· Independent
Cliniko publishes a per-message reminder price: 10¢. Two messages per appointment is 20¢. We ran that against plan prices at Cliniko, SimplePractice and Jane, and against the value of one recovered visit.
Loistrofi Editorial — Sep 5, 2026 — 7 min read
Cliniko charges 10¢ per SMS message, on top of a subscription that starts at $45/mo for one practitioner. Two messages per appointment — a booking confirmation and a day-before reminder — costs you 20¢. Against almost any visit fee, one recovered no-show a month covers hundreds of texts. The complication is that Cliniko is the only one of these three publishing a per-message rate today.
Two separate units get billed here and they move independently. The subscription is priced by practitioner: Cliniko bands you (1, then 2 to 5, then 6 to 8, and up), SimplePractice's group Plus plan charges for the first practitioner and then again for each additional one, and Jane's Balance plan is limited to one practitioner license and 20 appointments per month. The reminders are priced by message. Open last month's calendar, count completed and cancelled bookings, and multiply by how many texts each one triggers — confirmation, reminder, reschedule link, waitlist offer. A clinic that thinks it sends 300 texts a month usually sends closer to 600. That second number is the one that scales, and it is the one nobody budgets for.
| Vendor and plan | Published price | What that covers | Reminder price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cliniko — 1 practitioner | $45/mo | every Cliniko feature, unlimited admin and reception users | 10¢ per SMS |
| Cliniko — 2 to 5 practitioners | $95/mo | same feature set, up to 5 practitioners | 10¢ per SMS |
| Cliniko — 6 to 8 practitioners | $145/mo | same feature set, up to 8 practitioners | 10¢ per SMS |
| SimplePractice Starter | $24.50/mo for 3 months, then $49 | entry plan | not published |
| SimplePractice Essential | $39.50/mo for 3 months, then $79 | mid plan | not published |
| SimplePractice Plus | $49.50/mo for 3 months, then $99 | first practitioner; extra practitioners from $37, then $74 | not published |
| Jane Balance | $54/mo | one practitioner license, 20 appointments/month | not published |
| Jane Practice | $79/mo | — | not published |
| Jane Thrive | $99/mo | — | not published |
Take a solo practitioner seeing 120 appointments a month. The subscription is $45/mo, or $540 a year. Send a confirmation and a reminder for each booking and that's 240 messages at 10¢, or $24 a month — $288 a year. Your real annual figure is $828, not $540. Cut to one message per appointment and the SMS line halves to $144 a year. Decide which of those two you want before you compare Cliniko's $45 against anyone else's headline, because the difference between one text and two is more than half the price gap between several plans on this page.
Now scale it. A five-practitioner clinic sits in Cliniko's 2-to-5 band at $95/mo, or $1,140 a year. At 600 appointments a month and two messages each, that's 1,200 messages, $120 a month, $1,440 a year. The texts cost more than the software. Total $2,580. That is not an argument against reminders — it's an argument for knowing the number before it appears on a card statement. Cliniko's page states the 10¢ rate and nothing else about it, so confirm on their site whether patient replies are charged, and whether a message longer than a standard SMS counts as one credit or two.
Every SimplePractice plan on the page carries a 50% discount for three months, and the page is explicit that you must begin a paid account within 7 days to claim it. Starter runs $24.50 for three months, then $49: that's $73.50 plus $441, or $514.50 in year one, and $588 in year two. Essential is $118.50 plus $711 — $829.50 in year one against $948 in year two. Budget from the second-year number. The first-year saving on Essential is $118.50, which is roughly one month of the real price.
Group practices should do the multiplication before falling for the $99. Plus is $99/mo for the first practitioner and $74/mo for each additional one, so three practitioners is $247/mo — $2,964 a year, against $2,593.50 in year one with the promo months. Cliniko covers two to five practitioners for $95/mo flat. That is the single widest gap on this page, and it exists before either vendor sends a text. SimplePractice's pricing page, as fetched today, lists add-on prices for Care Aide, Note Taker, ePrescribe and Insurance Navigator, but states no price for SMS or appointment reminders, so we can't tell you whether messages are included or metered.
Jane's Balance plan is $54/mo and capped at one practitioner license and 20 appointments a month — the page describes it as up to 20 invoices. That's $2.70 of plan cost per appointment, and appointment 21 pushes you to Practice at $79/mo, a $25 jump, or $300 a year. Practice is $948 a year and Thrive $1,188. Jane's add-ons are priced per opted-in practitioner — AI Scribe at $15/mo, Group Telehealth at $15/mo, Insurance Billing at $20/mo plus $5 per additional full-time practitioner — so the pattern is that extras are metered per person. The page raises the question "Is SMS functionality available in my region?" but the text we fetched neither answers it nor prices it. Ask before you sign.
The formula is short: monthly SMS spend ÷ what one visit bills = visits you must save per month. The five-practitioner clinic above spends $120 a month on messages. If a visit at your practice bills $95, you need 1.26 recovered visits a month to break even on the texts alone — the second one starts paying down the $95 subscription. The solo practitioner spending $24 a month needs a quarter of one visit. Per appointment, two messages cost 20¢; against a $95 visit that's two-tenths of one percent. Use your own fee, not ours — no vendor page here states a no-show rate or a recovery rate, and neither do we.
- If you have two to five practitioners and you send a lot of texts, pick Cliniko: $95/mo flat covers the whole band, where three practitioners on SimplePractice Plus is $247/mo, and you get a published 10¢ rate you can forecast against.
- If you're solo and want the lowest committed spend, pick Cliniko at $45/mo plus metered messages, because a 120-appointment month lands at $69 all-in — under SimplePractice Essential's $79 revert price and under Jane Practice's $79 before any reminder cost you can't yet see.
- If you see fewer than 20 appointments a month and don't want metered anything, pick Jane Balance at $54/mo, because the cap that makes it cheap is one you won't hit — but move to Practice at $79 the month you cross it rather than getting surprised.
- If the reminder price is the deciding factor and you're weighing SimplePractice or Jane, don't decide yet: neither page publishes one, and a metered rate you learn after signing can be larger than the plan gap you spent a week arguing about.
- Ask Cliniko whether an inbound patient reply is billed as a message at 10¢, and whether a message over the standard SMS length consumes one credit or two — the page states the rate and nothing more.
- Ask SimplePractice, in writing, whether appointment reminders are included on Starter at $49 or metered separately; the pricing page prices Care Aide, Note Taker and ePrescribe but says nothing about SMS.
- Ask Jane whether SMS is available in your region at all, and what it costs, since the page raises the question and the fetched text doesn't answer it.
- Diary the SimplePractice revert date: the discount runs three months, and Starter goes from $24.50 to $49, Essential from $39.50 to $79, Plus from $49.50 to $99 plus $74 per additional practitioner.
- Confirm how each vendor counts a practitioner for billing — part-time, locum, students — because Cliniko's bands and SimplePractice's $74 per additional head both hinge on that definition and neither page defines it in the text we can see.
Buy Cliniko and switch on two messages per appointment. A published 10¢ rate is worth more than a slightly cheaper plan with an unpriced reminder feature, because you can model 10¢ on a spreadsheet today and you cannot model a blank. For a five-practitioner clinic that's $2,580 a year fully loaded, and one or two recovered visits a month covers the message half of it. If you're already committed to SimplePractice or Jane for clinical reasons, keep them — but get the SMS rate in writing before your trial ends, and re-run the break-even with your own visit fee.
Reminders are the rare add-on where the cost is small, variable and directly tied to the thing it prevents. The risk isn't that they fail to pay for themselves. It's that you sign for a plan whose message pricing you never saw.
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 5, 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
