SimplePractice Pricing In 2026: What It Really Costs

What SimplePractice Costs in 2026

If you run a private-pay therapy practice, you've probably opened a SimplePractice invoice in 2026 and done a double take. The plan you remember signing up for costs more than it used to, and the AI features everyone is talking about sit behind a separate line item. You're not imagining it — and you're not alone in re-evaluating.

This post is the honest, sourced answer to a simple question: what does SimplePractice actually cost in 2026? Not the sticker price on the homepage — the real, all-in number once you add the parts most therapists actually use. Every SimplePractice price below comes from SimplePractice's own pricing or support pages, with the date we verified it.

It's not a hit piece. SimplePractice is a capable, mature platform, and for some practices it's the right tool. But "SimplePractice pricing 2026" is a fair thing to research before a renewal, and the math is more interesting than the three numbers on the marketing page.

The 2026 Plan Tiers

Here are SimplePractice's current published plans (per clinician, monthly billing):

Plan	Price (2026)	Who it targets
Starter	$49/month	Solo clinicians who want the basics
Essential	$79/month	Most solo therapists (adds reminders, Wiley planners)
Plus	$99/month	Group practices, advanced features

Source: SimplePractice pricing page, accessed June 2026.

SimplePractice also runs a promotion on its pricing page: start a paid plan within the first 7 days of the free trial and get 50% off for 3 months (Starter $24.50, Essential $39.50, Plus $49.50 for that window), after which standard pricing applies. The 30-day free trial requires no credit card (SimplePractice pricing page, June 2026). It's a real discount — just a temporary one. Plan your budget around the standard price, because that's what you pay from month four onward.

What Each Tier Leaves Out

The gap between Starter and Essential matters more than $30. On the Starter plan, appointment reminders are limited to telehealth appointments only — full client reminders are an Essential-and-Plus feature. Starter also leaves out Wiley Treatment Planners, secure client messaging, and a client waitlist (Comparing SimplePractice features by plan, June 2026).

For most solo therapists, no-show reminders aren't optional — a single missed session can cost more than the plan upgrade. That's why most solo practitioners land on Essential at $79/month, not the headline $49 Starter. When you compare SimplePractice to anything else, compare from $79, not $49.

The 2025 Reprice Most Therapists Still Feel

The reason the 2026 number feels high is a change that landed in March 2025. According to third-party reporting from SteadyPractice and Oli Health, SimplePractice raised the Starter plan from $29 to $49 a month — a roughly 69% increase in a single step — with about a month's advance notice before it took effect.

We're labeling the $29-to-$49 jump as widely reported by third parties, because that's what it is. What we can confirm directly is the destination: SimplePractice's own pricing page lists $49 for Starter today (SimplePractice pricing page, June 2026). SimplePractice also folded integrated 1:1 telehealth into Starter, which softens the increase for therapists who needed video. For a cash-pay solo therapist who already had telehealth handled, the bundle was a smaller consolation than the price.

So to be precise about the calendar: there is no separate 2026 dollar increase that we could source. 2026 carries the standing price from the 2025 reprice — plus one genuinely new 2026 development we'll cover below.

The Add-Ons That Aren't in the Sticker Price

The three plan prices are the start of the cost stack, not the end. Here's what sits outside them.

AI Note Taker — $35/clinician/month

SimplePractice's AI Note Taker is an optional add-on at $35/month per clinician, available on every plan, with a 30-day trial (SimplePractice Note Taker FAQs, June 2026). If AI documentation is part of why you want a modern EHR, this is the number that reshapes your bill — it's added on top of whatever plan you're on.

Additional Clinicians — Plus Only, $74 Each

You can only add clinicians on the Plus plan, and each one costs $74/month for a 2-5 clinician practice (dropping to $72 for 6-15 and $69 for 16+) (SimplePractice subscription plan and pricing FAQs, June 2026). Practice managers are billed separately at $39/month each.

ePrescribe — $49/month + $89 Setup

If you prescribe, ePrescribe is $49/month per clinician plus a one-time, non-refundable $89 setup fee per clinician (Adding ePrescribe to your account, June 2026). Most talk therapists won't need this; psychiatric and prescribing clinicians should add it to the math.

The Annual CPT-Code Fee — ~$20/clinician/year

There's a small annual line item that's easy to miss: an AMA CPT-code fee of about $20 per clinician per year ($18.50 AMA royalty + $1.50 processing). It applies once per year to every paid clinician on the account (SimplePractice AMA fee FAQs, June 2026).

Card Processing — 3.15% + $0.30 per Transaction

SimplePractice processes card payments through its Stripe integration at 3.15% + $0.30 per successful transaction (Processing online payments, June 2026). This is where the math gets real for private-pay practices that collect most fees by card — so let's do it carefully.

The Honest Cost-Stack Math

Let's build a worked example for a typical solo private-pay therapist. These figures are a fictional, illustrative composite — change them to fit your own practice.

Subscription + AI:

• Essential plan: $79/month
• AI Note Taker: +$35/month
• CPT-code fee: ~$20/year ≈ $1.67/month
• Subtotal: about $116/month before a single card is swiped.

Card processing (illustrative):
Say you see 25 sessions a week at $175 each. Annualized and averaged, that's roughly $18,958/month collected. At 3.15% + $0.30 per transaction, processing runs about $630/month.

