AI Scribe for GPs: Costs, Free Tiers and the NHS Pilot Limit

A GP can start at $0 on free tiers such as Heidi Free or Accurx Scribe Lite; paid seats list at $110 a month billed annually for Heidi Clinician, while Accurx and Tortus quote. Before an NHS pilot, check clinical safety, data protection, record write-back and local approval: the pilot is capped at four months and must stay compliant.

Prices alone are a poor comparison. A free tool that requires manual copying into the patient record may consume more clinician time than a paid connected plan. Conversely, a practice that only needs a few draft notes for an approved test may learn enough without buying seats for the entire team. Measure the cost of a completed, checked note in the actual record.

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Separate list price from the GP's full monthly cost

Build the budget in five lines: scribe licence, EHR connection, onboarding or support, internal review time, and any infrastructure or devices needed for acceptable audio. Add the billing commitment and cancellation notice beside the monthly figure. The vendor's “per user per month” price may be shown on an annual contract; it is not a month-to-month price. For a GP practice, the record system and the exact write-back action can change the plan required.

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Heidi's help pages describe Free as unlimited notes with standard templates plus ten advanced actions a month, Clinician as unlimited advanced templates with lite EHR integrations where the partner supports them, and Practice as the team plan with full EHR integration access. Clinician and Practice each come with a 14-day free trial, and team plans are billed annually only. Heidi's dollar pricing page lists Clinician at $110 per user a month billed annually and prices team plans on request. Heidi prices by region, and the plan names and prices on a local page can differ, so ask for the written price for the intended plan and EHR. Do not treat a free note as evidence that a connected clinical workflow is included. The country-and-EHR scribe comparison covers that selection in detail.

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Tandem's pricing page offers a Free tier with unlimited note generation, up to two custom templates, up to two invited co-workers and limited daily Pro Actions, and a paid Pro tier, priced per user per month, with one-click transfer to over 100 medical record systems; yearly billing is shown at 15% off. One reading of the page showed Pro at $150 per user a month and another showed a euro price billed yearly, so a single USD list price for the practice could not be pinned down; request a written quote rather than converting it. Tandem's “100+ systems” claim is a reason to ask for a demonstration on the practice's exact record, not a guarantee for every site or field.

Accurx Scribe now has a free tier for primary care called Scribe Lite, which replaced the old free-trial cut-off. Accurx's help centre says each user gets five full-featured encounters a day; from the sixth, transcription and note generation carry on without limit, but saving to the record, document generation, the Adjust editing tool and template editing pause until the allowance resets at midnight. There is no cap on users per clinic. A paid plan is priced on the practice's patient list size, by quote. Reviewed notes can be saved to EMIS or SystmOne when used with Accurx Desktop, and Accurx says the product complies with DCB0129 and DTAC and that Tandem's underlying technology is registered with the MHRA as a Class I medical device. Accurx Scribe is powered by Tandem, but that does not make a standalone Tandem plan and an Accurx practice contract interchangeable. Ask which route the practice is buying and which support and governance terms apply.

Jane's pricing page, read in dollars, lists AI Scribe at $15 a month per opted-in practitioner for unlimited notes, or five free notes a month, on top of a Jane plan: Balance at $59 a month for a single practitioner limited to 20 appointments a month, Practice at $79 and Thrive at $99, each of those two including one full-time practitioner. Jane's scribe page says it is currently available to clinics in three named countries, so confirm eligibility before planning on it. Jane is relevant mainly if the practice already uses Jane for charting; buying a whole practice system to obtain the add-on is a different decision. Confirm availability and total base subscription before calling an add-on figure the practice's cost.

Tortus is another named option. Its site says GPs get it through X-on's Surgery Connect telephony platform, describes it as certified as a Class IIa medical device and lists DTAC among its assurances, but I found no public price page in this check. Ask for a written quote that separates any organisation agreement, integration, deployment and support. Do not fill the gap with a price from a reseller, an old presentation or a different clinical setting. A procurement comparison is more honest with “quote required” than a made-up number.

The table uses published starting points and explicitly leaves unknowns blank. It does not rank products for clinical safety or procurement eligibility. If a vendor presents a discounted pilot, ask for the post-pilot price, minimum term and what happens to stored drafts at exit. Check the price in the contract just before purchase. The clinic's accounts team should also budget any taxes under its normal process; the comparison here uses list prices without adding local tax.

