· Independent
Neither vendor sells telehealth as its own line item today, so the 'extra' you're weighing is a plan-tier difference, not a video fee. Here's the arithmetic on both, and where the integration earns its keep.
Loistrofi Editorial — Sep 3, 2026 — 9 min read
You are probably not paying extra for telehealth as a line item, so stop pricing it that way. Neither pricing page in front of us today sells video as an add-on. Cliniko says every subscription includes every feature, starting at $45/mo for one practitioner. SimplePractice charges $49, $79 or $99 a month by tier, and its published add-ons are ePrescribe and AI note tools — not video.
That reframes your decision. The real question is whether the tier you would land on, or the platform you would switch to, is worth more than the twenty minutes a week you currently burn pasting meeting links into appointment reminders. That is an admin-time question with a dollar figure attached, and you can work it out today.
Both vendors count practitioners — the clinicians who hold a calendar and see clients. Neither page charges by video session, by minute, or by patient. Before you compare anything, write down two numbers: how many people in your practice need a bookable calendar, and how many of those actually run virtual appointments. The second number does not affect your bill on either page, which is the first thing that makes standalone video look expensive by comparison. A per-host video licence usually charges for the host whether that host runs four sessions a month or forty.
Cliniko's page prices in bands, not per head: $45/mo for one practitioner, $95/mo for 2 to 5, $145/mo for 6 to 8, $195/mo for 9 to 12, $295/mo for 13 to 25, and $395/mo for 26 to 200. If you are a three-person clinic you pay the same $95 as a five-person clinic. Adding your fourth and fifth practitioner costs you nothing, and that matters more than any video feature comparison if you are hiring this year.
SimplePractice's Plus tier is spelled out per head: $99/mo for the first practitioner and $74/mo for each additional one. The Starter and Essential tiers are listed at $49 and $79 without a stated seat count on the page we read, so treat those as unpriced for a group until you confirm it directly.
| What you're buying | Price shown today | What it becomes | Separate telehealth charge? |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimplePractice Starter | $24.50/mo for 3 months | $49/mo | None published |
| SimplePractice Essential | $39.50/mo for 3 months | $79/mo | None published |
| SimplePractice Plus, first practitioner | $49.50/mo for 3 months | $99/mo | None published |
| SimplePractice Plus, each extra practitioner | $37/mo for 3 months | $74/mo | None published |
| SimplePractice ePrescribe | $24.50/mo for 3 months, plus $89 setup | $49/mo | Not a video product |
| Cliniko, 1 practitioner | $45/mo | $45/mo | Every feature included |
| Cliniko, 2 to 5 practitioners | $95/mo | $95/mo | Every feature included |
| Cliniko, 6 to 8 practitioners | $145/mo | $145/mo | Every feature included |
The 50% discount runs for three months, and the page attaches a condition: you must begin a paid account within 7 days to claim it. Your free trial otherwise keeps running to 30 days, but if you use the full trial you pay standard pricing from day one. So the cheap headline and the long trial are mutually exclusive. Decide which you want before you start the clock, because a 30-day evaluation costs you roughly $74.50 in forfeited discount on Starter, and $148.50 on Plus.
Run the year-one arithmetic on a solo Essential subscription: $39.50 × 3 months is $118.50, then $79 × 9 months is $711. That is $829.50 for twelve months. Year two, with no promotion, is $79 × 12 = $948. Budget against the second number, not the first.
A three-practitioner group on Plus works out like this. Promotional months cost $49.50 + $37 + $37 = $123.50/mo, so $370.50 for the first quarter. Standard months cost $99 + $74 + $74 = $247/mo, so $2,223 for the remaining nine. Year one lands at $2,593.50. Year two is $247 × 12 = $2,964. That is your real running cost for three clinicians, before any add-on.
Stack those and they outrun the platform. Care Aide across three clinicians is $59 + $49 + $49 = $157/mo, or $1,884 a year — more than half again what the three Plus seats cost. If your reason for choosing an all-in-one is bundled convenience, check which of these you would actually switch on, because the bundle stops well short of the AI tools.
The page states that all subscriptions include every Cliniko feature, 100% free support, unlimited admin users and unlimited reception users. There is no add-on column. The only usage charge listed is SMS credits at 10¢ per message, and 2% of every subscription is donated to charity. There is no promotional rate, which means the price you see is the price in month thirteen. For a two-to-five practitioner clinic that is $95 × 12 = $1,140 a year, flat, with front-desk staff costing nothing extra.
