Tessic vs CareValidate

For a brand launching or scaling a telehealth clinic in 2026, CareValidate is a plausible shortlist entry: HIPAA and SOC 2 badges, a LegitScript partnership, Pro and Enterprise plans, a nationwide clinician and pharmacy network, and a promise of going live in about 30 days. Telehealth platform pricing, though, is written to be skimmed, not added up. So this comparison adds it up, every fee, every tier, every asterisk, and every silence, and sets it next to Tessic. Both platforms supply clinicians, pharmacies, compliance, and a storefront. What separates them is how each company makes its money.

Tessic Health's entire commercial structure fits in a paragraph, which is the point. The Launch plan is $8,000 once for setup. That setup includes the MSO and friendly-PC structure drafted for the client's ownership and the LegitScript application prepared, filed, and managed by Tessic, so the brand launches on providers, pharmacy, and software that already operate under LegitScript certification. Certification itself is never guaranteed, because LegitScript sets its own schedule.

Then $1,000 a month, flat. The fee does not scale with orders, patients, revenue, or product lines, and every treatment vertical is included on every plan. Tessic publishes larger plans, Grow at $2,000 a month with a $15,000 setup and Scale at $4,000 a month with a $25,000 setup, which buy automation, integrations, analytics, and multi-brand operations. None of them adds a variable charge, because there is none to remove. Every plan is month to month: no term, no lock-in, and the client can cancel any time.

Medication is wholesale pass-through at 0% markup. Consultations are a flat $25 per completed consult, a visible line item on every plan in all 50 states. The brand's margin on any product is retail price minus wholesale medication cost minus the $25 consult, and there are no per-patient or per-order fees of any kind.

The client owns the brand, the patients, the records, and the data. Tessic never takes a cut of revenue or patients, and the client owns the billing relationship. Notice what this structure rules out. Tessic cannot hide margin in a medication price, because the markup is zero. It cannot hold a patient base at exit, because the patients and records were the client's the whole time. With that as the baseline, here is how CareValidate charges.

CareValidate charges a Patient Support Fee, billed per order, per month. On the Pro plan the first 250 orders are "included." After that: $5 per order. Past a thousand: $4. Past five thousand: $3.

Every order past 250, every patient the brand's marketing acquired and every refill its retention work earned, generates a recurring fee to CareValidate. The clinic's success is a billable event. On Tessic Health the same number is zero, at every volume.

Payment processing on CareValidate runs through CareValidate's Stripe account at 3.9%. A direct Stripe account of the clinic's own costs roughly 2.9% plus thirty cents. CareValidate's mandatory rate is a full point higher, so approximately one percent of every dollar patients ever pay the brand flows to CareValidate, dressed as a processing rate. On $2.4M of annual revenue, that is about $24,000 a year.

A clinic can use its own Stripe account, but only on Enterprise. On the Pro plan, patient payments and cards on file live inside CareValidate's Stripe account. The right to run the clinic's own payments, the thing that makes a patient base portable, is gated behind the $2,500-a-month jump to the Enterprise tier. On CareValidate, owning the billing relationship is a $30,000-a-year upgrade. On Tessic Health it is the default on every plan: Tessic takes no cut of revenue, and the client owns the billing relationship and the patients.

At five thousand orders a month a clinic pays CareValidate more than thirty-two times Tessic Health's flat Launch fee, for having built a successful clinic. Move that clinic onto Tessic's Grow plan at $2,000 a month and CareValidate still costs more than sixteen times as much, about $365,000 more a year. That is revenue-share economics in a SaaS costume. Splitting the take across three line items does not change what it is.

And the biggest number is still to come, because the biggest number is not published at all.

LegitScript matters: it is what protects a clinic's ad accounts and its payment processing. Tessic Health prepares, files, and manages the client's LegitScript application as part of setup, and the brand launches on providers, pharmacy, and software that already operate under LegitScript certification. There is no monthly line for it.

CareValidate sells it as a subscription: $205 a month, or $2,450 a year, in perpetuity. Three years in, a clinic has paid $7,350 and is still paying. Note how the service is described: CareValidate handles the application and adds the certification to the clinic's website. Whose certification is it? Does it survive if the clinic leaves the platform? Nothing in CareValidate's public materials answers that. Whether the credential that keeps a business advertisable is tethered to the vendor is a question to have answered in writing, not discovered later.

On a related theme: the Enterprise plan softens its $5,000 fee with per-order "credits," but they begin only at 500 orders a month, are applied against the following month's invoice, and at the 500 to 999 tier max out around $2,000 against a $5,000 charge. The clinic pays full freight and chases a partial rebate a month behind. A discount that has to be earned back monthly is a leash, not a discount.