Cost a completed note, including review and write-back

Use a short timing study. Have two clinicians document a small set of comparable approved encounters using the current method and the candidate scribe. Start the clock when the consultation ends and stop only when the note is accurate and saved in the patient record. Record draft generation, correction, coding review, copy or transfer, and a second check of the destination. Keep patient care and clinical judgement outside a claimed automation saving.

In an illustrative practice, two GPs each complete 18 consultations per day over 20 working days, giving 720 consultations in a month. Suppose the scribe is appropriate for 480 of them. Current documentation after each consultation takes an average of six minutes; with the scribe it takes four minutes including review and write-back. The potential difference is 480 × 2 = 960 minutes, or 16 hours a month. That is a planning estimate, not a promised saving. Repeated note errors or failed integration could erase it.

Now add the labour hidden by a subscription figure. Suppose the practice manager spends three hours on setup and each GP spends two hours on training in the first month: seven hours once. A weekly 30-minute review of errors adds two hours each month. At Heidi's dollar list price for Clinician, two seats cost $220 a month billed annually, or $2,640 committed for the year; the licence is $220, but the first month's cost also includes those nine hours and any integration fee. Use the practice's actual internal cost of time to complete the arithmetic; do not assume a universal GP hourly rate.

A cheaper illustrative path may use a free tier for ten test consultations and manual paste, with no licence charge but five minutes to review and transfer each note. A paid path with record transfer may take three minutes and cost $220 monthly, the two-seat Clinician figure above, provided the practice's record system is supported on that plan. Across 480 eligible consultations, a two-minute difference is 16 hours. Whether that is worth the contract depends on the observed work, the practice's staffing and the product's governance status. It is not enough to divide the licence by the total number of patients on the list.

Count the encounters that cannot use the tool. One patient may decline recording. Another consultation may involve an interpreter, poor audio or a sensitive conversation for which the practice chooses manual notes. If 480 encounters were eligible but 60 revert to manual documentation, the scribe affects 420. At the illustrative two-minute net difference, the potential monthly time changes from 16 to 14 hours. The model should make exclusions visible rather than treating every consultation as a completed AI note.

Stress-test the budget for quiet weeks and busy weeks

A practice-wide monthly average can hide a poor fit for individual GPs. Separate clinicians by actual use. A locum who works two sessions a month may need a secure, approved workflow but not a continuously billed individual seat. A GP who performs many short reviews may generate fewer useful ambient notes than one who handles long consultations. Ask the vendor whether a seat can be reassigned, whether a paused seat keeps its data, and whether a trial can cover an irregular rota. Put the answers beside the quoted price, not in a separate email that is forgotten when the contract is signed.

Illustrative low-use example: A GP expects 40 eligible consultations in a month. The scribe reduces end-to-sign time by one minute on 25 and adds one minute on 15 because the draft needs correction. The net difference is only ten minutes. A free, approved test has still taught the practice which note types work, but a recurring paid seat cannot be justified by a claim based on all 40 consultations saving time. The practice may keep manual notes for short reviews and test longer cases separately.

Illustrative high-use example: Another GP sees 280 eligible visits in the same period. After excluding 30 opt-outs or unsuitable encounters, the measured difference is two minutes on 250 notes, or 500 minutes. Before assigning a value to those minutes, check whether the GP genuinely finishes sooner, whether work has shifted to a receptionist or administrator, and whether any after-hours charting remains. Time recovered inside a clinic day is useful, but it is not automatically a cash saving or an extra appointment.

If pricing is based on patient-list size, ask for the formula or at least a written price for the practice's current list and the next likely band. If pricing is per clinician, calculate both the named permanent staff and the largest likely rota during leave cover. If the quote has a minimum term, compare the total committed amount with a month-to-month option. Do not convert a regional list price into a dollar figure and present it as a vendor's USD list; currency conversion and regional product packaging are separate issues.

Read the NHS pilot limit as a boundary, not permission

The NHS guidance on ambient scribing says a pilot or proof of concept can continue only if it is time-limited to up to four months and is not used to bypass compliance. It also calls for engagement with relevant commissioning and regional assurance routes before a pilot or commercial engagement. The practice should check the current applicable guidance, its local requirements and the supplier's evidence with its clinical safety and information-governance leads. A vendor trial length is a commercial offer; it is not the same as the governance limit.

Write the pilot dates and decision gate before recording a real consultation. An illustrative plan starts with fabricated cases, then a short approved live phase, a mid-point review and a final decision before the four-month ceiling. If approval takes six weeks, that period is not an excuse to extend live use informally. Ask the organisation's lead how the limit applies to its precise deployment and whether any further agreement is needed. A qualified adviser should resolve legal and procurement questions, rather than relying on vendor marketing.

