"Only pay when we deliver a patient" sounds like the buyer-friendly pricing. In dental, it's a trap. This post covers why every reactivation vendor you seriously evaluate will either be on flat SaaS pricing (like us) — or quietly walking you into a third-degree felony under state patient-brokering statutes.
Florida Statute §817.505 (Patient Brokering Act) criminalizes offering, paying, soliciting, or receiving any commission, benefit, bonus, rebate, kickback, or bribe in cash or in kind in return for referring a patient for any goods or services that will be reimbursed in whole or in part by any third-party payor. Most dental insurance is a third-party payor. Most patients reactivated are bringing third-party-reimbursable services back with them. So most per-patient dental reactivation fee structures run straight into §817.505.
Penalty: third-degree felony. Up to 5 years in prison + $5,000 fine per offense. "Per offense" = per patient rebooked.
§817.505 has an explicit safe harbor: a flat fee paid to a marketing organization that isn't tied to patient volume and isn't based on patient compliance with treatment. In practice:
| State | Statute / rule | Same shape? |
|---|---|---|
| California | Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §650 | Yes — bars per-patient referral fees |
| Texas | Tex. Occ. Code §102.001 et seq. | Yes — anti-kickback for healthcare |
| New York | N.Y. Soc. Serv. Law §366-d | Yes — Medicaid + private reach |
| Illinois | 720 ILCS 5/33E-13 | Yes |
| Ohio | Ohio Rev. Code §2921.42 | Yes |
| Georgia | O.C.G.A. §43-1B-7 | Yes |
Short story: there isn't a state where "pay us per rebook" is clearly safe. There are states where nobody's enforced against a dental reactivation vendor specifically — but "not yet enforced" isn't a strategy.
Two reasonable responses:
Because it sounds good to a fatigued practice owner. "You only pay when we deliver" lands well in a 30-minute sales call. The fact that it's legally risky never comes up because the sales deck doesn't have a compliance section.
usdpr. pricing:
Flat per tier. Never per-patient, per-rebook, per-booking, or per-show. Safe harbor language baked into the Service Agreement. Your attorney reviews the BAA and the MSA; neither contains any volume-based fee structure.
Honest admission: flat-fee pricing is worse for the smallest practices in the rare early months when nothing's working. A 1,200-patient practice spending $297/month for 45 days before seeing the first rebook is paying for the product before it delivers value. We offset that with the 14-day free trial + cancel-in-one-click — if the numbers aren't showing up in week 3, cancel. No contract.
Per-patient pricing would smooth that ramp at the cost of legal exposure. We'd rather carry the first 14 days and stay clearly compliant than offer a structure that could put the practice on the wrong side of a state AG.
Keep reading: HIPAA checklist · The $50k/90-day math · Competitor comparison