Most AI scribes are priced per seat: a flat monthly fee per clinician, sometimes with a cap on visits, sometimes with features held back for a higher tier. It is simple to read and hard to reason about. You cannot tell what a visit costs, why the premium tier costs what it does, or what happens in a heavy month.
Terra is priced differently. Every plan includes every product, and each plan comes with a monthly allowance of credits. One credit is $0.001 of model usage. This post explains the arithmetic, so you can check our numbers yourself.
The plans
| Plan | Price | Credits each month |
|---|---|---|
| Terra | $50 per month | 20,000 |
| Pro | $99 per month | 40,000 |
| Groups | $89 per clinician per month, for 3 to 100 clinicians | 35,000 per clinician |
Every plan includes the AI Scribe, Live Transcription, the Context Engine, the Coding Assistant, Record Chat, Clinical Evidence, and Templates and Style. Groups adds what a clinic needs on top: assistants with their own role, co-signatures, shared templates and per-clinician spending limits on one bill.
If a month runs long, top-ups add credits once, on any plan: $10 for 5,000, $25 for 12,500 or $50 for 25,000. Top-up credits do not expire, and nothing recharges automatically.
What a credit pays for
A credit pays for the work that runs on an AI or speech model:
- transcribing audio, by the minute,
- drafting a note,
- suggesting codes,
- answering a question from the record,
- researching a question in the literature.
Everything else is free to use as much as you like: typing and editing, signing and amending, exporting, searching the record literally, manual coding, templates and text shortcuts. If you run out of credits, you can still finish and sign every note by hand.
The arithmetic for one visit
Here is a typical 20-minute visit, using the published prices of the models Terra uses by default.
Transcription. Recorded-file transcription costs $0.0045 per audio minute, which is 4.5 credits. Twenty minutes is about 90 credits.
The note. A draft reads the transcript, the context and the chart sources you allow, and writes the note in your template. A typical draft is about 8,000 tokens in and 3,500 tokens out, including the model's reasoning. At $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, that is $0.016 plus $0.035, or about 51 credits.
Total. About 140 credits for a recorded visit with a drafted note.
That makes the Terra plan's 20,000 credits roughly 140 such visits a month, and Pro's 40,000 roughly 280. A note you dictate or type without transcription uses only the drafting credits, about 50.
Live transcription is billed differently because our speech provider bills streaming by session time, at 12 credits a minute including the medical vocabulary and speaker separation. A 20-minute live session is about 240 credits, and the session is settled to the second, so stopping early costs less.
These are estimates, and your visits will differ. Long, multi-problem visits cost more; short follow-ups cost less. That is the point of showing the arithmetic: you can see where the credits go.
You see the estimate before it runs
Before a draft, a code suggestion run, an evidence search or a live session, Terra shows an estimate and reserves that many credits. When the work finishes, the provider reports actual usage, Terra charges exactly that, and returns the rest of the reservation immediately.
Two details matter here.
- No double charges. If a provider's response is unclear, for example the connection dropped before it confirmed, Terra does not guess and does not retry automatically. The reservation is held until a practice manager reconciles it.
- Honest about failures. If a draft is discarded because the chart changed while it ran, the usage the provider already spent is still charged, because the work was done. If a request is rejected before any work happens, nothing is charged.
Why credits instead of seats
We chose credits for three reasons.
It matches the real cost. Terra's main variable cost is model usage. Pricing in credits means a clinician with short visits is not subsidising one with long ones, and nobody hits an arbitrary visit cap.
It keeps every feature on every plan. We did not want to hold coding suggestions or evidence research back for a higher tier. A solo clinician should have the same tools as a group. The plans differ by allowance and by team features, not by which products you can open.
It is checkable. A seat price asks you to trust that it is fair. A credit price shows you the inputs. If model prices fall, the arithmetic shows it.
Groups and spending limits
In a Groups practice, every clinician's credits pool into one practice allowance. Managers can set a monthly limit for each clinician, so one very busy schedule cannot use the whole practice's allowance. Limits only cap; they never add credits. Each clinician can see their own usage, and managers can see everyone's, without any chart content.
The trial
Every practice can try Terra free for seven days with no card: 15 drafted notes, 200 minutes of recorded audio, 50 document pages and 3,000 credits. The trial is for synthetic patients, so you can run a complete visit before using Terra with real ones. When you are ready, choose a plan and sign the BAA.
What we will not do
We will not sell your data to cover a lower price, run ads, or quietly change what a credit buys. If our prices change, we will tell you at least 30 days before your next renewal, and the pricing page will show the new arithmetic.
Questions about pricing for your practice? Write to hello@useterra.si.
