Dental AI buying guides have a problem. They read like brochures. Every one of them opens with the tool that pays them the most and buries the cost, which is backwards for the person who has to sign the check.
So here is the other approach. This is organized by the job the software does, and every price below was read off the vendor’s own pricing page or a third party review that quoted that vendor directly, checked in October and November 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a price, I say so rather than passing along a number I cannot trace. Most of them do not publish one.
That is the first real finding. A review of 40 dental AI vendors found only half publish prices at all. Ask for a price in writing before you sign anything.
If you run a single-location practice, three of the categories below pay back on published prices. The rest are worth understanding before you let a salesperson walk you through a demo.
What dentists are actually buying AI for in 2026
The most common misconception is that dental AI means radiograph diagnosis. It is the loudest part, not the biggest part.
What actually gets purchased is administrative relief: a phone that gets answered while you are with a patient, notes that write themselves, recalls that go out without someone remembering to send them. Clinical AI is where the marketing spend goes, and it is where pricing is least transparent.
Think about the economics. A hygienist chair in a typical single-location practice runs roughly $60 to $90 an hour in loaded cost. An assistant doing the same hours costs materially less but still real money. Every hour a scribe or a receptionist frees up goes straight to the bottom line, and it does not need a new patient to show up for it.
That is the reason AI call answering and AI scribing rank where they do in this list. They are labor substitution with a published price tag. Radiograph detection is a clinical differentiator, and it is worth having, but you should price it separately.
The short version if you only have budget for one thing
Three purchases clear the bar on published prices today. A phone assistant, a clinical scribe, and an automated recall system. Everything else is either cheaper than advertised, bundled into something you already pay for, or priced behind a sales call you should not rush into.
AI phone answering: the cleanest labor win
This is the category where the prices are real, published, and comparable. A missed call in a dental practice is a patient who called you instead of the practice down the road, and no amount of chair time brings them back.
- Dentovox runs three tiers: Overflow at $299 a month, Front Desk at $499, and Revenue at $749 for 1,000 minutes. Annual billing takes 10% off. Overage rates are not published, so ask.
- Dentina starts at $299 a month for Standard Inbound and $399 for Premium Inbound, billed annually per location for up to three providers. Monthly billing prices are not shown and neither are overage fees.
- Peerlogic is $399 a month for Professional and $699 for Premium, with enterprise pricing handled through sales. Overages are not stated.
- Intake.Dental starts much lower at $79.99 a month for Digital Forms and climbs to $999.99 for Practice Autopilot, with multi-office plans reaching $3,749.99 a month. Complete Automation is an add-on at $499.99 a month on top. There is a 14-day trial.
- CallBird AI is $99 a month for Starter with up to 50 calls, $249 for Professional, and $499 for Enterprise with unlimited calls.
- Smith.ai AI Receptionist has a free tier with 25 calls a month, then $3 a call. Pro is $150 for 75 calls at $2 a call, and Enterprise starts at $500 for 300 calls. Important catch: this listing was not marked HIPAA compliant.
Several of the names you will hear most are demo-only. Arini, Callura, Dentalbase, Elva, and Rondah AI all publish no price at all. Arini’s own blog calls it custom and demo-based, and Elva quotes only after a form submission. Third-party price figures exist for some of them, but they are not confirmed by the vendor, and I am not going to repeat them as if they were.
Here is my honest read on this category. You are buying coverage for a window when nobody can answer. The demo will make the voice sound perfect. The question that matters is what happens when the caller asks something outside the script, because the answer to that is the entire product. Ask for the fallback behavior in writing.
AI scribing: priced per provider, and worth reading the seat terms
Ambient clinical documentation is the category with the most published prices and the most confusing seat definitions. Prices are per clinician, and some vendors cap notes per month while others do not.
- Denti.AI has OneStop Clinical at $333 a month billed annually, which is $3,990 a year, or $399 on monthly billing. OneStop Clinical Plus is $499 annually billed or $599 monthly. One location, unlimited users, and no setup fee.
- DeepCura is $129 a month per provider monthly, or $999 a year for the annual plan, with volume discounts that bring three seats to about $125 each. You get 1,000 credits a month and extra credits cost $59 a month.
- OneChart has a free tier at $0 per active user per month with 40 notes, then Plus at $79 and Pro at $125 per active user per month, with enterprise handled through sales.
- Scribeberry runs a trial mode at $0 for three days of unlimited use and then 20 uses a month, Pro at $99 a month, and enterprise from $79 per user per month.
- Freed shows Starter at $59 monthly or $39 on annual billing for one clinician with up to 40 notes a month, and Premier at $119 monthly or $104 annual.
That Freed pricing has a genuine red flag on it. The Core tier lists a monthly rate of $59 and an annual rate of $79, so paying for the year costs more than paying month to month. Either it is a vendor page error or it is a deliberate bait. Either way, get the number in writing before you commit to an annual plan.
Others in the scribe category publish nothing. Avora, Bola AI, and Denti Note all hide pricing, with Denti Note pointing to a sign-up screen. Heidi Health offers a free seat, and their paid seat prices were not readable on the pricing page.
My take: start with one provider, not the whole clinical team. Run it for a month, count how many notes per appointment you actually produce, and compare that against the cap. A $59 tier with a 40-note limit can work out to a very different effective price than the sticker suggests if your hygienists produce more notes than that.
Recall and reactivation: quietly the best payback
Unused chair time is the cheapest capacity to fill. An empty slot from a nine-month recall notice costs you nothing to fill, and there is no marketing budget attached. This is why recall automation tends to have the shortest payback of any dental AI purchase, even though almost nobody writes about it.
