In 2026 a small clinic pays nothing on limited free tiers, about $39 to $149 per clinician a month for self-serve scribes such as Freed, Twofold and Sunoh, and a quoted price for enterprise products aimed at larger groups. For a three-clinician clinic, that's roughly $1,800 to $5,400 a year before integration, review time and consent admin.
The spread inside those ranges has more to do with plan features than with the quality of the notes. The jump from a basic to a top plan is usually paying for three things: unlimited notes, pushing notes straight into your clinical records system, and extras like coding suggestions and patient letters. If your team is happy to paste a note into the record, you may not need the top tier at all. If they aren't, the cheap plan's saving disappears in copy-and-paste time.
Published prices, side by side
These are list prices from each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Promotions and struck-through "was" prices are common on these pages, so confirm on the day you buy.
| Scribe | Plan | Price per clinician | What the tier adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freed | Starter | $39 a month | Up to 40 notes a month |
| Freed | Core | $79 a month | Unlimited notes, template builder |
| Freed | Premier | $119 a month, or $1,248 a year ($104 a month) | Push to EHR, visit summaries, patient instructions and letters, ICD-10 and CPT coding |
| Twofold | Personal | $69 a month, or $49 a month billed annually | Unlimited notes, coding; first month discounted on annual |
| Sunoh.ai | Single plan | $149 a month (shown as a limited-time price; regular $199) | No long-term commitment stated |
| Heidi | Free | $0 | Transcription and notes on standard templates; 10 advanced actions a month |
| Heidi | Clinician / Practice | Shown in local currency; Practice is sales-led | Advanced templates and features; 14-day trial on Clinician |
| Enterprise tools (Microsoft Dragon Copilot, Abridge, Suki, DeepScribe) | Quote | No self-serve price published | Deep integration with large record systems, admin controls |
Group plans (Freed Groups, Twofold Group, Heidi Practice) are quote-based. They typically add admin dashboards, shared templates, single sign-on and volume discounts. For a clinic of four or more clinicians it's worth asking for a group quote even if you'd rather self-serve, because it gives you something to compare.
Yearly budgets for three clinic sizes
Each clinic below is illustrative, and each is priced only on the list prices in the table above.
A solo clinician, about 240 notes a month
| Option | Year one |
|---|---|
| Heidi free tier | $0, with limits on advanced features |
| Twofold Personal, annual | $588 (less the first-month discount) |
| Freed Core, monthly | $948 |
| Freed Premier, annual | $1,248 |
| Sunoh.ai at the current offer | $1,788 |
A three-clinician clinic: two full-time, one part-time
The part-timer writes about 35 notes a month. Mixing plans matters here. On Freed, two Core seats and one Starter seat cost $197 a month, $2,364 a year. Putting all three on Premier annual for EHR push costs $3,744. On Twofold annual, three seats cost $1,764. Paying unlimited rates for the part-timer is the most common overspend in clinics this size.
An eight-clinician practice wanting admin controls
Self-serve top tiers set a ceiling: eight Freed Premier seats on annual billing cost $9,984 a year. A group plan should come in under that, or add enough (single sign-on, admin reporting, onboarding) to justify the difference. Enterprise products may cost more per seat; they're built for deep integration with larger record systems, so ask what you'd actually use before comparing.
Line items beyond the subscription
| Item | Typical cost | Who it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Integration with your clinical record system | Often only on the top plan or group tier | Clinics that pick the cheap plan and then paste every note |
| Admin and assistant access | Included on some plans, group-only on others | Practice managers who need to see usage or share notes |
| Microphones for noisy rooms | A phone or laptop usually works; a room microphone is a small one-off | Clinics with open-plan treatment areas |
| Consent conversations | A minute or two on some appointments | Everyone, every time a new patient is recorded |
| Review and correction of drafts | 2 to 3 minutes a note, falling with use | Clinics that count the subscription and not the review |
| Template set-up | A few hours per clinician in month one | Specialties the standard templates don't fit |
| Data export when you leave | Usually free, but check the format | Clinics that switch vendor after a price rise |
Review time is the biggest cost on that list and the one that decides whether the scribe pays. A draft that takes a clinician four minutes to fix has saved very little. The sum is worth doing with your own figures. Say a clinician used to spend seven minutes writing each note. If the scribe's draft takes two minutes to check, the saving is five minutes a note, and 240 notes a month gives 20 hours back. If the draft takes four minutes to check, the saving drops to three minutes and 12 hours; at five minutes it's eight hours, and the subscription is paying for much less than it seemed. To get the real figure, time 20 consecutive notes in week one and again in week four with a phone stopwatch, from opening the draft to signing it. Review time usually falls as templates are adjusted, so the week-four number is the one to budget on.Whether your clinic's savings beat the costs is the subject of whether an AI scribe is worth it for a small private clinic.
