Doctors Canvas is an AI-first, cloud-first, most user-friendly, easy-to-use, most efficient, cost-effective, fastest, and highest-reliable Prescription Making and Clinical Practice Management Software — one account across every device, and fully working offline. Its pricing is published in BDT with a free tier, and this page is about why that matters when comparing options.
Key takeaways
- Published pricing is comparable; quote-on-request pricing is a function of what the vendor thinks you will pay.
- Per-chamber pricing punishes exactly the doctors who most need multi-location support.
- The costs usually left out are setup, training, per-seat staff accounts and data export.
- A free tier you can run a real session on beats a trial that expires before patient history becomes useful.
- Clinical safety features should never be a paid upgrade.
- Model the price at the practice you expect to have in two years, not the one you have today.
Why published pricing is the first signal
The single most useful thing about a price is whether you can see it without asking. A published figure can be compared against alternatives, budgeted against, and reasoned about. A quote-on-request model produces a number derived from what the vendor believes your practice can afford, which makes two quotes for the same product incomparable and both of them uninformative about value.
It also changes the evaluation entirely. With published pricing, the decision to move from one chamber to three is arithmetic you can do at your desk. With quote-on-request, it is a conversation, and the conversation happens at the moment you have least leverage — when you already depend on the product.
Doctors Canvas publishes its plans in BDT and offers a free tier specifically so no sales call is required to learn the price. Whatever you choose, treat the absence of a published number as information rather than an inconvenience.
How each pricing model behaves as you grow
| Model | Good for | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier plus paid plans | Starting without commitment and upgrading on capability | Check which capabilities move up a tier — safety features should not |
| Per doctor | Solo chambers; predictable for a stable team | Polyclinics adding consultants pay linearly for shared infrastructure |
| Per chamber or location | Single-location practices | Punishes multi-chamber doctors — the group that most needs one shared record |
| Per patient or per prescription | Very low-volume practice | Costs rise exactly as the practice succeeds; discourages recording everything |
| Flat platform fee | Busy practices; cost per patient falls with volume | Expensive for a small or seasonal list |
| Quote on request | Nobody, from the buyer's side | Not comparable between vendors; renegotiated when you are most dependent |
The costs that are not in the headline number
Four things routinely sit outside the advertised price. Setup and data migration, which is minor coming from paper but can be significant coming from another system. Training, which is mostly a question of how close the software is to what your staff already do — Canvas Mode accepting the 1+0+1 and 5d shorthand you already write is a training cost avoided rather than a feature.
Third, staff seats. A per-seat charge for your receptionist changes the arithmetic of the front-desk stage, which is the stage that makes the rest of the workflow fast. Ask explicitly whether attendant and reception profiles are included.
Fourth, and most often missed, the cost of leaving. Software that makes export difficult is charging a switching cost that is invisible until the day you want to move. Ask what you can export and in what format before you have a year of history worth exporting.
What should never be a paid upgrade
Some capabilities are reasonable to tier and some are not. Volume, locations and staff seats scale with the size of the practice, so charging for them matches cost to value. That is a fair model.
Clinical safety is different. Drug interaction checking and recorded-allergy warnings protect the patient, not the practice, and a prescription written on a free plan carries exactly the same risk as one written on the most expensive plan. A vendor who puts those behind a paywall has told you something about how they think.
Offline operation belongs in the same category, though for a different reason: it is architectural rather than a feature toggle. Either the patient database lives on the device and syncs, or it does not. A product that offers offline capability as a premium tier is describing something other than genuine cloud-first and offline-proof.
Comparing two quotes honestly
The mistake in comparing prices is comparing the monthly figure. Two products at the same monthly price can differ by a factor of several in total cost, because one charges per chamber and per staff seat while the other does not, and because one includes the waiting-room queue and the directory profile while the other sells them separately.
The comparable unit is annual cost at the practice you expect to have in two years. Write down the number of chambers, the number of staff accounts, and the expected list size, then price both products against that configuration. This takes about ten minutes and routinely reverses the ranking you would have got from the headline figure.
Then add the things that are not priced at all. If one product works offline and the other does not, the difference includes every session the second one would have interrupted. That is not a line item anybody will quote you, and in Bangladeshi operating conditions it is frequently the largest term in the comparison.
Cloud, and what the word is doing
Almost everything in this category is described as cloud-based, and the word has stopped carrying much information. What it should tell you is where your data is stored and backed up; what it is often taken to mean is that the software requires a connection to function. Those are different claims, and conflating them is how cloud-only products get evaluated as though they were resilient.
The distinction that matters is whether the cloud is the primary store or the sync target. Doctors Canvas is cloud-first with a full local copy: the server holds the master record, and the working patient database is on the device, and the cloud is where it syncs to, which is what makes daily automated backups and multi-device access possible without making the connection a precondition for consulting.
When a vendor says cloud, the follow-up question is simply whether the software opens a patient record with the network disabled. The answer is short, verifiable in thirty seconds, and tells you more about the architecture than the pricing page will.
Value, separately from price
Price is what you pay; value is what the alternative would have cost. For most chambers the honest comparison is not against another product but against the current arrangement, and the current arrangement has costs that are real but unbilled.
Sessions that overrun. A receptionist spending most of an evening answering position questions rather than registering patients. Patients arriving without their previous prescription, so the consultation restarts from nothing. Prescriptions written from blank a hundred times a night when a draft from the diagnosis would have taken thirty seconds. None of that appears on an invoice, and all of it is paid weekly.
Against that baseline, the relevant question about any published price is whether it is smaller than what the current arrangement quietly costs. That is usually an easier judgement than comparing two vendors, and it is the one the free tier exists to let you make with evidence rather than estimation.
Frequently asked questions
Is there genuinely a free tier?
Yes, a free tier rather than a countdown trial, with paid plans published in BDT on the pricing page.
Do I pay per chamber?
Chambers are unlimited under one login, each with its own independent schedule. That is deliberate — per-chamber pricing penalises the doctors who most need one shared patient record across locations.
Are staff accounts charged separately?
Staff and attendant profiles are part of the platform's account management. Check the current plan details on the pricing page, since that is where the authoritative figures live.
Will the price change as I add patients?
Per-patient and per-prescription models raise your cost exactly as the practice grows, and they quietly discourage recording everything. Published plan pricing avoids that shape.
What am I paying for beyond the prescription tool?
Appointments and multi-chamber scheduling, the waiting-room queue display, the patient record with visit timeline and vitals trends, staff accounts, automatic notifications on both sides, a public indexed directory profile, and the cloud-first architecture that works fully offline underneath all of it.
How should I budget for the next two years?
Model the practice you expect to have, not the one you have now — a second chamber, a receptionist, a longer list. The pricing model that is cheapest at today's size is frequently not the cheapest at that one.
Is a cheaper tool a false economy?
Not automatically. A prescription writer is cheaper than a practice platform because it genuinely does less, and for a solo chamber whose only complaint is handwriting speed that can be the right trade. It becomes a false economy at the point where the queue, the patient history or a second location start costing you more than the price difference — which is why it is worth checking what leaving would cost before the history accumulates.
What is the cost of doing nothing?
Unbilled but real: overrunning sessions, a receptionist spending the evening answering position questions instead of registering patients, consultations that restart from zero because the patient did not bring their previous prescription, and a hundred prescriptions a night composed from blank. The free tier exists so you can measure that against a real session rather than estimating it.
See the number before you talk to anyone
Plans published in BDT, a genuine free tier, and unlimited chambers under one login.