How does the per-session vs. flat-rate pricing comparison work for private practice?

Per-session pricing (Blueprint: $0.99/session) scales linearly with your caseload. A typical private practice therapist seeing 20 clients per week pays $0.99 × 20 × 4.3 weeks = ~$85/month. At 25 clients/week: ~$107/month. At 30 clients/week: ~$128/month. Flat-rate pricing (TherapyDraft: $39/month) is caseload-agnostic — you can see 40 clients per week and the price does not change. For any private practice therapist seeing more than about 10 sessions per week, flat-rate pricing is less expensive than $0.99/session. For practices billing at $150–$300/session, the cost difference between TherapyDraft and per-session alternatives is a rounding error on one session.

Topic · AI progress notes for private practice

AI progress notes for solo private practice — local inference on your Mac, EHR-paste-ready output, flat $39/mo with no per-session fee that scales with your caseload

Q: What is the best AI progress note tool for solo private practice?

The best AI progress note tool for a solo private practice therapist on a Mac is one that drafts notes in the format you actually use (DAP, SOAP, BIRP, or GIRP), produces output you can paste directly into your EHR without reformatting, charges a flat monthly fee rather than a per-session fee that scales with your caseload, and does not upload your clients' session audio to a cloud service. TherapyDraft does all four. For a therapist seeing 20 clients per week, a $0.99/session cloud scribe (Blueprint) costs $79.20/month — twice the $39 flat rate. For 30 clients/week it costs $118.80. TherapyDraft's $39/mo is caseload-agnostic.

Q: How does AI progress note drafting work for solo private practice?

TherapyDraft's workflow for solo private practice is: (1) Record session audio locally on your Mac — built-in microphone or external recorder. (2) Open TherapyDraft after the session and load the recording. (3) Whisper.cpp transcribes the audio locally on your Mac's Neural Engine — no internet required. (4) The local model drafts the progress note in your preferred format (DAP, SOAP, BIRP, or GIRP), calibrated to your own documentation style through one-shot template matching from your example notes. (5) You review and edit the draft — typically 2–3 minutes. (6) Copy and paste into SimplePractice, TheraNest, TherapyNotes, or whichever EHR you use. The whole process adds roughly 5 minutes to your post-session routine instead of 15–20 minutes for a fully manual note.

Q: Does TherapyDraft integrate with SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes?

TherapyDraft does not have a direct API integration with EHR systems — it works as a note-drafting tool whose output you paste into your EHR. The paste presets are formatted to match the note-entry fields in SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes: character count, line-break handling, and section header format are optimized for each EHR's note editor so the paste produces clean output without reformatting. TherapyDraft works with any EHR that accepts pasted text — which is all of them. The absence of API integration is intentional: no integration means no EHR-level data sharing, no OAuth token for a vendor to hold, and no API-level record of which clients have which note content in which EHR.

Q: Is a solo private practice therapist responsible for HIPAA compliance when using an AI scribe?

Yes. Solo private practice therapists who are covered entities under HIPAA are fully responsible for HIPAA compliance, including compliance by business associates who handle PHI on their behalf. When a solo private practice therapist uses a cloud AI scribe, they are the covered entity responsible for the BAA with the vendor, the vendor's handling of session content, and any breach or impermissible disclosure that the vendor causes. The BAA shifts some liability to the vendor, but it does not eliminate the covered entity's own exposure. With TherapyDraft, the architecture eliminates the vendor-as-business-associate relationship for session content entirely — no PHI leaves the clinician's Mac for note-drafting purposes, so there is no business associate relationship to manage for that step.

Solo private practice therapists control their own tool decisions without institutional IT procurement, employer platform mandates, or group practice billing infrastructure. That autonomy creates both the freedom to choose better tools and the full weight of HIPAA compliance responsibility. TherapyDraft is designed for exactly this profile: a licensed clinician on an M-series Mac who sees 15–30 clients per week, uses SimplePractice or TheraNest or TherapyNotes, and wants AI-assisted progress notes that match their documentation style without uploading client session content to a cloud vendor. Local inference. EHR-paste-ready output. One flat price regardless of caseload size.

TL;DR

TherapyDraft drafts DAP, SOAP, BIRP, and GIRP progress notes from session audio processed locally on your M-series Mac. No client session audio, transcript, or note content reaches any cloud server. Output is formatted for paste into SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes. The price is $39/month flat — no per-session fee, no caseload scaling. There is a 10-session free trial at no cost.