Here's the honest part, and it's important: that $630 is not a SimplePractice penalty or a "savings" you'd recover by switching. Card processing is a real cost on any platform that accepts cards. Every EHR that takes Stripe, Square, or a similar processor charges a percentage. The fair comparison between two EHRs is the subscription + AI add-on stack, plus only the incremental difference in card markup — not the entire processing fee. We won't tell you switching "saves $630 a month in processing," because that math is wrong, and you'd notice the first time your new processor's statement arrived.

Two-clinician example:
A two-person practice has to be on Plus. That's $99 + $74 = $173/month for two seats before add-ons. Turn on AI Note Taker for both clinicians and you add 2 × $35 = $70, bringing the subscription to $243/month before any card fees or the annual CPT fee.

The takeaway isn't that SimplePractice is unreasonable. It's that the real number is plan + AI + extra seats + card processing, and that number is meaningfully higher than the price on the homepage.

What's Changing in 2026: AI Transcript Retention

Here's the actual 2026 news. Starting June 16, 2026, after the AI Note Taker review period ends, SimplePractice may retain a de-identified, de-coupled version of the session transcript to help improve Note Taker and other AI-powered features (SimplePractice Transcript retention FAQs, June 2026).

Read that FAQ closely, because the details matter and the headlines won't capture them. Per SimplePractice's own documentation:

• SimplePractice states it is not training an AI model on the retained transcript data.
• Retention is optional and can be managed at the clinician, client, or session level.
• The default depends on when you started. If you used Note Taker before June 16, 2026, you're opted out by default — no action needed. If you enable Note Taker on or after June 16, 2026, you're opted in by default and can opt out at any time.
• The transcript is available to the clinician for up to 7 days, or until the note is signed and locked, whichever comes first.

We're not going to tell you SimplePractice "sells your data" or "trains AI on your sessions" — their FAQ says the opposite on both counts, and overstating it would be dishonest. What's fair to say is this: there's now a data-handling decision to make that didn't exist before, it's worth understanding before June 16, and — especially if you're a newer Note Taker user who'll be opted in by default — you should confirm your own retention preference rather than assume it. For some clinicians that's a non-issue; for others, any retention of session-derived content is a line they'd rather not approach. Both reactions are reasonable. Read the source, then decide.

A Lower-Complexity Path for Private-Pay Therapists

If you're researching SimplePractice's 2026 cost because the stack got complicated, here's a simpler option built specifically for private-pay behavioral health: CoralEHR.

The pricing is flatter on purpose:

• From $29/month (Starter) for a complete, AI-free EHR — notes, scheduling, telehealth, client portal, and payments.
• $79/month (Professional) includes AI documentation — note drafting, treatment plans, and a form builder — with no separate $35/clinician AI add-on and no second subscription.
• Every plan includes a 30-day free trial with no credit card and a price that doesn't change underneath you.

On the AI, here's exactly what it does and doesn't do. CoralEHR's AI drafts notes, treatment plans, and assessment summaries as suggestions — the clinician edits them and signs them. AI drafts stay in a preliminary state until a licensed clinician signs; nothing auto-signs, auto-diagnoses, or auto-decides anywhere in the product. No session recording is required: drafts are generated from your typed scratchpad notes and structured chart fields, not from audio. And your patient data is not used to train any model — CoralEHR runs on Anthropic's first-party Claude API under a Business Associate Agreement and commercial terms that exclude training on your data. CoralEHR is HIPAA-compliant and signs Business Associate Agreements (you can read and download the BAA before you ever enter PHI). On certifications, CoralEHR is HIPAA-compliant today and is pursuing SOC 2 Type II and HITRUST — we'd rather tell you what's in progress than imply a badge we don't yet hold.

Be honest about the trade-off, though. If you bill insurance — claims submission, ERA/EOB processing, eligibility checks — CoralEHR is not for you, and SimplePractice or TherapyNotes may genuinely be the better fit. CoralEHR has no insurance-claims module by design; it's built for cash-pay practices that don't want that machinery. Choose the tool that matches how you actually get paid. For a feature-by-feature breakdown, see the full CoralEHR vs SimplePractice comparison, and for a wider shortlist read our guide to SimplePractice alternatives for private-pay therapy. If compliance is your starting point, our HIPAA guide for private-practice therapists covers the basics.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 SimplePractice sticker is $49 / $79 / $99, but the number you actually pay is subscription + AI add-on + card fees + extra seats — and most solo therapists start from $79 Essential, not $49 Starter. The big price jump was March 2025 (Starter $29 → $49, roughly +69%, widely reported by third parties), and the genuinely new 2026 change is the June 16, 2026 AI transcript-retention policy — optional, opt-out by default for existing Note Taker users but opt-in by default for anyone who enables it on or after June 16, and worth reading before it takes effect.

If that stack is more complexity than your private-pay practice needs, there's a flatter path with AI documentation included.

Try a simpler, AI-included EHR built for private-pay therapy. Start a free 30-day CoralEHR trial — no credit card, AI documentation included on Professional, and a price that doesn't change underneath you. Start your free trial →

This article is clinician and practice-management education, current as of June 2026 — not legal, financial, or clinical advice. Vendor pricing and policies change; verify every figure on the vendor's own current pages before you make a purchasing decision.