SimplePractice Just Raised Its Prices 69%. Solo Therapists Got the Bill. (Deep dive #3)
Private equity bundled insurance billing into the base plan. You don't use it. You pay for it anyway. Here's the fix.
TL;DR: The Blueprint at a Glance
The event: SimplePractice raised its Starter plan 69% in March 2025 — from $29/month to $49/month — by bundling telehealth and insurance billing that self-pay therapists have never touched.
The market: ~100,000 solo therapists in private practice in the US. About one in four accepts zero insurance. Those 25,000 therapists just paid for an insurance billing engine they've never opened.
The play: ClearSession — scheduling, SOAP notes, invoicing, client portal. $20/month. Nothing else. Not one line of insurance billing code.
The gap: Every alternative (TheraNest, Therapyzen, TherapyNotes) is $41–$59/month and still bundles the full complexity. Nobody has built the stripped-down version for the therapist who will never, ever bill insurance.
The verdict: GO. The trigger event happened. The market is moving. The positioning is unclaimed.
