Choosing an AI Scribe When Your Employer Won't Buy You One

Nobody is buying you a scribe. If you're taking telehealth shifts as a 1099, covering locums assignments, moonlighting on top of a day job, or running your own panel, the AI scribe market mostly wasn't built with you in mind. Abridge sells to health systems; its own site cites 300+ of them. DAX, now Microsoft Dragon Copilot, sells through Microsoft's enterprise channel. Suki markets IT-deployed EHR integration. These are real products with real capabilities. You also cannot buy them, because you are not a health system.

I'm a practicing physician, I built Scribeable, and yes, we sell one of the tools in this category, so read accordingly. But most of what follows is vendor-neutral: when the card on file is yours, four things change about how you should shop. Price becomes real. The EMR stops being your problem to integrate with and starts being five different problems. Ownership matters more than features. And the job-change question stops being hypothetical.

Start With the Price You Can Actually See

A CMIO evaluating scribes gets a quote through procurement. You get whatever the public website says, and for most of the market, it says nothing. As of July 2026: Abridge has no pricing page, only "Contact Us." Microsoft publishes no rate for Dragon Copilot. Suki, Augmedix, and DeepScribe all route to a sales conversation or a demo request. Nabla's pricing page doesn't exist at all. Heidi gets partial credit: its pricing page names the tiers but displays no dollar amounts.

Two vendors in this space publish real numbers. Freed lists Starter at $39/month for up to 40 notes, Core at $79/month unlimited, and Premier at $104 to 119/month. Scribeable lists Lite at $39/month and Pro at $79/month, plus a permanent free tier. Credit to Freed for publishing; it's rarer than it should be.

For a self-paying clinician this isn't a transparency lecture, it's a filter. If you can't see the price without booking a call, the vendor is telling you who its customer is. It isn't you.

The Self-Pay Math

$79 a month is $948 a year out of your own pocket, so the question isn't just the sticker, it's what the sticker includes. Compare the two published price lists and the difference is in the contents, not the number. On Freed's own pricing page, coding — E/M, ICD-10, and CPT — sits on the Premier tier at $104 to 119/month, and HCC risk adjustment isn't mentioned at any tier. Scribeable includes the coding engine, ICD-10, the HCC V28 crosswalk, and E/M support, at Pro, $79/month, along with 236 clinical calculators that are scored in code rather than guessed by the model. Same sticker on the middle tier. Different contents.

The other line item that matters when you're self-paying: what happens in your slow months. Locums assignments have gaps. Telehealth volume swings. Moonlighting is seasonal. A per-seat subscription you can't idle is a tax on the months you don't work.

• Free tiers: Heidi advertises a free tier with unlimited transcription on standard templates. Scribeable's free tier is 5 notes/month through the same two-pass pipeline as the paid plans. Freed lists no permanent free tier, only a 7-day trial.
• Trials: Freed's trial is 7 days, no card. Scribeable's is 14 days or 15 notes, whichever comes first, no card. Enterprise vendors generally advertise no public trial terms at all.
• BAA: whoever you pick, the BAA has to be included at the tier you're actually buying, not a paperwork upsell. Scribeable includes it on all paid plans.

EMR-Agnostic Beats EMR-Native When the EMR Isn't Yours

Deep native EHR integration is the enterprise scribes' genuine strength. Suki markets real-time integration with Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth, and MEDITECH. Augmedix names seven EHRs on its site. When a health system's IT department deploys and maintains that plumbing, it's a better experience than copy-paste, full stop.

But look at your actual week. A locums doc might touch a different EHR every assignment. A telehealth clinician is often charting in a platform's proprietary EMR that no scribe vendor has ever heard of. A moonlighter gets guest credentials on a system they use six shifts a month and zero say in what gets installed on it. You are not getting an IT-deployed integration approved at any of those sites, and you shouldn't have to re-buy your scribe every time your badge changes.

That flips the requirement. What you need is a scribe that lives with you, not with the building: a browser extension and mobile app that work alongside whatever system you're handed, and a note you can move into any chart. Scribeable is built that way on purpose; setup is a browser extension, not a deployment. The honest tradeoff: transferring a note into the EHR is a step that native push integration doesn't have. If you spend your whole career inside one Epic instance your employer instruments for you, native wins. If your career spans systems, portable wins.

The Job-Change Test

Here's the question I'd ask before any of the feature questions: if I leave this job, what do I keep?

An employer-deployed scribe seat belongs to the employer's contract. The templates you tuned, the workflow you built, the tool you got fast with: none of it follows you to the next credentialing packet. For an employed physician that's an annoyance. For a locums or telehealth clinician who changes "employers" quarterly, it's disqualifying.

Vendor identity is worth the same scrutiny, because over a career, companies move under you. Nuance's DAX page now redirects to Microsoft, which completed its $19.7B acquisition in 2022. Augmedix was acquired by Commure in October 2024. DeepScribe repositioned around oncology workflows. None of that is a criticism; companies pivot and get bought. It's a reason to hold the account in your own name, so a vendor's strategy change is something you read about rather than something that happens to your notes. A Scribeable account belongs to the clinician who signs up and moves across every job you take. And because the company is bootstrapped, with no outside capital, there's no acquirer integration or investor exit on the horizon to reprice you at renewal.

A Note for the Telehealth Crowd

Telehealth deserves its own paragraph because it's the segment where self-pay is most common and the platforms vary most. Some telehealth companies provide a scribe; Nabla, for instance, sells to telehealth companies directly, so you may inherit one. Many provide nothing, and you're documenting across two or three platforms as a 1099 with whatever you bring. If that's you, the requirements above compound: published price, works-anywhere capture, an account in your name. We wrote up the telehealth-specific workflow, including how visit capture works regardless of which video platform the patient opened, on the telehealth page.

The Checklist

• Can you see the full price on the public website, today, without a sales call?
• Is there a free tier or a no-card trial long enough to test on real clinic days?
• Does it work with every system you touch this month, including the ones you don't control?
• Is the account yours, in your name, independent of any employer or platform?
• Is the BAA included at your tier?
• What exactly is included at the price: just the note, or the coding and calculators too?
• If you cancel, what happens to your notes and your data?

Where Scribeable Fits, and Where It Doesn't

Honest routing, because not everyone reading this should buy from me. If your hospital already deployed Abridge or Dragon Copilot for your employed work, use it there; it costs you nothing and the integration is real. A personal scribe account is a separate thing you can hold alongside it for the work the employer's deployment doesn't cover. If all you want is unlimited documentation-only notes at $79 and you'll never touch the coding layer, Freed's Core plan is a fair, published deal. If you practice outside the US, Heidi's multi-country compliance footprint may matter more than anything in this post.

Scribeable's case is the self-paying US clinician this article is about: published pricing at $39 to $79/month, a free tier for the slow months, coding and 236 code-scored calculators included at Pro rather than on a higher tier, a two-pass pipeline that verifies the draft before you sign it, and an account that's yours across every job, every platform, every EHR. The trial is 14 days or 15 notes, no card. Run it against whatever else you're considering, on your own patients, and keep whichever one earns the line on your credit card statement.