The unlimited reception and admin users line is the one to weigh against SimplePractice's per-practitioner Plus pricing. If your clinic has three clinicians and two front-desk staff who need logins, the band price does not move. Confirm what a non-clinical login costs on any platform before you compare totals, because that single policy difference can be worth more than the entire telehealth question.
We could not read Zoom's published pricing today — the plans page returned no readable figures — so we will not print a number we cannot trace. What we can give you is the calculation to run yourself in five minutes. Open the vendor's pricing page, find the healthcare or compliance-tier plan, and multiply the per-host annual price by the number of clinicians who run virtual sessions. Then add anything the plan charges for a signed business associate agreement, because that is frequently gated to a specific tier rather than the entry plan.
Set that annual figure against the gap between your current platform tier and the one that includes telehealth. If the gap is smaller than the standalone total, built-in wins on price alone. If your practice management software already includes video at your current tier, as Cliniko's all-features-included line implies, standalone video is a pure addition to your bill with no offsetting saving.
The saving is not the video call. It is everything wrapped around it: the link generated on the appointment rather than pasted in by hand, the reminder that carries the correct link for the correct clinician, the client who joins from the same confirmation email they already received, and the session that ends attached to the right chart. A front-desk person managing external meeting links for three clinicians is maintaining a second calendar in their head. That is the cost you are removing, and it scales with your clinician count, not your session count.
Put a number on it. If your admin spends fifteen minutes a day reconciling links, reissuing them to confused clients and fixing double-booked host accounts, that is roughly 65 hours a year. At $22 an hour that is about $1,430 — more than a year of Cliniko at the 2-to-5 band. If your admin spends two minutes a day because you run four telehealth sessions a week, the integration is worth almost nothing and you should pick your platform on other grounds entirely.
If you run fewer than five virtual sessions a week and you already pay for a compliant video account for other purposes, keep the standalone tool and choose your practice software on scheduling and billing, because the integration is saving you minutes a month, not hours.
If you have two to five practitioners all seeing clients virtually and you also need front-desk logins, take Cliniko at $95/mo, because every feature and unlimited reception users are included at that flat band price and your bill does not move when you hire a fourth clinician.
If you are solo, want the lowest committed monthly figure and can decide inside a week, start SimplePractice on Starter at $24.50/mo and accept the $49/mo revert, because $514.50 for year one is the cheapest committed twelve months on either page.
If you know you will want AI notes or ePrescribe within six months, price them in now: Note Taker at $35/mo and ePrescribe at $49/mo plus $89 setup add $1,097 to a full second year on top of your plan, which changes which platform is cheapest.
If you are hiring your sixth practitioner this year, compare Cliniko's jump from $95 to $145/mo against SimplePractice Plus adding $74/mo per head, because the band structure and the per-head structure diverge sharply exactly at that point.
- Ask the vendor in writing which tier includes telehealth and whether a business associate agreement is signed at that tier — neither page we read states this.
- Confirm whether the SimplePractice $49 and $79 tiers permit more than one practitioner, since only the $99 Plus tier publishes a per-additional-practitioner rate of $74.
- Confirm whether Cliniko's band prices are the total for the band or per practitioner within it; the page presents them as single monthly figures but does not say the word 'total'.
- Ask what a non-clinical login costs on each platform, then recount your reception and billing staff before you compare annual totals.
- Check the session limits on any built-in video: participant cap, session length and whether group sessions are supported. Neither pricing page addresses this.
- Ask whether annual prepayment carries a discount. Both pages we read quote monthly figures only.
For a clinic of two to five practitioners doing regular virtual work, we would take Cliniko at $95/mo and not buy a separate video subscription at all — $1,140 a year with every feature and unlimited reception logins is hard to beat once you stop treating telehealth as a product and start treating it as a scheduling feature. For a solo clinician, we would start SimplePractice on Starter inside the seven-day window, run the year at $514.50, and add nothing. We would not pay for standalone compliant video unless the vendor confirms in writing that its built-in room cannot do what you need.
The one scenario where we would pay twice: high-volume group sessions, or any workflow where you need recording, breakout rooms or third-party interpreters joining. Confirm those requirements first, because they are the only things on this list that a purpose-built video platform reliably does better, and neither pricing page tells you whether the built-in option handles them.
Loistrofi does not take vendor briefings or speak to sales teams. Every figure here comes from a page the vendor publishes itself, checked on Sep 3, 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
