the vendor has changed it and we are out of date — tell us and we will fix it. That is a weaker guarantee than “always correct”, but it is a checkable one, which is the point.

We also do not publish estimates for the nine opaque vendors, even though doing so would make our pages more complete and probably rank better. Incomplete-and-checkable beats complete-and-wrong when someone is making a five-figure decision on the strength of it. The full methodology sets out the rest of the rules, including what affiliate commission does not buy.

The audit, restated

Fourteen products. Five publish a price. Nine do not. Of the substitute figures circulating for the opaque nine — and even for some of the transparent five — at least three widely repeated numbers are demonstrably wrong, including one that belongs to an entirely different product.

If you take one thing from this: check the vendor’s own page before you believe a price, including ours. Every figure we publish links to where we got it.

Start with what dental software actually costs, or the full comparison of all 14 systems.

Frequently asked

Why don't dental software companies publish prices?

Three reasons are commonly given: pricing genuinely varies with practice size and module selection, competitors would see the numbers, and a sales conversation converts better than a price page. The first is legitimate for enterprise products. It is harder to justify for a product sold to solo practices, where the configuration barely varies.

How much does dental practice management software cost per month?

Among vendors that publish figures, entry prices run from $125 per month (tab32, start-up year) to $1,399 per month (Oryx AI tier). On-premise systems cluster around $129 to $199 per location, and all-in-one cloud platforms around $650 to $1,299. Add-ons often double the on-premise figures.

Is Open Dental $179 or $199 a month?

Open Dental's published fee schedule says $199 per month per location for the first 12 months, then $149. The $179/$129 figures circulating on review sites are Practice-Web's prices, not Open Dental's.

Can you negotiate dental software pricing?

With quote-only vendors, yes — that is the point of quoting rather than publishing. With vendors that publish a rate card, the base rate is generally fixed, though promotional and volume pricing exists. Open Dental publishes a volume rate of $169 per office for practices with four to nine offices.

Software prices referenced in this guide were read from vendor sites on 2026-08-01 and are linked to their sources. Always confirm current pricing with the vendor.