When you opened your practice, you expected to pay for an EHR. Maybe $50, $70 a month. Fine. Cost of doing business.
What you didn't expect: upgrading to a higher tier just to sync your calendar. Paying a billing partner a subscription fee and a cut of every reimbursement. Watching prices creep up year after year while the features you actually need stay locked behind the premium plan.
We talked to therapists about this, and the frustration was universal.
One clinician told us she recently upgraded from $69 to $99 a month, a 43% increase, for one feature: two-way Google Calendar sync. "I needed to upgrade the plan to get it, which was like just having two-way calendar integration... that wasn't available in the plan that I had." She still thinks her EHR is worth it. For now. "But I do have concerns about if they continue to raise the prices."
Another described paying her billing partner around $950 a year, plus a percentage of every insurance reimbursement. "That does mean that they take a portion of my fees, which sucks. Totally sucks."
So let's do the math.
You're paying:
- $70–100/month for your EHR
- $950/year for billing support
- A percentage of every claim on top of that
- Maybe a separate payment processor because the built-in one charges too much
That's over $2,000 a year before you've seen a single client. And the features that would actually save you time? Those cost extra.
This is the hidden tax on private practice. Not just the sticker price, but the nickel and diming. The tier upgrades. The percentage cuts. The feeling that every tool is designed to extract more from you, not serve you better.
Building differently
At Harbor, we're building differently. No feature paywalls for basics like calendar sync. No double dipping on billing. Just straightforward pricing for the tools you actually need to run your practice.
Because you shouldn't need a finance degree to figure out what your EHR actually costs.