Tell the patient what they'll owe. Before they buy.
Benchtop turns your contracted rates into an itemized, out-the-door number in under a minute — with a plain-English reason for every line, so the conversation at the dispensing table is about the glasses, not the bill.
Built for independent optometry. No patient data leaves your practice.
The problem
Nobody in the practice can answer the one question every patient asks.
"What's this going to cost me?" It's the question that decides the sale, and today it gets answered from memory, a laminated card, or a spreadsheet somebody built four rate changes ago.
- ×Your best optician is the estimate. When she's out, the number changes — or nobody gives one at all, and the patient goes home to "think about it."
- ×Quotes and reality don't match. The patient hears one number at dispensing and sees another at pickup, and you eat the difference to keep the relationship.
- ×Nobody can explain the number. "That's what the insurance pays" isn't an answer, and a patient who doesn't understand a price assumes they're being overcharged.
- ×Rate changes quietly break everything. A January allowance change invalidates every cheat sheet in the building, and no one finds out until a patient complains.
- ×Second-guessing costs you upgrades. Staff who aren't confident in the number stop offering the AR coating and the progressive, because they can't defend the price.
How it works
Three fields, one number, and a sentence you can say out loud.
Benchtop sits on the dispensing table next to the frame board. It is not an EHR, it doesn't touch your practice management system, and it doesn't need a login for every staff member.
Enter your rates once
In Practice setup you enter the payers you accept, what each plan actually pays, and what you actually charge. There's no fixed list of payers the software "knows about" — a regional plan or an employer-direct group is a text box, not a support ticket and not a release you wait for.
Pick the plan and what they're buying
Plan, frame, lens design, options, and how long since their last benefit. Change the election to contacts and the contact and fitting allowances apply, with a warning that the glasses benefit is forfeited for the period. The total updates as you go, so a patient can watch an upgrade change the number in real time.
Hand them a quote they understand
Every line carries a plain-English explanation of how it was calculated. Print an itemized patient quote with the totals, a dated disclaimer and a signature block — so what they agreed to at the table is on paper, and pickup day holds no surprises.
What makes it different
Built for the number to be defensible, not just fast.
Every line explains itself
Not just "$56.00" but why: allowance applied, amount over, discount taken. That sentence is what turns a price objection into an understood price.
Rate changes are versioned
Saving new benefit rules doesn't overwrite the old ones — it closes them out from a date you choose. A quote given last November still reproduces after a January change.
Your rates, not our guesses
The engine runs on the contracted figures you enter. Nothing is scraped, averaged, or assumed on your behalf, and no number appears that you didn't put there.
Exact money, every time
Amounts are computed in whole cents, never floating point. Totals reconcile to the penny — no rounding drift between the quote and the till.
Rates stay behind a code
A four-digit code at the dispensing table gets staff the estimator; your contracted rate screens need a separate permission. Enough to keep a patient or a new hire out of your fee schedule.
Works when the internet doesn't
The estimator runs on the machine in front of you. An ISP outage takes down your phones, not your ability to quote and dispense.
Privacy
We don't hold your patient data. Not as a policy — as an architecture.
Benchtop has no patients table, no estimates table, and no column anywhere holding a price your practice charges. There is nowhere for that data to go, because we never built the place to put it.
What stays on your machine
Your contracted rates, your price list, your payers, and every estimate you produce. All of it lives in a settings file on the practice's own computer, which you can export and back up yourself.
What we actually store
Which practices are registered and which devices are licensed — a name, a billing email, and a support code. That's the whole list.
Why this matters for you: a vendor that never receives protected health information is a vendor with a much smaller footprint in your compliance posture. Bring us to your attorney or your IT consultant early — that conversation tends to be short, and we'd rather you have it before you sign than after.
Pricing
One price. Per location. No per-seat math.
Everyone at the office uses it, on the machines where the work happens — the exam lane, the dispensing table, the optician's desk.
Month to month. No setup fee, no contract, cancel any time.
- Unlimited estimates and printed patient quotes
- Unlimited staff — codes identify a role, not a person
- Every payer and plan you accept, including regional and employer-direct
- Versioned rate history, so old quotes stay reproducible
- Help getting your actual contracted rates in — with you, on a call
- Direct line to the person who builds it
or
Multi-location groups are priced per site. Ask about it.
For context: practice management and EHR platforms serving this market commonly start in the $340–$440 per month range. Benchtop does one job and is priced accordingly.
Get started
See it run on your plans.
A 20-minute call. You bring the two or three combinations that are hardest to quote today, and we run them live. If the number comes out wrong, that's the useful part — tell us and it gets fixed.
- You'll hear back within one business day, from a person.
- No sales sequence, no drip campaign, no reseller calls.
- We never ask for patient information — not on the call, not ever.
- Founding practices help set what gets built next.
Questions
The things practices ask first.
Does it connect to my practice management system?
Not today. Benchtop is deliberately standalone — it runs beside whatever you already use rather than replacing or integrating with it, which is why it can be running in your office this week instead of next quarter. Integration is on the roadmap, and founding practices decide which system comes first.
Does it check the patient's eligibility in real time?
No. It estimates from the plan you select and the benefit history you enter, not from a live eligibility feed. You should still verify eligibility the way you do now. Real-time verification is the most requested thing on our list and the most expensive to do responsibly, so we'd rather ship it well than early.
How long does setup actually take?
Entering your real contracted rates is the work, and it's honest to say it takes a couple of hours across your main plans — you're transcribing what's in your payer contracts. We do it with you on a call. Once it's in, it's in; a rate change later is editing a few fields, and the old version is retained automatically.
Is the estimate binding? What if it's wrong?
It's an estimate, and every printed quote says so with a dated disclaimer. Accuracy comes from the rates you enter — the engine applies them exactly and shows its arithmetic on every line, so when a number looks wrong you can see precisely which rule produced it and correct the underlying figure rather than guessing.
What happens to our data if we cancel?
Nothing happens to it, because we never had it. Your settings and rates are a file on your own machine that you can export at any time, before or after cancelling. There is no data of yours for us to hold hostage or to delete on request.
Who's behind this?
A small, independent effort — not a private-equity roll-up and not a division of a lab or a frame vendor. Nobody upstream of your dispensing table has a financial interest in what this software tells your patients. When you call, you get the person who wrote it.