What solo private practice therapists actually need from an AI note tool

The marketing for most AI therapy scribes is aimed at the general market — clinic administrators evaluating group purchases, large group practices comparing enterprise tiers. Solo private practice therapists have a simpler, more specific set of requirements:

Draft quality good enough to edit in 2–3 minutes, not 15. The time savings is the product. A draft that requires substantial rewriting is not a time-saver.
Output that pastes cleanly into the EHR used. SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes each have different note-editor behaviors; a paste that produces garbled formatting requires reformatting and negates the time savings.
Note format that matches the clinician's style. Solo practice therapists have developed their own documentation voices over years of practice. A tool that produces notes that read like someone else wrote them is not useful — the clinician has to rewrite the voice, not just the content.
Flat pricing that does not increase with caseload. A per-session fee at $0.99 or $1.25 means that growing a practice directly increases the tool cost. At $39/month flat, the cost is fixed regardless of whether the therapist sees 10 or 40 clients per week.
No BAA anxiety. Solo private practice therapists who are covered entities are personally responsible for HIPAA compliance. They do not have a compliance team to review vendor agreements. A tool that processes session audio without uploading it eliminates the need to manage a BAA for note drafting entirely.

TherapyDraft addresses all five requirements. The one-shot template matching feature — where the clinician supplies five of their own well-written notes as examples — is specifically designed for the solo practice use case, where the clinician has a distinct documentation voice they want preserved.

How TherapyDraft works for solo private practice

The workflow adds approximately 5 minutes to the post-session routine instead of 15–20 minutes for a fully manual note:

Record the session locally. During or after the session, record audio on the Mac's built-in microphone or an external recorder. TherapyDraft accepts standard audio file formats (WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC). No live-capture plugin is required; the recording is a file that exists on the Mac.
Load the recording into TherapyDraft. Drag the file into the app. Transcription begins immediately using Whisper.cpp on the Mac's Neural Engine. For a 50-minute session, transcription takes 90–120 seconds on an M2 Mac.
Review the draft. TherapyDraft generates the note in the clinician's preferred format, calibrated to their own documentation style. The draft typically requires 2–3 minutes of editing — correcting client names, adjusting phrasing, adding specific details from memory that weren't audible in the recording.
Paste into the EHR. The paste preset for SimplePractice, TheraNest, or TherapyNotes formats the note for clean paste into the EHR's note editor. No reformatting required.

The session audio, transcript, and note draft are never uploaded to any server. The Mac's network sandbox enforces this at the OS level — audio and note content are restricted from any network socket. The only outbound traffic TherapyDraft uses is the anonymous app-version check and the Stripe license activation; neither involves session content.

EHR paste presets for SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes

Solo private practice therapists primarily use three EHR platforms: SimplePractice (largest market share in the US for private practice), TheraNest (strong in trauma and specialty practice), and TherapyNotes (popular in cognitive-behavioral and structured settings). Each has a different note-editor behavior:

SimplePractice uses a rich-text editor with paragraph formatting. TherapyDraft's SimplePractice preset outputs the note as clean paragraphs with section headers as bold text — the format that pastes cleanly into the SimplePractice note editor without creating spurious line breaks or losing the SOAP/DAP section structure.

TheraNest uses a plain-text note editor for progress notes, with some template fields. TherapyDraft's TheraNest preset strips rich-text formatting and outputs the note as plain text with section markers formatted to match TheraNest's expected template structure.

TherapyNotes uses structured note templates with separate fields for each section. TherapyDraft's TherapyNotes preset separates the note into individual section outputs — one per SOAP element — so the clinician can paste each section into the corresponding TherapyNotes field rather than pasting the whole note into a single text area.

See the full detail on AI therapy notes for SimplePractice, AI therapy notes for TheraNest, and AI therapy notes for TherapyNotes.

HIPAA responsibility for solo private practice

Solo private practice therapists who are covered entities under HIPAA carry the full weight of HIPAA compliance without the compliance infrastructure that larger organizations have. This is why the BAA question matters more to a solo practitioner than to a clinician employed by a covered entity with a compliance team — the solo practitioner is personally responsible for every vendor agreement, every data handling decision, and every disclosure.

TherapyDraft's architecture removes the BAA-for-note-drafting entirely from the solo practice compliance picture. There is no vendor processing session content; there is no BAA to execute, no subprocessor chain to audit, no vendor breach to monitor. The privacy guarantee is architectural: the Mac's network sandbox restricts the app from opening network sockets for audio or note content, so the guarantee is enforced at the OS level rather than through contractual representations.

See HIPAA for private practice therapists — the 2026 rewrite for the full compliance picture, including the solo practitioner's checklist for Risk Analysis, Subprocessor Inventory, and Breach Protocol.

Pricing

TherapyDraft is $39 per month or $349 per year for the Solo plan — unlimited session note drafts, all four format options (DAP, SOAP, BIRP, GIRP), EHR paste presets for SimplePractice, TheraNest, and TherapyNotes, the inference attestation log, and one-shot template matching from your own example notes. The 10-session free trial requires no credit card.

Pricing comparison for a therapist seeing 20 sessions per week: Blueprint ($0.99/session) = ~$85/mo. Mentalyc ($19.99/mo for 10 sessions; scales up) = ~$39–$79/mo at typical usage. Upheal ($29/mo flat for limited sessions; higher tiers above). Freed ($99/mo). TherapyDraft: $39/mo flat, all sessions included. Full comparison at the pricing comparison page.