the money question
What a dental front desk actually costs
A single-location practice has one front desk, and it is one overloaded person. When emails sit unanswered and the recall list goes untouched for a year, the question is what to buy. Here is what each option costs, and what each one actually does.
More front-desk hours
$40,000–80,000 a year, fully loaded
The honest fix, and the expensive one. A full-time coordinator costs $40,000–80,000 a year once wages, payroll taxes and benefits are counted, and the role turns over often enough that you re-train it every couple of years.
The hours you buy are also the hours you have. Cover until 5pm on a Friday does nothing for the new-patient enquiry that arrived at 7pm, and a queue of calls and emails on Monday morning swallows the recall list again.
A patient-communication suite
$100–400 a month
These platforms are good senders. They put appointment reminders and recall campaigns on a schedule, and for a practice that sends nothing today, that alone fills chairs.
What they do not do is answer. A patient who replies with "what does a crown cost, and do you take my insurance" gets a template or a nudge to call. The question lands back on the desk the tool was bought to relieve.
A voice receptionist service
$200–800 a month
Phone-first services answer calls with a synthetic voice and handle a real share of routine ones. They are also the heaviest option to adopt: a telecom integration, a connection to the practice management system, and a leap of faith that the voice will not embarrass the practice with a patient.
They leave the written channel exactly where it was. The contact form and the info@ inbox still wait for someone to open them.
The written front desk
$249 a month, per location
Marine Fruit runs the written half of the front desk completely: a booking page with your real availability, an inbox where every patient email is read and answered in your own voice, reminders, recall, balance reminders, and one morning digest of what was booked, asked, and needs a human.
There is nothing to install and no phone system to touch. The worst failure mode is a draft you did not like.
How to read these numbers
A coordinator costs more per year than every software option on this page combined, and the software options differ in what they cover. A suite covers sending. A voice service covers the phone. The written channel — the contact form, the info@ inbox, the reply to a reminder — is where an increasing share of patients start, and it is the part every other option leaves unmanned.
Measure the spend the way the practice measures everything else: in filled chairs. A recall sequence that reads like a letter from the dentist, sent to patients who are fourteen months overdue, pays for a flat monthly plan many times over.
What $249 a month includes
One plan, per practice location: the booking page, the answered inbox, reminders before every appointment, recall for patients overdue, balance reminders, and the morning digest. No tiers, no trial, no usage billing, no negotiation.
The details, and the plan itself, are on the Marine Fruit front page.
Marine Fruit is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is why this page can stay current with what the plan actually includes.