Coordinators don't count: why we priced Helose for the briefing, not the seat

Until today, Helose priced per operator seat. The provider was a seat. The coordinator was a seat. The biller was a seat. A three-person FM clinic looking at the published number was looking at three seats.

That changes today. The published pricing:

• 2 weeks free on your real panel for every clinic type. BAA at signup. No credit card to start.
• $99 per month base for functional/integrative medicine and weight-loss clinics. Coordinators and billers included. Add provider seats or volume when you need more.
• $49 per month base for rural and critical-access clinics, with the same add-on model when you scale.
• Multi-site custom, for clinic groups running multiple locations or non-standard EHR footprints.

The number that matters in that list is the second one. Here’s why we landed there.

Per-operator pricing was a stealth multiplier

The published number a buyer compares Helose against is the per-provider number from the rest of the AI clinical-tool market. DeepCura is $129 per provider. Freed is $39 to $119 depending on plan. Heidi runs $40 to $150. Suki sits at $299 to $399 for its enterprise tier. All of those price the prescriber, not the seat count.

When Helose charged per operator and a clinic had a provider, a coordinator, and a biller all using the product, the headline number against the same clinic was two to three times what those other tools were quoting. The math made sense to us internally; it did not make sense to a clinic comparing line items on a spreadsheet.

That was a self-inflicted positioning problem. We were a wedge product wearing enterprise pricing.

The briefing is what the clinic is buying

The thing a clinic pays for is the 90-second pre-visit briefing the physician opens before the room. That’s the moment that earns the seat, and it’s the moment that justifies the line item to the practice administrator.

Coordinators and billers get real value from the portfolio. The coordinator uses it to chase outstanding labs. The biller uses it to pull verbatim chart quotes for an appeal. Those are good uses, and we want them happening.

What we don’t want is to price as if the coordinator’s chair is the product. The product is the physician’s 90 seconds. Price the briefing, not the seat.

Coordinators get value, but charging them was making the headline look wrong

This is the part we got wrong for about six months. We could see, from usage data, that the coordinator and the biller were active users. So we charged for them. The internal logic was straightforward and the external optics were terrible.

A practice administrator looking at a $149 per provider line item makes one decision. The same administrator looking at $447 for a three-seat license, even though it’s the same underlying contract, makes a different decision. The seat-count framing made Helose look like it was being sold the way Epic gets sold. Helose is not what Epic is. Helose is the pre-visit briefing, plus the portfolio underneath it, and the briefing is opened by one person per visit.

The fix is to charge for the role that opens the briefing and let everyone else in the clinic use the product without the meter running.

The free tier replaces the pilot

For most of Helose’s existence, the way into the product was a two-week pilot. The reason for the pilot was simple: PHI was involved, the BAA had to be countersigned, and that conversation was a real wall.

That wall is meaningfully lower in 2026 than it was eighteen months ago. Click-through BAAs on free signup are standard practice in the AI clinical-tool market. Heidi, Doximity, Freed, and Nabla all run click-through BAA on free signup today. The legal posture that used to require a sales call now fits in a checkbox at the bottom of a registration form.

So the free tier replaces the pilot. A solo FM provider can sign up, click the BAA, connect Charm or Cerbo or Practice Better, and run up to 50 briefings a month without talking to us. They get the full portfolio view, the full briefing, FM-calibrated ranges, the works. The only thing they don’t get is multi-provider provisioning and the multi-site features that practices actually need.

If 50 briefings a month is enough, it stays free. If the practice grows past it, the upgrade is one line item at the prevailing per-provider rate.

What this isn’t

This isn’t a price cut for existing customers. Practices already on Helose are on the new pricing as of today, and most of them are paying less than they were last week. That’s intentional.

This also isn’t a freemium product in the sense of “free tier with the actual value paywalled.” The free tier includes the portfolio, the briefing, the FM-calibrated ranges, and the connectors. It’s the same product, capped at a volume that fits a solo provider’s actual visit count.

Pricing as a positioning statement

The version of Helose that charged per operator was telling a story about who the buyer was. It read as enterprise software for a clinic’s quarterly OPEX line, and it priced like one.

The version of Helose that charges per provider, with coordinators and billers free, is telling a different story. It says Helose is a tool the physician opens in the 90 seconds before the room, the practice pays for the physician’s seat, and the rest of the clinic uses the product because that’s what makes the seat work.

Pricing is a positioning statement. This version of the statement is the one we should have made eighteen months ago.

The waitlist is open. Solo providers can start today.