The sticker price isn't the price. Calculate your real cost — and your real return.
Per-provider licences, per-SMS usage fees, EMR vendor surcharges, and — the biggest number of all — the staff time spent booking by phone for every patient the tool turns away. For most Ontario clinics the licence is paid back within the first week of each month. Model yours below.
Clinic
$65 /clinician/mo
- All-in: online booking + email & SMS reminders (unlimited for online-booked appointments)
- $0 setup — implementation, configuration, training & support included
- All patients, all languages, same-day rules
- Ontario Health OAB subsidy eligible: OAB licences & setup — we supply the documentation
Regional & OHT programs
Custom
- Coordinated access across clinics — one front door, warm hand-offs
- Usage-based regional pricing proven at 25,000–54,000 appointments/month
- Virtual care (Zoom) integration, Health811 flows, regional reporting
- Multilingual programs — per-language configuration
Campus, pharmacy & white-label
Custom
- Fully branded portals on your domain with single sign-on
- Proven: campus health (Sheridan), 23-location pharmacy chain deployments
- Per-location + transactional pricing available for high-volume programs
Calculate your monthly & 3-year cost savings
Compare Empower vs Ocean, Cortico, Mikata, Pomelo and more — with Ontario's OAB subsidy applied, filtered to vendors that work on your EMR.
Open the OAB savings calculatorWhere booking costs hide
Per-provider licences
Most vendors charge per clinician per month, and online booking often requires a higher licence tier than the base messaging bundle. Ten providers means ten licences.
Usage fees
SMS reminders commonly bill per message on top of the licence — Ocean's is $0.11 per SMS. At 1–2 reminders per appointment, a busy clinic pays hundreds per month in metered fees alone.
Surcharges & increases
Vendor pricing pages note EMR vendors may add surcharges, and list prices have risen repeatedly in recent years. Model the trajectory, not just today's invoice.
The biggest cost is invisible: every patient a booking tool turns away becomes a phone call your staff handle by hand. Industry analyses put a phone booking at roughly 8 minutes of staff time versus under a minute for a self-scheduled one — about $3 of loaded wage per booking, every booking, forever. Low online uptake is the most expensive "feature" a booking tool can have. See how we model it, with sources →
How you're paid changes what online booking is worth.
A recovered appointment slot bills at full fee under fee-for-service. Under FHO capitation you're paid for that patient whether or not they attend — so the slot bills shadow billing only, and the real return moves to protecting your access bonus and growing your roster. Our calculator branches on your payment model. Most don't.
Fee-for-service & FHG
Recovered slots bill at full fee, so no-show recapture is the headline number. Reminders plus easy self-rescheduling turn missed appointments back into billed visits.
FHO+, FHO & FHT
April 2026 changed this materially: the access bonus ended, the blended premium rose to 30%, and time became hourly-billable — so an empty slot now costs roughly four times what it did. See what changed →
CHC & salaried
No billing recapture — the return is clinician and staff time, and reaching the patients an English-first, phone-gated system structurally misses.
No-show reduction studies, phone-versus-online booking time, OHIP and capitation values, and the language ceiling — with the range each default sits inside, and where ours sits in it.
Want the calculator run against your real numbers?
Bring last month's appointment volume to a demo. We'll model it live — including the subsidy and pilot programs you may qualify for.
Book a demo