Check at least these gates: clinical safety assessment and hazard log, information-governance review and DPIA decision, patient notice and choice, access controls, audio and note retention, support and incident reporting, and the record interface. Decide who reviews every AI draft before it enters the record. The NHS guidance emphasises clinician review and supplier assurance. A free tier can help test note layout with invented data, but it does not bypass these gates for patient use. The practice assurance checklist gives the more detailed evidence trail.

Two parts of that guidance save procurement time. It points practices to NHS England's AVT Supplier Registry, a national, self-certified list of ambient scribing suppliers; the guidance says the registry is not a commercial framework and that NHS England does not endorse the suppliers on it, so a listing is a starting point, not approval. It also asks the deploying organisation to complete DCB0160 documentation, meaning a safety case, hazard log and monitoring plan, plus a DPIA, and to obtain the supplier's DCB0129 clinical safety case report. Budget the clinical lead's time for that paperwork: in the illustrative practice above, even four hours of review belongs in the first month's cost beside the licence.

Accurx's own guide warns that its scribe may omit information or generate incorrect content, and says a clinician must review outputs before they are saved or shared. Test an illustrative consultation where a patient reports a drug allergy, then a second where the patient says they have no allergy. The final note must preserve the distinction and avoid inventing a medicine. A cost calculation that assumes the clinician signs without checking is unsafe and unrealistic.

Ask a second GP or clinical lead to review a sample of notes for omissions and unsupported statements during the pilot. Use a predefined error list: wrong patient, missing red flag, wrong medicine, incorrect dose, altered negative finding, invented examination, and unsupported plan. Do not use the scribe as a diagnosis tool. The note-error checklist supplies a practical clinical review method, while this budget records the time that review costs.

Price the exit before the pilot starts

The pilot budget needs an exit line. Ask how staff will export signed notes, unresolved drafts and the audit evidence needed by the practice. The final clinical record should remain in the approved record system, but the practice must understand what else the vendor stores and how deletion is requested and confirmed. If a scribe produced letters or summaries outside the EHR, assign someone to reconcile those documents before access ends. A low trial price can be misleading if staff spend days tidying unfinished notes when the trial expires.

Illustrative exit example: A test finishes with 24 draft notes, 20 already reviewed and filed, two needing a clinician correction, and two generated from fabricated cases. The manager's exit checklist records which 20 appear in the correct chart, asks clinicians to finish the two live drafts, and deletes the fabricated sessions under the vendor's documented procedure. Only then does the practice disable the account. The four open items matter more than whether the subscription renews at midnight.

Make a second small budget for interruption. If EHR write-back fails for a day, clinicians need a safe manual route and time to reconcile any drafts. For example, if ten notes require four extra minutes of manual transfer and verification, that is 40 minutes of work in the illustrative outage. Confirm whether the vendor's support agreement gives a response time, what staff should do while waiting, and whether the practice can see a transfer audit. An integration failure should not leave an apparently complete note outside the record.

At the closing review, report four figures separately: subscription and one-off fees, staff hours spent setting up and governing the pilot, median minutes to a checked note, and the count of material errors or misplaced records. Avoid compressing these into a single “return on investment” figure while the sample is small. The practice can then decide whether to stop, repeat the test after a specific fix, or move to a limited paid deployment with a new review date.

Compare three purchase paths against the same sample

Path one is a bounded free test with fabricated encounters. It costs no scribe licence on an eligible free plan, but requires staff time to test note quality, privacy terms and manual transfer. It is suitable for learning whether the output format could help. It is not a shortcut to recording patients. Ask whether the trial account retains notes or audio and how they are deleted after the test.

Path two is a paid individual plan for one clinician after approval. This can be useful when a single GP handles a clear documentation bottleneck and the practice can control the manual or supported record transfer. The quote should include the exact billing cadence and any per-note or advanced-action limits. Time 20 eligible encounters and compare with the same GP's baseline. If the product saves only seconds after correction, a second licence is unlikely to solve the underlying note process.

Path three is a practice or connected plan. It may offer team templates, administration, shared controls and EHR write-back, but usually requires a wider agreement and more governance work. Ask for the cost of all active clinician seats, integration, onboarding, support and future additions. One clinician using an integration does not prove that a locum's role, another specialty template or another site behaves identically. Test the least common but high-risk workflows before scaling.

