"£44 a month" is designed to feel small. The number that actually decides anything is how many sessions a year you work to pay for it — after the tax relief you get for a business expense. Here is every tool in our ranking, converted.
Everything below is worked at a £60 session fee. Your fee, your caseload and your tax band all move the answer — and the fastest way to see yours is to spend a minute on the calculator first.
Three questions. About a minute.
Free · No sign-up · No personal data · 2025/26 UK tax rates
We take no commission from any tool on this page and there are no affiliate links to any of them. Published by the team behind Practik, a free take-home pay calculator for UK therapists — which is where the tax maths below comes from, and which is free, needs no sign-up and stores no personal data. These are estimates using 2025/26 rates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland for a sole trader. They are a guide, not tax advice.
A therapist deciding whether to pay for practice management software is making a different calculation from a salaried person deciding whether to pay for Netflix. Two things are true for you that aren't true for them: the money comes out of a profit you're taxed on, so the cost is genuinely lower than the sticker price — and your income arrives one session at a time, so every cost has a natural unit that isn't pounds.
Software used wholly for your practice is an allowable business expense for a self-employed therapist. It doesn't get refunded — it reduces the profit you pay tax on. For a sole trader inside the basic-rate band, each £1 of allowable cost therefore saves about 26p: 20p income tax plus 6p Class 4 National Insurance.
Tax relief is not a discount and nobody sends you money. You still pay the full £44. What changes is that £44 of profit is never taxed, so the cost after tax is about £33. It's real, it's worth counting, and it is not the same as the thing being cheaper.
Above £50,270 of profit the arithmetic improves: 40p income tax plus 2p Class 4 NI means each £1 of cost saves 42p, so the same subscription costs a higher-rate therapist about 58p in the pound. A tool that costs six sessions a year at basic rate costs roughly four and a half if you're in the higher band.
| Tool | Per year | After tax relief | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|
| bacpac | £216 | £160 | 2.7 |
| Jane Balance (20 appts/mo) | £348 | £258 | 4.3 |
| WriteUpp Flex + booking | £359 | £266 | 4.4 |
| WriteUpp Solo | £402 | £298 | 5.0 |
| Cliniko | £415 | £307 | 5.1 |
| Zanda Growth | £452 | £335 | 5.6 |
| Jane Practice | £528 | £391 | 6.5 |
| Jane Thrive | £660 | £488 | 8.1 |
The whole category fits between about three and eight sessions a year. That is the honest headline: the difference between the cheapest credible tool and the most expensive one is about five and a half sessions a year — roughly £330 after tax, or one working day. It is not nothing, and it is also not the decision most people agonise over it being.
Zanda's Starter plan at US$19 would sit at the bottom of that table, around two sessions, but we've left it out of the main list because the features most solo practitioners want sit on Growth. Pricing a plan you'd have to leave isn't a useful comparison. Zanda was also running an introductory 50% discount for six months when we checked, which flatters the first year and not the second — always cost a subscription at its standing price.
Sessions, not pounds, is the useful unit precisely because it moves with your fee. Jane Practice — £391 a year after relief — looks like this across a realistic range:
| Your session fee | Sessions to pay for it |
|---|---|
| £45 | 8.7 |
| £60 | 6.5 |
| £80 | 4.9 |
| £100 | 3.9 |
Raising your fee by £10 does more for this arithmetic than switching tools ever will — which is the sort of thing you only notice once the cost is expressed in the unit you actually earn in.
One tool at five sessions a year is easy. The pattern that quietly hurts is the stack: a practice system, an accounting tool, a video plan, a booking widget — each individually defensible, none of them reviewed again after the month you bought it.
Twelve sessions is a fortnight of work for a part-time practice, and that's before insurance, supervision, membership fees and room hire. The point isn't that any one of those tools is bad value. It's that they were each judged against "is £12 a month a lot?" and never against each other.
The cheapest fix is an annual half hour with your bank statement, asking one question per line: would I buy this again today? Two of the four above are usually already included in the first one — booking comes with WriteUpp Solo and video comes with Jane and Cliniko, so a stack like this often means you're paying twice for something you already own.
There's a cleaner way to judge any of these than agonising over £3 a month. At a £60 fee, one recovered no-show a month is £720 a year — more than the most expensive tool on this page costs before relief, and more than double the cheapest. If automated reminders prevent one missed appointment a month, every tool here has paid for itself and you're arguing about the change.
That's the real test, and it points somewhere useful: buy the tool whose reminders you'll actually switch on, not the one with the longest feature list.
The same 26p-in-the-pound logic applies to the rest of the costs of running a practice, which most therapists under-claim because they never wrote them down:
Keep the receipts, and take advice on anything unusual — particularly the home-working claim and anything used partly for private purposes, where the apportionment matters. This is general information, not tax advice.
Every tool on this page is very good at recording what you invoiced. Not one of them tells you what you keep. A therapist billing £48,000 with £4,000 of running costs takes home substantially less than the headline suggests once income tax and Class 4 NI come out — and that gap is where fee-setting decisions go wrong, because people set fees against turnover and live on take-home.
If you want the benchmark rather than your own figure, Practik publishes what UK therapists actually earn after tax by profession — counsellors, psychotherapists, CBT therapists, physiotherapists and others — worked from real session fees and caseloads rather than job-advert salaries. And if you want your own, the calculator takes about a minute.
Three questions — sessions a week, fee per session, running costs — and Practik shows your real take-home after tax, National Insurance and costs. Free, no sign-up, no personal data.
Calculate my take-home →Software used wholly for your practice is an allowable business expense for a self-employed therapist, so it reduces your taxable profit. At basic rate that's worth about 26p in the pound once 20% income tax and 6% Class 4 National Insurance are counted. Keep the receipts, and check anything unusual with an accountant — this is general information, not tax advice.
About 26% of the cost if your profit is inside the basic-rate band, and about 42% if it's above £50,270, where the rates are 40% income tax and 2% Class 4 NI. Nobody sends you the money: the expense reduces the profit you're taxed on, so you pay less tax at the end of the year than you otherwise would have.
bacpac at £18 a month including VAT — £216 a year, or about £160 after basic-rate relief, which is under three sessions at a £60 fee. Halaxy has a genuinely free core plan if budget is the binding constraint. Among the broader tools, WriteUpp Flex with the online booking add-on works out at about £359 a year including VAT.
Yes, and it's the most common mistake in software comparisons. If you're below the registration threshold you can't reclaim VAT, so a price advertised "plus VAT" costs you 20% more than the number shown. WriteUpp excludes VAT from its advertised prices; bacpac includes it. That turns a £27.95 plan into £33.54 and closes most of the apparent gap between them.
The principle holds — business costs reduce taxable profit — but the arithmetic on this page doesn't. It assumes a sole trader paying income tax and Class 4 National Insurance. A limited company pays corporation tax at a different rate, and how you take money out changes the answer again. Speak to an accountant rather than using these figures.
Because it's the unit you actually earn in, and it makes costs comparable across practices of different sizes. "£528 a year" means nothing without context; "six and a half sessions" tells you immediately whether it's worth it, and it automatically adjusts when you raise your fee.