Ask what physical therapy software costs and you get a range so wide it is useless: somewhere between nothing and several hundred dollars a month. The range is wide because the products are not the same product, and because the price on the page is frequently not the price on the card statement.
This is an attempt at the useful version — how the pricing works, where the extras live, and a method for arriving at your own number rather than a range.
Three pricing models, and who each one punishes
| Model | Suits | Hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Per practitioner | Practices where everyone works similar hours | Anyone with part-timers; a Friday-only clinician costs full price |
| Per active patient | Small or seasonal caseloads | Growing practices — the bill rises exactly when cash is tightest |
| Per feature tier | Anyone whose needs sit neatly inside one tier | Everyone else: the one feature you need lives a tier up |
None of the three is dishonest. What matters is knowing which one you are buying, because the same headline figure means different things depending on the model. A US$39 per-practitioner plan is US$156 a month for a four-person clinic, and a US$39 per-patient-tier plan might be US$39 for the same clinic — or US$120 once you pass the patient cap.
The charges that are not on the pricing page
In rough order of how often they surprise people:
- Per-message SMS. Reminders are frequently billed per message. Two hundred appointments a month at a few cents each is small; it is not zero, and it is not on the pricing page.
- Extra users. Including the receptionist who only takes bookings, and the locum covering two weeks.
- Storage and attachments. Scans, imaging, photographs. Fine for a year, then a tier upgrade.
- Setup or migration fees. Sometimes reasonable, sometimes a way of making the monthly look lower.
- Export charges. Rare, and a significant red flag when present. Paying to get your own records out is not a pricing decision, it is a lock-in strategy.
- Payment processing. If card payments run through the software, there is a percentage on top of the subscription. Compare it with what you pay your current terminal.
- Currency. If the vendor bills in a currency that is not yours, your card issuer applies its rate and often a foreign transaction fee. We bill in US dollars, so this applies to us too.
The month-three number
Month one is the trial, and everything is free or discounted. Month three is the truth: every user you actually added, every patient you actually have, every message you actually send.
Work it out on paper before you sign up. Subscription at your real tier, plus extra users, plus messages at your real appointment volume, plus processing on your real card takings. Then compare products on that figure. It is common for the cheaper headline to lose.
Compare in sessions, not in dollars
The number that decides whether software is expensive is not its price. It is how many of your sessions the subscription costs, and how many sessions it has to save or recover to pay for itself.
If a session is worth US$60 and the plan is US$39, the subscription costs you about two-thirds of one session a month. To break even it has to recover one missed appointment every two months, or save you roughly forty minutes of admin. If it does that, the price is irrelevant. If it does not, it is expensive at any price — including free, because the hours still go somewhere.
Do the sum with your own number. Session fee, divided into the monthly price, equals sessions per month. Under one session: stop arguing about price and choose on how it feels to write a note. Over three sessions: that had better be a very good product.
Our prices, since somebody has to publish theirs
| Physioly plan | Per month | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Free | US$0 | Free forever. First 7 days with no limits at all, then 1 patient with full records, diary and finances. |
| Essential | US$29 | Up to 20 patients. Starting out, or a part-time caseload. |
| Professional | US$39 | Up to 100 patients. A full solo week. |
| Elite | US$65 | Unlimited patients, priority support. |
| Practice Essential | US$95 | Up to 3 practitioners, unlimited patients, a diary each. |
| Practice Pro | US$239 | Up to 10 practitioners, with payouts calculated per practitioner. |
| Practice Elite | US$399 | Up to 20 practitioners. |
Annual billing is ten months for twelve — US$290 instead of US$348 on Essential, US$950 instead of US$1,140 on Practice Essential. We would still take the monthly price for the first couple of months. Two months free is a fair trade for a product you have proven; on day one it is a bet.
There is no per-message charge, because there is no SMS gateway: appointment confirmation works through a link you send patients yourself. No setup fee, no export fee, no charge for the receptionist's login within your plan's practitioner count.
Check the arithmetic yourself
The free plan costs nothing forever and the first seven days have no limits at all. Put a real week in it and see what the number looks like against your own session fee.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.Is a cheaper plan false economy?
Sometimes, and it is worth being specific about when.
A cheaper plan is fine when what it removes is a feature you were never going to use — telehealth you do four times a year, an outcome-measure library when you use three instruments you know by heart. A cheaper plan is false economy when what it removes is export, audit trail, or a second login, because those are the three things whose absence you only discover at the worst possible moment.
Never economise on getting your data out. If export sits behind a higher tier, price that tier as the real price of the product. The alternative is a product you cannot leave, and software you cannot leave gets more expensive over time in ways that are not on any pricing page.
A note for readers in the United States
If your practice bills insurance, most of the cost question is not the subscription at all. It is claims: clearinghouse fees, denial management, eligibility checks, and the staff time around them. Products built for that market are priced accordingly, and comparing them with a US$39 record-and-diary product is comparing two different categories.
Physioly is not built for US insurance billing. There is no clearinghouse connection, no CMS-1500 workflow, no ERA posting. For a cash-pay practice, a mobile or concierge physical therapist, or a cash-based wellness and rehab service, it is a reasonable fit. For an in-network clinic living on third-party reimbursement, it is not, and no price makes it one.
Where Physioly fits, and where it does not
Physioly covers clinical records with a session timeline, an online diary with a waiting list, assessment forms by specialty, pain tracking charted across a course of treatment, session packages, payment and overdue tracking, PDF reports, Excel and CSV import, and a public profile page. Practice plans add a diary per practitioner, shared records, group classes billed per participant and per-practitioner payouts.
What it does not do: insurance or health fund claiming, accounting sync with Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, SMS sending, patient self-booking, payroll, rostering or stock control. There is no native app — it is a progressive web app you can install to the home screen — and support is email and WhatsApp rather than a phone line.
Those are the things that decide whether the price is relevant to you at all. If one of them is a dealbreaker, the cheapest plan on the market is still too expensive.
Questions we get asked
How much does physical therapy software cost per month?
For a solo clinician, roughly US$20 to US$80 a month is the common range, and practice plans scale with the number of clinicians. Physioly publishes US$29, US$39 and US$65 a month for solo physiotherapists and US$95, US$239 and US$399 for practices of up to 3, 10 and 20 practitioners, plus a free plan. Anything much above that range is usually a product built around insurance billing.
Why is physical therapy software priced per practitioner?
Because that is roughly how the vendor’s costs and your revenue both scale. It is predictable, but it punishes part-timers: a clinician who works one day a week costs the same as one who works five. If you have several part-time staff, a per-practitioner price is effectively higher for you than the headline suggests.
What hidden costs should I look for in practice software?
Per-message SMS charges, a fee per extra user, a patient or storage limit that forces a tier upgrade, setup or migration fees, charges for exporting your own data, and payment processing on top of the subscription. Ask for the total of all of these at your expected month-three usage.
Is annual billing worth it for practice management software?
Only after the software has survived a real month. Two months free for a year up front is a fair trade once you know the product works for you; paid on day one it is a bet on a product you have used for a week. Take the monthly price first, switch to annual at renewal.
Is free physiotherapy software good enough?
It depends what is free. A genuinely free tier usually caps patients or features; a free trial expires. Physioly’s free plan is free forever with one patient after an unlimited first week, which is enough to try the system on a real case but not a substitute for a paid plan at full load.