At some point in every demo call the conversation inevitably turns to price, usually with this sentence: 'So how quickly does this system pay for itself?' A legitimate question. But as the people who have been having these conversations since our founding, we have noticed something: most clinics asking it do not know what their current method costs them. Because plaster is a cheap material, the traditional process is assumed to be cheap as well, but it is not.
The figures below are rounded and will not apply one-to-one to every clinic; use them as a framework to plug your own numbers into.
The ledger of invisible costs
Item one: specialist time. Plaster casting, pouring and model correction typically demand 2-4 hours of qualified labour per case. In a mid-sized clinic taking 10 cases a week, that is over 100 hours of specialist time a month. What is the alternative use of those hours? Patient examinations, new case intake — the clinic's actual revenue-generating activities.
Item two: revisions and remakes. It is rarely discussed in the industry, but in manual production the share of devices that do not fit properly at the first fitting is far from small. Every revision means material, labour, an extra appointment and deliveries slipping in the calendar. We are measuring where that rate goes on the digital line too, but we will not publish a number before the 90-day protocol ends — we do not want to add another unverified percentage to the many already circulating in this industry. Still, do count the share of devices in your own clinic delivered without revision at the first fitting; that single line is the most illuminating row of the whole ledger.
Item three: calendar uncertainty. In plaster-based production the delivery date is a range: 'within two to three weeks.' That uncertainty affects patient satisfaction, and through it referrals and the flow of new patients. Hard to measure, real in effect. Item four is more tangible: physical space. A plaster workshop, with its dust and storage, occupies serious square metres. Put the rent equivalent of that area, and its alternative value as an examination room, into the calculation.
A sample calculation — swap in your own numbers
Picture a hypothetical but realistic clinic producing 10 insoles + 3 AFOs + 1 helmet a week. Say the traditional line spends roughly 120-140 hours of production labour a month on that volume. When scanning plus design approval drops to 15-20 minutes per case on the digital line, the same volume falls to 25-30 hours a month. Multiply the roughly 100-hour difference even by a conservative hourly patient revenue and you reach a serious annual figure — in most clinics, larger than the hardware investment itself.
Add the revision savings: work out how many remakes a month you avoid for every point your first-fit rate climbs. We are not supplying the point value — start from your own baseline measurement, because there is no published Clonify first-fit rate yet. Add the material difference too — 3D printing material is more expensive than plaster, so this line goes in the against column. How much the material difference weighs against labour and revision savings depends on your case mix.
Payback varies widely from clinic to clinic; case volume, existing hardware and remake rate decide it. That is why we do not hand out a ready-made 'pays for itself in X months' figure. To calculate with your own numbers, use our free Plaster-to-Digital Clinic Calculator; in demo calls, too, we fill in this table with your volume numbers instead of a standard slide deck.
The part that doesn't fit in the spreadsheet
One final note, because the ROI table does not tell the whole story. In clinics that move to the digital line, something emerges after a while: accumulated data. Every scan, every design, every revision record is in the archive. When the same patient returns a year later you can compare against their previous geometry. You see the distribution of your case population and plan stock and capacity accordingly. That is an institutional memory that simply does not exist when you work with sacks of plaster.
And there is the team. Moving from mould dust to a design screen does not eliminate the technician's job; it carries their skill into measurement and design. None of this goes into Excel, but it deserves a seat at the table when you decide.
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