Cost per note: the number to compare on
Monthly price divided by notes actually written is the fairest comparison between plans, and it exposes overspending quickly:
Twofold annual, full-time clinician, 240 notes: $49 / 240 = $0.20 a note
Freed Core, full-time clinician, 240 notes: $79 / 240 = $0.33 a note
Freed Premier annual, 240 notes: $104 / 240 = $0.43 a note
Freed Core, part-timer, 35 notes: $79 / 35 = $2.26 a note
Freed Starter, part-timer, 35 notes: $39 / 35 = $1.11 a noteRun this monthly from the vendor's usage page. A seat that drifts above $1.50 a note usually means a clinician has stopped using the tool, and that's either a training fix or a cancellation.
Here's the month-three check for the three-clinician clinic, filled in from an illustrative usage page:
| Clinician | Plan | Notes this month | Cost per note | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time A | Core, $79 | 251 | $0.31 | None |
| Full-time B | Core, $79 | 118 | $0.67 | Ask why: half the usual volume |
| Part-time | Starter, $39 | 31 | $1.26 | None; within the 40-note cap |
Clinician B's figure is the useful one. The conversation revealed she had stopped using the scribe for her longer assessments because the standard template kept putting examination findings under history. Half an hour building her own template brought her back to about 230 notes the next month. Without the check, the clinic would have kept paying full price for half the use, and she'd have concluded the tool didn't suit her.
Free tiers: what they cost you instead
Free tiers are real and worth testing, but they're paid for in other ways. Heidi's free plan, for example, covers transcription and notes on standard templates, with 10 actions a month for advanced templates, form filling and its assistant; heavy users will hit that quickly. Check three things before relying on any free tier for real patients: whether the vendor will sign the data-processing agreement your obligations require on that tier, how long audio and transcripts are kept, and whether support exists when a note goes missing. Retention differs more than prices do. Heidi says it doesn't keep audio; Nabla discards audio and keeps transcripts for 14 days by default. Read the current wording on each vendor's own page, because it changes. A free tool with no agreement in place isn't free if it creates a data-protection problem. The checks are listed in the patient data confidentiality checklist.
A related question is whether you need a separate scribe at all. Some clinical and practice-management systems now include AI note features. Check yours before buying; the tutorial on using the AI already in your practice software shows how to find what's switched off by default.
SimplePractice is a useful example of the add-on route. Its Note Taker costs $35 per clinician a month on top of the practice subscription. For an illustrative four-therapist practice already running SimplePractice, that's $140 a month or $1,680 a year, against $3,792 for four Freed Core seats, and the notes land in the record they already use with no copy-and-paste step. What to test in the trial is whether its note formats suit your specialty as well as a dedicated scribe's templates would.It also shows why settings need checking after you sign: since 16 June 2026, new Note Taker users are opted in by default to the vendor keeping de-identified transcripts. A practice that set the tool up in May and added a new clinician in July could have two different settings without knowing. Whichever scribe you use, check each clinician's privacy settings when they join, not only at the start.
Reading a group quote: a sample and what to question
Once a clinic asks for a group price, the quote usually arrives as a short table. Here's an illustrative one for a six-clinician practice, with the questions each line should prompt:
| Quote line (illustrative) | Amount | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| 6 clinician seats, annual | $95 per seat per month | Can part-time clinicians be on a capped seat? Can we add or drop seats mid-year? |
| Onboarding and template configuration | $1,200 one-off | What exactly is configured? Is it refundable if we cancel in the first 30 days? |
| Record-system integration | Included | Is it a full push into the right sections, or a pasted block? Who fixes it when the record system updates? |
| Admin dashboard and single sign-on | Included | Does the dashboard show notes per clinician, so we can spot unused seats? |
| Price protection | Not stated | Is the per-seat price fixed for the full term, and what is the renewal price? |
In this example, the quote works out at $6,840 a year for seats plus $1,200 set-up: $8,040 in year one. Six Freed Premier seats on annual billing would cost $7,488 with no onboarding fee, so the group quote only wins if the onboarding and integration are genuinely better. That comparison is the point of knowing the self-serve prices before any sales call.
