What drives the cost is scope, not the industry. An appointment reminder system that texts or calls patients before their visit is a single workflow: one job, one trigger, one channel. A system that also tracks hearing-aid follow-up schedules, flags when batteries or supplies are due for reorder, and drafts referral letters is a multi-part operations system: several workflows sharing patient data that need to stay in sync with each other and with your practice management software. That difference, one task versus an interlocking set of them, is the biggest single driver of cost.
The other driver is build-only versus build-and-operate. Building a workflow and handing it to you to run is one project. Building it and then running it, watching it work, fixing it when a supplier's reorder form changes or your scheduling system updates, and stepping in only when something genuinely needs a person, is a different and ongoing commitment. Referral letters are a good example of where a person still belongs: a system can draft one from visit notes, but a clinician should still read it before it goes out. We map which parts of a workflow like this a system can honestly own, and which parts still need you, before we build anything.
We don't publish a price list, because those two kinds of engagement cost differently, and because what a system is worth depends on what it replaces: staff time spent on manual reminder calls, missed reorders that turn into rushed visits, follow-ups that slip when someone's out sick. Precipitate quotes each engagement on the value the system creates, not by the hour. A sensible way to judge it for your clinic: add up the weekly time your front desk or an audiologist spends on reminders, reorders, and letters, and treat a proposal as worth it if it plainly costs less than that time is worth to you. The way to get a real number is a short conversation about your specific workload.