How this is paid for
Studio is paid for by recurring subscriptions to the two paid products that sit alongside it. That's the entire funding model, in one sentence, and it's the only one there will be.
What pays for it
There are exactly two paid subscriptions (see published pricing). Studio Advanced, at $79 per month, adds the advanced clinical work: surgical cases, serial superimposition, and sending a case out to a surgeon. Practice Conductor, at $249 per month, is the practice-management layer: scheduling, billing, insurance, recall, and the rest of a running practice. Every subscribing practice's monthly payment funds Studio's continued development and support, for every practice using Studio, whether they ever subscribe to either one or not.
That's it. There's no second funding source to disclose, because there isn't one.
- Not donations. Nothing to run dry.
- Not ads. Nothing inside a patient chart to sell.
- Not your data. Nothing shared or sold to a third party.
- Not a trial clock. No nag screen waiting to switch on.
This is a better answer than a mission statement, because it's checkable in a way a mission statement isn't. Look at what's actually for sale (two subscriptions, both priced on this site) and what isn't (your attention, your data, your patients' data). If Studio's funding ever needed to change, it would show up as a new charge, a new ad, or a new data-sharing clause somewhere in the product. None of those exist today. Covenant 4 on the pricing page is the standing promise that free security patches are never the thing that gets walked back to fix a funding problem.
A recurring subscription, not a one-time sale
The obvious alternative was to sell the paid tier once, for a single up-front price, and let those purchases carry Studio's ongoing costs. We designed that model in detail and rejected it before selling anything, because it has a weak point that only shows up years later: a one-time payment has to fund support and updates indefinitely, so a slow quarter is a funding gap. The money keeping Studio running in any given month would have to come from sales made in prior months or prior years, with nothing guaranteed to arrive this month at all.
A subscription removes that weak point. Every subscribing practice pays every month, for as long as it keeps subscribing, so the funding base renews continuously rather than depending on a steady stream of new one-time buyers. A slow month for new subscriptions doesn't threaten Studio's funding the way a slow month for one-time sales once would have, because the existing subscriber base keeps paying regardless of that month's new-customer count. The honest version of this argument is not "trust our mission"; it's "look at the mechanism," and the mechanism is more durable now than it was before.
Why it's free, not just discounted
Patient records, photo documentation, cephalometric tracing, CBCT and STL viewing: this is the diagnostic infrastructure a clinician uses to actually look at a patient's anatomy. Pricing it per patient, per provider, or behind a trial clock turns core clinical tooling into a toll booth on care, and that toll should not exist.
So Studio isn't a free trial of something else, and it isn't a stripped-down version of a paid product with the useful parts removed. It's a complete clinical imaging and records program in its own right: unlimited patients, providers, and workstations, on day one and every day after. Studio Advanced and Practice Conductor are genuinely separate subscriptions for practices that want the advanced clinical work or the practice-management layer around it; Studio doesn't need anyone to subscribe to either to keep working.
The funnel, and why it's not hidden
Practices that use Studio every day and come to trust it are the practices most likely to eventually want the surgical tools, or the scheduling and billing layer around it, and subscribe. That's the whole model: free Studio users become subscribers to one or both paid products, and the ones who never subscribe become advocates simply by using and recommending software that worked for years at no cost.
Both outcomes are the plan working. A practice that runs Studio for free indefinitely isn't a missed conversion; it's the free tier doing exactly what covenant 2 on the pricing page promises. You are not the product being monetized here; the two subscriptions, priced at the rates published on this site, are the only things being sold.
The same promise as the paid side, seen from the other side
Both subscriptions carry a published ceiling: their prices are rare to change and, when they do, never rise faster than cumulative inflation since the day a practice joined. It also carries a floor: cancel, or simply stop paying, and the version a practice already has keeps running, with full access to all its data. That's the paid side of this discipline, bounded on both ends and disclosed in advance.
Studio is the same discipline seen from the free side: sustainably funded by a recurring subscription base, not by a source that can dry up or quietly get replaced by something worse. Read both pages and one honest position should come through, not two different stories: what's free here is funded and durable, and what's paid here is price-bounded, published, and never taken hostage if a practice's budget tightens.