TL;DR
- Cheapest with public pricing: Freed at $39/month (Starter) up to $119/month (Premier). 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
- Cheapest mid-market: Suki Compose at $299/month per provider. Suki Assistant (full ambient) at $399/month per provider.
- Cheapest enterprise-grade: Abridge at roughly $208/month per provider (~$2,500/clinician/year) on multi-clinician contracts. Standalone Abridge is not available.
- Hidden-pricing tier (request quote): DeepScribe (estimated $350–$500/month per provider), athenahealth, Phreesia.
- Most expensive: Nuance DAX Copilot at $369–$830/month per provider plus a $650 first-user setup fee.
Verified pricing — public tiers only
Most AI medical scribe vendors do not publish pricing. The exceptions are Freed and Suki, both of whom list prices on their public websites. Everything else in the table below is either an estimate from clinician-reported contracts or a published enterprise rate that requires a multi-provider commitment. Numbers are accurate as of May 2026; pricing changes without notice — verify with the vendor before committing.
| Vendor | Cheapest tier | Per-provider/month | Public pricing? | Free trial? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freed | Starter | $39 | Yes | 7 days, no card |
| Freed | Core | $79 | Yes | — |
| Freed | Premier | $119 ($104 annual) | Yes | — |
| Abridge | Enterprise (multi-clinician) | ~$208 (~$2,500/yr/clinician) | No (KLAS-reported) | No |
| Suki Compose | Compose only | $299 | Yes | Demo on request |
| Suki Assistant | Full ambient | $399 | Yes | Demo on request |
| DeepScribe | Standard (estimated) | $350–$500 | No | Demo on request |
| Nuance DAX Copilot | Subscription | $369–$830 | No | No |
Heidi Health, Ambience Healthcare, and Augmedix do not publish pricing as of May 2026. Heidi is generally considered competitive with Freed at the solo-practice tier; Ambience and Augmedix are mid-market enterprise. Operator review of each is on the wave-2 list.
Why Freed wins on price for solo practice
Freed is the only ambient AI scribe with a self-serve checkout, public pricing, and a real free trial. The Starter plan at $39/month covers up to 30 visits — fine for a part-time consult practice or a physician dipping a toe in ambient AI. The Core plan at $79/month is unlimited and is what most full-time solo physicians end up on. Premier at $119/month adds team features useful when a 2–4 provider group consolidates billing.
The pricing transparency itself matters. Freed is the only vendor where you can sign up at 8 PM on a Sunday, run an ambient consult on Monday morning, and decide on Wednesday whether to keep paying. Every other vendor on this list requires a sales call, a demo, and (usually) a multi-provider commitment.
When the cheapest tier is the wrong choice
Cheapest does not mean best fit. Three scenarios where the price-leader is the wrong pick:
- You are on Epic and need deep EHR auto-population. Freed integrates with Epic via the public API, but it does not have the embedded-in-Hyperspace experience that Nuance DAX (Microsoft Pal partnership) and Abridge (Epic's first official "Pal") deliver. If your IT department mandates an Epic-native scribe, the cheap-but-not-deep tier is not an option.
- You need specialty-specific note templates across many specialties. Suki has the broadest specialty coverage of mid-market scribes (100+ specialty templates). Freed covers most common specialties but lacks Suki's depth in oncology and ophthalmology workflows.
- You are a large health system standardizing across thousands of clinicians. Abridge's #1 Best in KLAS 2026 ranking, deployment at Mayo / Kaiser / VA, and Epic Pal status make it the safest enterprise pick despite the higher per-provider rate.
Total-cost-of-ownership math
Per-provider/month is a useful number but not the whole story. Three additional cost vectors clinicians underweight:
- Setup and onboarding fees. Nuance DAX charges $650 for the first user and $250 per additional user. Most other scribes have no setup fee. Over the first 12 months on a 3-provider practice, DAX's setup fee alone is roughly $1,150 — equivalent to two months of Freed Premier for one provider.
- Lock-in. Freed and Suki are month-to-month. Most enterprise scribes (Abridge, Nuance DAX, DeepScribe at the volume tier) are annual contracts with auto-renewal. If the AI scribe market shifts in 12 months — and it will — month-to-month flexibility is worth real money.
- Time savings to revenue. KLAS data and published research show ambient AI scribes typically cut documentation time by ~50%, freeing 1–2 patient encounters per day. At an average wRVU revenue of $80–$120 per visit, even a $400/month scribe pays back in 4–6 visits per month — not 4–6 visits more than baseline, just 4–6 visits charged at all. The cheapest scribe is not the highest-ROI scribe if it produces lower-quality notes that require physician rework.
Regulatory note: AI medical scribes generally fall under the FDA Clinical Decision Support carve-out and are not regulated as medical devices, because they transcribe rather than diagnose. The line shifts if the scribe begins autonomous coding or diagnostic suggestions — FDA released guidance in mid-2025 clarifying when an AI scribe crosses into device-regulation territory. For HIPAA, all scribes operate under Business Associate Agreements with the practice or health system.
Verdict
For a solo or small-group practice trying ambient AI for the first time, Freed at $79/month (Core) is the rational starting point: public pricing, real free trial, no contract, no setup fee. If after 60 days the note quality is not where you need it, switch to Suki Compose at $299/month. If you are on Epic in a multi-provider practice and have IT support to onboard, evaluate Abridge or Nuance DAX through their sales teams — both will be 2–4× the price of Freed but offer Epic-native integration that recovers physician time at scale.
The single biggest mistake we see solo physicians make is signing a 12-month contract with the first vendor that gave them a demo. Use Freed's 7-day trial first. Burn an afternoon. Then decide.