Cheaper routes if a scribe doesn't add up
For a clinic where the break-even is marginal, there are cheaper middle paths. One is to use a scribe only for the notes and letters that take longest, such as new-patient assessments and reports, on a capped plan like Freed Starter, rather than for every follow-up. Another is post-consultation dictation: the clinician speaks a two-minute summary after the patient leaves, and a business-plan AI assistant turns it into a structured note. That keeps recording out of the room and costs only the seat on a business plan your clinic may already have, but it needs the same data checks as any tool handling patient information, and it saves less time than ambient capture. Neither route is as fast as a full scribe; both can be the right answer for a clinic seeing five or six patients a day.
Contract terms that change the real price
- Annual versus monthly. Twofold's annual price is about 29% below monthly; Freed Premier's is about 13% below. Only commit annually after a trial and a month of real use.
- Promotional prices. A discounted first month or a "limited-time" rate is common. Ask what the renewal price is and whether it's guaranteed for a year.
- Auto-renewal and notice. Diary the renewal date the day you sign. Annual plans often renew automatically.
- Price changes mid-term. Scribe pricing has moved repeatedly in this market. Ask whether a price rise can apply before your term ends.
- Exit and data. Ask how you export notes and templates, and when audio and transcripts are deleted after you cancel. The tutorial on keeping your data portable has the questions.
The costliest mistake in this list is committing everyone annually on day one. A realistic version: a three-clinician physiotherapy clinic, pleased with a two-week trial, puts all three clinicians on Freed Premier annual for $3,744. The part-timer, who treats mostly post-surgical patients, finds the drafts mislabel the procedures she sees most and stops using the scribe in month two. Across the rest of the year she writes about 60 notes with it, so her seat works out at more than $20 a note, and the money can't be recovered. Monthly billing for her, or a Starter seat until she'd used it for a full month of real clinics, would have cost a fraction of that.
Put the contract questions in writing before you sign, so the answers are on record. A short email is enough:
Subject: Questions before we sign - [clinic name], [number] seats
Hello,
Before we commit, could you confirm in writing:
1. The per-seat price for the full term, and the price at renewal.
2. Whether a price change can apply before our term ends.
3. Whether we can move a seat to a cheaper plan or remove it mid-term.
4. Which plan includes pushing notes into [record system], and whether
it fills the right sections or adds one text block.
5. How long you keep audio and transcripts, on this plan, by default.
6. How we export notes and templates if we leave, and in what format.
7. Whether you will sign our data-processing agreement on this plan.
Thanks,
[first name], [role]A vendor that answers all seven clearly is usually one that will be straightforward at renewal. Vague answers to questions 1, 2 or 5 are worth more weight than any difference in list price.
A worked budget for the first year
Here's how the three-clinician clinic above might budget, with illustrative figures. It starts with one full-time clinician on a monthly plan to test, then moves to the right mix.
| Period | Set-up | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | One clinician on Freed Core, monthly; free trial first | $79 |
| Month 2 | Second full-time clinician added on Core | $158 |
| Months 3 to 12 | Two Core seats and one Starter seat | $1,970 |
| Staff time | Template set-up, consent materials, monthly usage check (about 12 hours at $40) | $480 |
| Year one total | $2,687 |
Against that, if each full-time clinician saves even 3 minutes on 240 notes a month, the clinic gets back about 24 clinician-hours a month once both are running. The spend is easy to justify on those numbers; the question is only whether your clinic's real saving looks like that, which is what the trial is for. Before signing, run the vendor through the questions to ask before buying AI for a medical practice.
Further reads
- What Is an AI Scribe and How Does It Work in a Consultation? — How a scribe works in a consultation, before you pay for one.
- AI for Veterinary Practice Owners: Costs, Tools, and First Steps — The same cost picture for veterinary scribes and tools.
- How to Roll Out an AI Scribe Without Losing Patient Trust — Rolling out a scribe without losing patients' trust.
- A Worked AI Implementation Plan for a Small Medical Practice — Where a scribe fits in a practice's wider 90-day AI plan.
- AI Tools for Physiotherapy Clinics: What Each One Actually Does — Which AI tools physio clinics use beyond note-taking.
- How Physiotherapists Use AI to Write Treatment Notes Faster — Scribe, dictation or shorthand: how physios get SOAP notes drafted in minutes, and why ranges of motion, sides and exercise doses need checking every time.
- How Small Vet Practices Use AI to Cut Time on Clinical Notes — Vet AI scribes, consult by consult: narrating the exam, weight-based doses to check, multi-pet visits, discharge notes, and a three-vet practice's numbers.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: pricing pages for Freed (and Freed's help article on pricing), Twofold, Sunoh.ai and Heidi, plus Heidi's pricing help article; SimplePractice Note Taker pricing and transcript default; Heidi and Nabla data-retention pages (checked 27 September 2026). Enterprise vendors checked for published self-serve pricing; none found.