Doctor commission and revenue-share models in clinic software mean the platform earns a percentage or a per-appointment fee from the clinic's consultations, instead of a fixed licence price. The main variants are booking-marketplace commissions, per-appointment fees, and revenue share on collections. Each looks cheap at low volume and expensive at scale.
This is not a hit piece on any model. Commission pricing solved a real problem: it let small clinics start without an upfront licence, and it aligned the platform's income with the clinic's. But the model behaves very differently at 100 appointments a month than at 1,000, and most clinics sign at 100. This article maps the models neutrally, works the math at scale, and is explicit about where a commission is worth paying.
Take a busy multi-doctor OPD clinic: 1,000 appointments a month, average consultation fee ₹500, so ₹5,00,000 in monthly consultation collections. The commission rates below are illustrative round numbers chosen to show the mechanics, not any specific vendor's current rate card.
| Model | Illustrative rate | Monthly cost | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace commission on sourced bookings | 10% of fee on 300 marketplace bookings | ₹15,000 | ₹1,80,000 |
| Per-appointment fee | ₹20 per appointment, all 1,000 | ₹20,000 | ₹2,40,000 |
| Revenue share on collections | 5% of ₹5,00,000 collected | ₹25,000 | ₹3,00,000 |
| Flat annual fee (CuraVerto Pro tier) | ₹24,999 per year, unlimited doctors | About ₹2,083 | ₹24,999 |
The pattern is the point, not the exact rates. At this volume, every usage-linked model costs a multiple of a flat licence, and the gap widens as the clinic grows. CuraVerto's Pro tier at ₹24,999 per year works out to roughly ₹2 per appointment for a clinic booking 1,000 appointments a month, and that per-appointment figure keeps falling as volume rises. Under a percentage model the per-appointment cost never falls; it is the same slice of every fee, forever.
There is a second-order effect worth naming: a revenue share also taxes your pricing decisions. If the clinic raises its consultation fee, the platform's take rises automatically. Under a flat fee, a fee revision belongs entirely to the clinic.
Honestly: sometimes. A new clinic with empty slots and no local reputation has a patient-acquisition problem, and a marketplace that fills those slots is doing real work. Paying a commission on a first visit from a patient who would never have found the clinic otherwise is a marketing cost, and often a reasonable one. Judge it the way you would judge any marketing spend: cost per genuinely new patient, against what the same money would buy elsewhere.
The model stops earning its keep when it starts charging for patients the clinic already has. A patient who visited twice, saved the doctor's profile, and rebooks through the app out of convenience is not an acquisition; routing that repeat visit through a commission is a silent tax on the clinic's own follow-up care. Since OPD practices live on repeat visits and follow-ups, the share of commissioned bookings that are actually repeats tends to grow every year the clinic stays on the platform.
The practical middle path many clinics settle on: use a marketplace deliberately for discovery, and move booking for existing patients onto a channel the clinic owns. CuraVerto's WhatsApp booking bot exists for exactly this, letting patients book directly with the clinic on WhatsApp, with utility template messages metered at ₹0.15 per message and replies inside the 24-hour service window free.
Practo is the name most Indian clinic owners associate with this space, so it deserves a factual note. CuraVerto's published competitor comparison lists a revenue share cut as the trade-off associated with Practo Ray, set against CuraVerto's unlimited appointments under a flat annual fee. CuraVerto publishes its own flat rates of ₹9,999, ₹24,999, and ₹49,999 per year, excluding GST, so at least one side of the comparison can be checked against listed numbers. Practo Ray's plan pricing is not publicly listed and is disclosed after a demo call, so clinics evaluating it should ask directly what percentage or fee applies, to which bookings, and whether repeat visits from existing patients are commissioned the same as new ones.
Those three questions, asked of any platform, will surface the true cost of a commission model faster than any comparison article can.
One clarification, because the search term is ambiguous: doctor commission also refers to what a clinic owes its own associate and visiting doctors, which is an internal payout problem, not a platform fee. Clinics that compute these payouts on spreadsheets know the month-end ritual of disputed totals and missing procedure splits. CuraVerto includes a doctor commission engine that automates these internal payouts, with per-consultation rates, percentage splits on procedures, and configurable incentive thresholds per doctor, and the full feature depth is covered on the billing solutions page linked below.
The distinction matters when evaluating software: you want a system that calculates commissions you owe your doctors, and you may or may not want a platform that charges commissions on your patients. They are opposite sides of the same word.
For clinics that conclude a flat fee suits them better: CuraVerto charges a flat annual fee per tier, excluding GST, with no commission on consultations and no per-doctor fee, so the software bill is identical in a record month and a quiet one.
CuraVerto charges a flat annual fee with no commission on consultations and no per-doctor fee. Compare the two models line by line, including what happens to your cost as appointment volume grows.