Beluga Health Pricing: The À-la-Carte Model, Explained

What Beluga publishes, and what it doesn't

The published part is the architecture: per-visit fees tiered by monthly volume with async and sync priced separately, pass-through pharmacy and lab fulfillment, a flat monthly platform fee, and onboarding credited back against visits. The unpublished part is every actual figure, which arrives on a scoping call. In a category where most vendors publish nothing at all, publishing even the structure is a transparency signal worth crediting, and it makes diligence concrete: your ask is simply the tier table, in writing.

Beluga also positions à la carte or full stack (visits, pharmacy and lab fulfillment, compliance framework), so two buyers can hold quotes that are not comparable because they bought different slices. Before comparing anything, fix the slice: list which layers you are buying from Beluga and which you are assembling around it, and price the assembled layers in the same model.

A published structure with gated figures means your diligence artifact is the tier table in writing: every tier boundary, both visit modalities, the platform fee, and exactly what the onboarding credit assumes about your volume.

Reading the structure like an operator

Each published component moves your model differently. Per-visit fees tiered by monthly volume mean your marginal clinical cost falls as you grow, so model the tier boundaries against your growth curve rather than pricing everything at month-one volume; the async-versus-sync split matters because the modality mix of your care lines, not an average, sets your blended visit cost. Pass-through pharmacy and labs mean transparent fulfillment costs, and also that the medication economics are yours to manage: pass-through tells you what a fill costs, and your program still has to decide what it charges.

The flat platform fee is fixed cost, so it is regressive at small volume and disappears into the unit economics at scale: divide it by active patients at three volume scenarios and watch it move. Onboarding credited against visit volume is friendlier than a sunk fee, and it functions like a soft volume commitment: ask what happens to the credit if your ramp is slower than the scoping call assumed. None of this requires the numbers to be public; the structure alone dictates the questions.

• The full tier table in writing: every volume boundary, async and sync priced separately
• The platform fee, divided by active patients at three volume scenarios
• Pass-through mechanics for pharmacy and labs: what a fill costs you, invoiced how, on whose paper
• The onboarding credit's assumptions, and what a slow ramp does to it
• Which slice you are buying (à la carte vs full stack), fixed before any comparison

The reseller layer: are you buying Beluga through someone else?

A structural fact of this market: many storefront-layer platforms route their consults through clinical networks like Beluga rather than operating medical groups themselves. If you are evaluating a storefront platform, part of your bill may be a network layer underneath it with a margin added, and if you are evaluating Beluga directly, you are pricing that layer at the source. Neither is automatically better; a good storefront layer adds real software and conversion value. But you cannot judge the trade without seeing both prices, so ask any platform who performs the clinical layer, and ask what that layer costs when bought directly.

This is also why quotes across this category refuse naive comparison: one vendor's number includes the storefront, another's includes the network, a third includes both. The per-active-patient model below is the normalizer.

From scoping call to comparable number

Build the same model you would for any vendor in this layer: the Beluga slice (visits at your modality mix and volume tier, platform fee, fulfillment pass-throughs) plus every layer you assemble around it (storefront and funnel, payments for a healthcare merchant, compliance function, marketing machine, operations). Our startup cost calculator assembles the launch budget from published anchors, the stack index maps the layers, and the KPI reference holds the checkpoints the model should answer to.

Then divide by active patients, not by months, at three volumes: launch, the twelve-month target, and the number that would make you scale. Retention drives all three denominators, which is why revenue per patient and cost per patient belong on the same page of the spreadsheet. The winning quote at one volume is routinely the losing quote at another; the tier table is where that shows up first.

How EmbedCare prices the same problem

EmbedCare packages the layers Beluga sells à la carte, plus the ones it doesn't, as one operated stack behind your brand: 50-state clinicians, owned pharmacy supply with medication included on GLP-1 programs, the white-label storefront and funnel, growth and retention, and compliance operations. Pricing is flat product rates fixed in a signed partner agreement, with a self-serve Launch tier starting at $495/mo. The honest comparison is your modeled all-in per-active-patient cost under an assembled stack versus one operated P&L; get both in writing and let the spreadsheet decide.