Free to look up. Paid for depth, workflow, and scale.
CMS publishes this data, so the lookup, the payment calculator, Contract Check, and the provenance behind every amount stay free. What costs money is the archive that goes back years, the workflows that turn a number into finished work, and production volume inside someone else's product.
Nothing paid is buyable yet. The free plan is live and complete. The three paid plans are published so you can tell us which one you'd actually pay for — there's no checkout behind them, and everyone who says so now gets founding pricing when there is one.
Free
LiveAnswer a question. No account, no card, no trial clock.
- Every CPT and HCPCS code, priced for your locality and care setting
- The last four quarterly releases — about a year of rates
- The CMS file, row, and formula behind every amount
Research
Coming soon$190/year — 2 months free
Replace the Medicare spreadsheet: build fee schedules, compare payer rates, watch your codes.
- Every release we hold — price any date of service, compare releases, export CSV
- Your code list as a locality-correct fee schedule, at any percentage of Medicare
- Saved code portfolios with quarterly change alerts and dollar impact
Workbench
Coming soonDo the work, not just read the number.
- Batch payment review across a whole remittance
- Saved payer contracts — “135% of 2025 Medicare” becomes reusable
- Saved code baskets and analyses you can come back to
Production API
Coming soonA maintained Medicare pricing dependency inside your product.
- Quarterly ingests, locality resolution, and historical reproducibility — maintained for you
- Stable schemas, production volume, and commercial rights
- Support from the people who wrote the parser
What's in each plan
Rows are grouped by the three things that cost money. Where a cell isn't a plain yes or no it says what it actually is — "one offer at a time" is a real answer, and a dash would have been a wrong one.
| Capability | Free $0/month | Research $19/month | Workbench $149/month | Production API From $1,000/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rates and provenance | ||||
| Every CPT and HCPCS code, by locality and setting | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Calculation provenance — CMS file, row, inputs, formula The thing that makes an amount defensible in an appeal. Never gated. | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Payment calculator — expected versus paid, one line | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Evidence packet — the full derivation as a file Release, locality, RVUs, GPCIs, formula, source file and row — shaped for a payer inquiry, a contract discussion, or an audit workpaper. | Readable on every page | Downloadable report | Downloadable report | API |
| Depth of history | ||||
| The last four quarterly releases About a year of rates — the current release and the three quarters before it. The calculator gives the same year by claim date, without an account. | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Every earlier release we hold Public code pages stay indexed and readable at every vintage. What the plan gates is exploring them — pivoting a code across years, not reading one page. | Readable, one page at a time | Included | Included | Included |
| Release-over-release comparison across years | Adjacent releases only | Included | Included | Included |
| Export a historical view | Not included | CSV | CSV | API |
| Workflow | ||||
| Contract Check — price a payer offer Paste payer allowables and see each as an effective percentage of Medicare, or a contract percentage as expected dollars. | One offer at a time | Pasted code lists, saved results, CSV | Saved and versioned | Not included |
| Fee schedule builder — your code list at a percentage of Medicare The locality-correct answer to the spreadsheet: paste codes, pick multipliers, download CSV. | Not included | CSV | Saved and repeatable | API |
| Saved code portfolios with quarterly change alerts Rate, RVU, status, and policy-indicator changes for the codes you actually bill, with the dollar impact at your volumes. | Single-code email alerts | Personal portfolios | Per-client portfolios | Not included |
| Rules check for a code list — NCCI pairs, MUE limits, policy indicators | Per code page | Pasted code list | Claim-level, with modifiers | API |
| Saved payer contracts and multipliers | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Batch payment review across a remittance A stripped variance file — codes, localities, amounts, year of service. No patient identifiers. | Not included | Not included | Included | API |
| Saved analyses and code baskets | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Scale | ||||
| API keys Free keys are self-serve today: create an account and mint a token. | Free, self-serve | Free, self-serve | Free, self-serve | Included |
| Production volume, commercial rights, and support | Not included | Not included | Not included | Included |
Why it isn't priced per lookup
Charging per calculation would have been the obvious model. It's the wrong one twice over: the underlying data is public and free from CMS, so metering it reads as a toll booth on a public road — and nobody actually hits a wall at claim number two.
The walls people hit are elsewhere. They need eight years of history rather than four quarters. They need the number to become finished work — a reconciled remittance, a priced contract — rather than a figure to retype. Or they need it inside their own product, at volume, without maintaining a CMS parser.
So those three are what cost money, and the free plan stays genuinely capable rather than becoming a sample.
Questions you'd reasonably ask
- Does the free plan expire?
- No. There is no trial clock and no card. Rate lookups, the payment calculator, Contract Check, rate-change alerts and the calculation provenance behind every amount are free and staying free.
- Will historical code pages disappear behind a paywall?
- No. Every code page stays public and readable at every vintage we hold — that is how most people find us, and hiding it would be self-defeating as well as unfriendly. What Research pays for is exploring that history: pivoting one code across years, comparing releases, and exporting the result.
- What do free API keys cover?
- Free keys are self-serve today — create an account and mint a token under Settings → API tokens, no card. The free tier meters 0 units a day, where one code costs one unit and a bulk call costs one per code. Production plans raise that and add commercial rights and support.
- Can I pay for any of this today?
- Not yet — there is no checkout behind the paid plans. They are published so the ladder can be argued with before it is built. Tell us which one fits and you get founding pricing when it exists.
Which of these would you actually pay for?
That question decides the build order, and the list is small enough that a real person reads every answer. In the meantime, everything on the free plan is live — start with a claim you already have.