Clinic Credits Cost Calculator — What Patient Texting Actually Costs

How many texts will my clinic send, and will it cost extra?

Your first month comes with $100 of message credits, whichever plan you are on. After that each plan carries its own monthly credit — $25 on TDC Essential, $50 on TDC Enhanced, and unlimited messaging on TDC Complete. Your texts, emails and calls come out of that balance. Put your real numbers in below and you will see exactly what you use, whether you run out, and what the extra would cost — before you ever get a bill.

Treat this as a close guess, not a quote. It is built on what real TrustDrivenCare clinics actually send, so it will get you near the right number — but it will never match your invoice to the cent.

The mobile networks set their own fees, and those fees differ by carrier, by message, and by where your patients are: state to state across the US, again across Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands and the other US territories, and again in Canada. None of that is in our control and it changes over time.

It also cannot see how you will actually use the platform. Message length, emojis and images, call recording and transcription, AI features and premium workflow actions all draw on the same balance and are not modelled below. Use this to plan and budget, and expect your real bill to land near these figures rather than exactly on them.

Your plan

Your clinic

Appointments a week

All providers, all locations.

New patients a week

First-timers get a welcome series.

Total patients

Everyone in your database.

Phone calls a day

In and out, on your TDC number.

What else lands on your bill

Every text your clinic sends, and what it costs

Turned on	What goes out	Texts a month	Cost

Every one of these is switched on in your account by default. Untick any you would not use — but read what it costs you before you do.

What else your credits pay for

Longer and richer messages cost more

You are not charged per message, you are charged per message credit, and a message can use up several. A plain text is billed in 160-character parts, so a long message costs two or three times a short one. What is in the message matters just as much:

Emojis drop the limit from 160 characters to 70, so one smiley can turn a single text into two or three.
Images and GIFs are sent as MMS, billed at about $0.02 each instead of $0.0079 — several times the price of a plain text.
Merge fields expand at send time, so a message that looks short in the editor can go out long.

Keeping automated messages short and plain is the single easiest way to spend less.

Calls cost in both directions

Every minute is charged whether the patient rang you or you rang them — inbound is cheaper than outbound, but neither is free. On top of the minutes:

IVR calls — the "press 1 for appointments" menus — cost more than a plain call.
Recording calls carries a storage charge every month, for as long as you keep the recordings.
Transcriptions are charged separately again.

Automations and AI draw on the same balance

Your wallet is not only for messages. Premium workflow actions are billed per run, and that includes webhooks, pushing data to Google Sheets, sending messages to Slack or ClickUp, AI agents and AI actions, and ChatGPT steps inside a workflow. So does AI content creation and other AI use, such as building funnels or summarising conversations.

None of it is large on its own, but it comes out of the same credits as your texts. This calculator does not attempt to price any of it — if you lean on AI and premium actions heavily, budget above what you see here.

Same clinic, every plan

Plan	Plan price	Credits used	Extra	Total a month

These are your ongoing months, once the first month's $100 of credits is behind you. Texts, calls and emails cost exactly the same on every plan — what changes is how much credit the plan includes before you start paying extra. TDC Complete includes unlimited messaging — texts, emails and calls are never charged against your credits and never billed as extra. Credits used includes the monthly carrier fee for keeping your number registered.

See the numbers behind this — change any of them

Reminder texts per appointment Visits that don't rebook (%) Visits asked for a review (%) Patients you win back each month (%) Replies you get per text sent Average call length (minutes) Emails you send per appointment What your phone number costs a month

These defaults come from what real TrustDrivenCare clinics actually send. The automations that come switched on in your account are: appointment reminders a day and an hour before, a four-message welcome series for first-timers, a nudge to rebook three days after a visit if nothing is booked, a Google review request, a referral ask 35 days after someone reviews you, a birthday message, a win-back text after 90 quiet days, and an instant reply to any call you miss. Nothing is emailed automatically, so emails start at zero — raise it if your team emails patients by hand. SMS Carrier Fees — what the mobile networks charge on top of every text — rise and fall with how much you send, so they move with the numbers you put in above. Across TrustDrivenCare clinics they run about a cent per text.