MainstreetMainstreet vs Zocdoc
Stop paying a finder's fee for patients who already knew your name.
Zocdoc is a marketplace: patients search it, and you are billed for the new ones who book. That works until you are good at attracting patients yourself — at which point you are paying per head for people who searched for your practice by name and would have called anyway. Mainstreet puts the same real-time booking on your own website for one flat monthly fee, and the patient stays yours.
No signup, no card.
Put your own numbers in
We are not going to tell you what you pay — you have the invoice. Enter what is on it and the arithmetic is the same arithmetic we would do.
If your plan has one
And it stays $199 in the month you get twice as many patients, which is the part that does not show up in a single month’s comparison.
Mainstreet vs Zocdoc
| Feature | Mainstreet | Zocdoc |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat monthly fee | Per new patient, plus subscription |
| Cost of a busy month | Unchanged | Higher |
| Where patients book | Your own website | Their marketplace |
| Competitors shown beside you | — | ✓ |
| Real-time availability from provider hours | ✓ | ✓ |
| Patients reschedule and cancel themselves | ✓ | ✓ |
| Appointment reminders included | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automatic Google review request after the visit | ✓ | — |
| Google Business Profile managed for you | ✓ | — |
| Map-pack rank tracking | ✓ | — |
| Weekly Google Posts written and published | ✓ | — |
| Brings you patients who have never heard of you | Through search, over time | Immediately, for a fee |
| Insurance search across a national directory | — | ✓ |
| Contract | Month to month | Varies |
What you get
Most of your Zocdoc bookings are people who already know you
This is the one that stings, and it is worth checking rather than taking our word for it: pull your last month of new-patient charges and count how many of the names you or your staff recognise — a referral, a returning family member, someone who called first and booked online afterwards. Whatever that fraction is, it is the part of the bill that bought you nothing.
You cannot forecast the line item
A flat fee is not merely cheaper at volume, it is knowable. The practices that leave per-patient billing usually say the same thing: the problem was not the size of the invoice, it was that the invoice was largest in exactly the months that had gone well, and nobody could budget for it.
You want the patient relationship, not a rental
A patient who books through a marketplace learns to go back to the marketplace. A patient who books on your website has been to your website. The second one is yours the next time they need something, and does not cost anything to reach.
You still need to be found — that is the real objection
Zocdoc's actual product is demand, and dropping it without replacing it is how practices end up quietly re-subscribing three months later. This is why Mainstreet is not only a booking page: it also works your Google Business Profile — reviews replied to, weekly Posts, map-pack rank tracked — so the patients arrive by searching for what you do rather than by being sold to you. Booking is what catches them when they do.
Common questions
Will I lose new patients if I leave Zocdoc?
Possibly, in the short term, and you should plan for that rather than be surprised by it. Zocdoc sells demand — that is the thing you are actually buying. The honest sequence is to build the replacement first: get your Google Business Profile ranking and your review flow working, put booking on your own site, and watch where the appointments come from for a couple of months. Practices that cancel on day one and hope tend to come back. The ones that overlap for a quarter usually do not.
How much does Zocdoc actually cost?
It depends on your specialty, your market and your contract, which is why we do not print a number and tell you it is yours. Their per-new-patient fee is published as a range in their own marketplace terms, and dental and dermatology sit well above the bottom of it. The calculator on this page uses whatever you enter — the figure on your invoice beats any estimate we could make.
Is Mainstreet a marketplace? Will patients find me on it?
No. There is no Mainstreet directory and no patient-facing search — nobody browses us looking for a dentist. Your booking page lives on your own domain and carries your name and your logo. That is the trade: we will not hand you a stranger tomorrow, and we will never show your competitor to a patient who came looking for you.
What does the $199 actually include?
Unlimited appointments and providers, booking embedded on your site or as a standalone link, email confirmations with self-service reschedule and cancel, appointment reminders, and an automatic Google review request after the visit. There is no per-patient charge at any volume. Google Business Profile management — replies, Posts, rank tracking — is the separate Mainstreet plan, and the two add together.
Can I run both for a while?
Yes, and for most practices that is the right way to do it. Put Mainstreet booking on your website, leave your Zocdoc profile alone, and after two months look at where new patients actually came from. If Zocdoc is still earning its fee, keep it. That is a real answer to a real question, and it is cheaper to find out than to argue about.
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