An illustrative four-week comparison gives the owner a decision. Week one measures ten baseline notes and tests fabricated cases. Week two pilots one approved clinician and records correction time. Week three tests an EHR outage, a patient opt-out and a long consultation. Week four calculates net minutes, errors and cost, then reviews with the clinical and privacy leads. If the product fails the wrong-patient or medication checks, the team stops regardless of apparent time saved. If it passes but saves little, the practice can decline the quote without losing useful learning.

Put a renewal reminder in the contract calendar. A monthly equivalent billed annually can produce a larger upfront commitment, while a free trial may start charging at expiry. Confirm whether the price includes support, whether seats can be reassigned, whether unused seats can be removed and how notes are exported at termination. If a model or integration changes during the pilot, repeat the key safety and write-back checks. The resulting decision should state the real price for the proposed workflow, the measured time per completed note and the assurance status, not merely the cheapest number on a pricing page.

Cost and pilot questions for GP practices

Is a free scribe safe to use with real patients?

A free price does not establish clinical or information-governance approval. Check the supplier, data processing terms, audio retention, clinical safety evidence, patient notice and how notes enter the record before using real consultations. A fabricated test can assess note quality while those reviews are completed.

Does the NHS four-month limit make a pilot compliant?

No. The guidance allows a time-limited pilot or proof of concept of up to four months only within its stated assurance route; it does not let a supplier bypass compliance. The organisation still needs the appropriate clinical, information-governance, procurement and local approvals before live use.

Why is a quote needed when a vendor has a public price?

A public seat price may exclude EHR integration, team controls, onboarding, retention options or a practice-wide agreement. Ask for the exact configuration, number of users, billing term and cancellation terms. Compare the whole monthly cost with the time measured during a controlled pilot.

Further reads

• AI Dictation Software for Doctors: Dictation or Ambient Notes? — Decide whether dictation or ambient capture fits.
• AI Scribe Costs Compared: What Small Clinics Pay in 2026 — Compare wider clinic price models.
• Is an AI Scribe Worth It for a Small Private Clinic? — Test whether documentation time actually falls.
• How to Roll Out an AI Scribe Without Losing Patient Trust — Plan patient notice and the opt-out route.
• How Can AI Help GP Practices? Eight Admin Jobs Beyond the Scribe — Compare a scribe with other practice tasks.
• AI Receptionist for a GP Surgery: The 8am Rush and Hand-Offs — A practical overflow test and clinical hand-off plan for a surgery considering an AI phone receptionist.
• AI Solutions for Medical Practices: Build, Buy or Hire Help? — A decision rule for build, buy or hire: by practice size and data sensitivity, with the cost and time of each route and when a consultation pays for itself.
• Best AI Scribe for Paediatrics: What to Check Before You Pick — A paediatric practice's checklist for choosing an AI scribe: speakers, consent, templates and cost, with notes on Heidi, Freed and others.
• Twofold AI Medical Scribe for Clinicians: Trial Checklist and Cost — Twofold's Free, Personal and Group plans as published, what the page says about audio and data, and a trial checklist to run before a small clinic pays.
• AI Medical Scribe for Clinicians: Shared Templates in a Group Practice — Standardise scribe templates across a group practice with a shared core, personal overrides, a sampling audit and one consent script.
• AI Policy for General Practice: A Template for UK Surgeries — A fill-in AI policy for a GP surgery: approved tools, patient data rules, DCB0160 and DPIA sign-off, incident handling and a review cycle.
• AI for Medical Practitioners: An Ahpra Checklist for Using a Scribe — A checklist of what Ahpra's AI guidance expects from a practitioner using a scribe, with consent wording and a four-week pilot plan.
• Automated Onboarding for Doctors: A Practice Manager's AI Checklist — A practice manager's gate-by-gate onboarding checklist for a new doctor, with AI-built trackers, chasers and a 90-day review.
• Best AI Tools for Clinicians in the UK: MHRA Status and Data Location — Jane, Tandem, Heidi and general assistants compared on MHRA status, data location and NHS paperwork, with a buying routine for clinics.
• How Can AI Help Physicians Finish Charting? A Four-Week Trial — A four-week AI scribe trial for a physician group: baseline minutes per note, two clinicians, a consent script, an error log and a go or no-go rule.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Heidi pricing page and plan help articles; Tandem Health pricing page; Accurx Help Centre, Accurx Scribe: An Overview, Scribe Lite and Clinical Safety articles; Jane pricing page and AI Scribe page; Tortus website; NHS England, Guidance on the use of AI-enabled ambient scribing products in health and care settings. Prices are USD list prices where a dollar page was available, otherwise marked quote required. Checked 4 November 2026.