- Weave is the reference point here, with communication, patient engagement, and recall built into one platform.
- Intake.Dental covers the front of the funnel rather than the recall cycle, with forms and scheduling starting at $79.99 a month.
Most vendors in this space bundle recall into a broader patient communication platform rather than selling it alone, which is why a clean per-recall price is rare. If a vendor quotes you a single number for “everything,” read the tier list carefully. The comparison across 41 tools found many vendors limited their HIPAA business associate agreement coverage to higher tiers only, which means the cheap plan you are quoted may not be the plan that carries the compliance coverage you need.
Practice management software: the AI is usually already included
This is where most of the budget actually sits, and where the AI marketing gets fuzzy.
Dentrix, the largest practice management platform in North America, runs roughly $137 to $1,599 a month per office in 2026 depending on configuration. The wide range is real. What matters is that Dentrix now bundles clinical AI, instant AI detection, hands-free documentation, and automated x-ray accuracy into its package structure rather than selling them as separate add-ons.
So if you are already on Dentrix, a chunk of the AI you are being pitched may be sitting in the platform you already pay for. Before you sign a separate AI contract, ask your Dentrix representative which of the specific AI features you want are included in your current tier and what the upgrade path costs.
The same logic applies to the practice management competitors. Vendors across the category shipped AI features in 2026 as part of their standard releases. The pricing differentiator has moved to the AI add-ons, and those are the ones with the price tags on them.
Radiograph and imaging AI: the least transparent category
Radiograph detection is genuinely useful, and it is also the category where you are most likely to sign something without knowing the number.
Diagnocat is the one exception. Their blog lists 2D Practice at 129 euros a month and 3D Practice at 249 euros a month, with a third plan priced on request. Note that those are euro figures, and US dollar pricing is not published.
Overjet, Pearl‘s Second Opinion, VELMENI, and VideaHealth all publish no price. VideaHealth in particular is one of the most widely deployed imaging AI brands in the country, and you will need a sales conversation to get a number. Third-party price reports exist. None are confirmed by the vendor.
Overjet and Pearl are the two worth putting in front of a vendor for a quote anyway, not because they are cheaper but because they have the clinical validation to justify a price when one is given. If you want to see how these products behave on your own images rather than a vendor demo, both let a dentist review the flagged findings on a real case before you commit to anything.
I will not repeat unconfirmed numbers, so treat every figure you hear for these tools as an opening bid rather than a price. Two questions worth asking: is the imaging AI priced per provider or per location, and does the price include the required business associate agreement, or is that a higher tier.
What the price pages do not tell you
Across 41 dental AI tools, only half published a price. Of the ones that did, several common gaps showed up repeatedly, and they are worth checking on any quote you receive.
- Does the AI cost extra? Some practice management platforms price the base software low and the AI features as an upgrade. Always ask what each tier includes and whether AI is one of the add-ons.
- Overage charges. Per-minute and per-message fees are the most common hidden cost in the phone answering category. CallBird states its call limits, Dialzara publishes overage at $0.48 down to $0.35 a minute, and several others say nothing at all about overage.
- Setup and implementation fees. Mango Voice explicitly requires a one-time implementation fee and does not publish the amount. Intake.Dental offers a 14-day trial with no credit card, which is the more buyer-friendly version of the same thing.
- Month to month or annual? A meaningful number of vendors only publish their annual price. Dentina and Denti.AI both show annual billing prominently, and the monthly figures are either higher or simply absent.
- Business associate agreement on your tier. This one matters most and gets asked least. Some vendors limit BAA coverage to higher tiers. One receptionist in the review was not marked HIPAA compliant at all.
A realistic budget for a single-location practice
Pulling the lowest defensible price for each category and stacking them gives a realistic starting point for a one-chair-to-three-chair practice doing this in 2026.
Start with AI phone answering in the $79 to $299 range if your main problem is missed calls. Add a scribe for the providers who document the most, at $79 to $129 per provider. Put recall inside a broader patient communication platform you already pay for, or buy it separately at $100 to $300 a month. Total for the three: roughly $300 to $700 a month.
That is the number to hold onto. It is the part of the stack that pays for itself in recovered appointments and freed hours, and every component publishes a price you can check.
Imaging AI is a separate conversation and a separate budget. It pays back differently, through case acceptance and clinical differentiation rather than direct labor substitution. Get a written quote, ask what the per-provider math looks like at your headcount, and be ready to negotiate. Image analysis tools sit in the same relationship to the practice as a perishable supply rather than a fixed overhead, so they belong in a budget line that flexes with production instead of a subscription that does not.
What to ask before you sign
Five questions, in this order. They come from what actually goes wrong in dental software deals.
- Will you sign a business associate agreement on the exact plan we are buying, in writing?
- What are the per-minute, per-message, or per-note overage rates?
- Is there a setup or implementation fee, and how much?
- Is the contract month to month or annual, and is the annual price lower than twelve months of the monthly price?
- Does the AI feature cost extra on top of the base platform we already pay for?
Ask all five in email and get the answers in email. Pricing pages change, vendors change, and a verbal quote from a salesperson is not a price. The single best habit here is to ask for the number in writing and treat any refusal as information.
Bottom line
The good news about dental AI in 2026 is that the labor-saving half of it has become genuinely affordable and genuinely transparent. Phone answering from $79.99, scribing from $79 per provider, and recall inside platforms you may already pay for. The bad news is that the clinically impressive half, the radiograph detection that gets the conference talks, remains priced behind a sales call at nearly every major vendor.
Buy the boring part first. It pays back, you can check its price online, and it will make the harder conversations about imaging AI easier to have later.