By
Adam Simmons
· Last checked
August 2026
Five costs are effectively unavoidable:
Registration fees to your regulatory body
Professional liability insurance
Records software
Some way of being reached — a phone number, an email address, or both
Payment processing, taken as a percentage of everything you bill
Everything else is elective in year one. An office, a website, a fax line, scheduling tools, a bookkeeper, supervision beyond what you are required to have, a video platform separate from your records software — all real, all deferrable, and none of them the reason a practice does or does not work.
Registration fees are published, and they vary more than most people expect. Recent annual figures: BC social work $373.25 (BCCSW); social work $400 in both Ontario and Alberta (OCSWSSW · ACSW); Nova Scotia counselling therapy $520 (NSCCT); Ontario psychotherapy $641 plus HST for the full category and $350 plus HST for Qualifying (CRPO); Alberta psychology $1,000 for a registered psychologist and $500 for a provisional one (CAP); BC psychology $1,630 (CHCPBC). They move every year, so read your own College's schedule rather than this list.
Two things sting on the way in. Most of these are not prorated for a mid-year start — Alberta social work states it flatly, "annual fees are non-refundable and are not pro-rated". And getting registered costs well beyond the annual fee once application, examination and jurisprudence fees stack on top.
Insurance goes the other way: cheaper than people fear, and usually bought through an association. Published group rates for a solo practitioner sit roughly between $100 and $230 a year. A social work plan lists $5,000,000 of professional liability plus $5,000,000 of commercial general liability for "$132" (BMS Canada, CASW coverage highlights). A BC counselling plan prices the two separately — professional liability "starts at $3,000,000 for $100" with a "$5,000,000 option [that] starts at $145", and commercial general liability from "$60" (BCACC, Summary of Insurance Benefits). Most other programmes quote after a form rather than publishing a rate.
Check the floor your own regulator sets before you buy. Alberta social work requires "a minimum of $5 million in coverage that must include legal defense coverage" (ACSW), and Nova Scotia counselling therapy requires the policy be "held personally in the name of the registrant" — which means an employer's policy does not count.
The software half of the bill is the part with public numbers attached, and it is smaller than most people expect. Practitioners discussing what they pay describe phone and communication services in the low tens of dollars a month, and bundles that fold in fax, secure messaging and video at the upper end of that. Those are reported figures rather than current quotes, and they are American as often as Canadian.
The phone half is checkable and small. There is no discounted second-number product from a Canadian carrier — a second number is a second plan, and Bell says so: "you will need two rate plans and will be billed separately for the two lines" (Bell, dual SIM support). The cheapest publicly priced Canadian line is prepaid, at "$19/month" with unlimited Canada-wide calling (Koodo). App-based services publish entry prices in the teens — "plans start as low as $14/month" at Grasshopper (pricing), "$19/month" for Talkroute's single-user plan (pricing) — but neither page states a currency and both companies are US-domiciled, so the Canadian cost is higher than the printed number.
Records software is the harder half, because a lot of this category no longer publishes a price you can simply look up. Get the quote in writing, in Canadian dollars, and get it before you compare anything.
Five costs are effectively unavoidable:
Registration fees to your regulatory body
Professional liability insurance
Records software
Some way of being reached — a phone number, an email address, or both
Payment processing, taken as a percentage of everything you bill
Everything else is elective in year one. An office, a website, a fax line, scheduling tools, a bookkeeper, supervision beyond what you are required to have, a video platform separate from your records software — all real, all deferrable, and none of them the reason a practice does or does not work.
Registration fees are published, and they vary more than most people expect. Recent annual figures: BC social work $373.25 (BCCSW); social work $400 in both Ontario and Alberta (OCSWSSW · ACSW); Nova Scotia counselling therapy $520 (NSCCT); Ontario psychotherapy $641 plus HST for the full category and $350 plus HST for Qualifying (CRPO); Alberta psychology $1,000 for a registered psychologist and $500 for a provisional one (CAP); BC psychology $1,630 (CHCPBC). They move every year, so read your own College's schedule rather than this list.
Two things sting on the way in. Most of these are not prorated for a mid-year start — Alberta social work states it flatly, "annual fees are non-refundable and are not pro-rated". And getting registered costs well beyond the annual fee once application, examination and jurisprudence fees stack on top.
Insurance goes the other way: cheaper than people fear, and usually bought through an association. Published group rates for a solo practitioner sit roughly between $100 and $230 a year. A social work plan lists $5,000,000 of professional liability plus $5,000,000 of commercial general liability for "$132" (BMS Canada, CASW coverage highlights). A BC counselling plan prices the two separately — professional liability "starts at $3,000,000 for $100" with a "$5,000,000 option [that] starts at $145", and commercial general liability from "$60" (BCACC, Summary of Insurance Benefits). Most other programmes quote after a form rather than publishing a rate.
Check the floor your own regulator sets before you buy. Alberta social work requires "a minimum of $5 million in coverage that must include legal defense coverage" (ACSW), and Nova Scotia counselling therapy requires the policy be "held personally in the name of the registrant" — which means an employer's policy does not count.
The software half of the bill is the part with public numbers attached, and it is smaller than most people expect. Practitioners discussing what they pay describe phone and communication services in the low tens of dollars a month, and bundles that fold in fax, secure messaging and video at the upper end of that. Those are reported figures rather than current quotes, and they are American as often as Canadian.
The phone half is checkable and small. There is no discounted second-number product from a Canadian carrier — a second number is a second plan, and Bell says so: "you will need two rate plans and will be billed separately for the two lines" (Bell, dual SIM support). The cheapest publicly priced Canadian line is prepaid, at "$19/month" with unlimited Canada-wide calling (Koodo). App-based services publish entry prices in the teens — "plans start as low as $14/month" at Grasshopper (pricing), "$19/month" for Talkroute's single-user plan (pricing) — but neither page states a currency and both companies are US-domiciled, so the Canadian cost is higher than the printed number.
Records software is the harder half, because a lot of this category no longer publishes a price you can simply look up. Get the quote in writing, in Canadian dollars, and get it before you compare anything.
Where does the money actually go?
Three places, in this order.
Percentage costs, which scale with you. Payment processing takes a cut of every session. It feels invisible because it never arrives as a bill, and over a full caseload it is one of the larger line items in the practice.
Fixed monthly software, which does not scale with you and therefore hurts most when you are small. This is the cost that makes a new practice feel precarious, and it is the one people most often over-buy.
Your time, which is not on any statement. Phone tag with referrers, chasing a client to book a fifteen-minute consult, rebuilding forms after switching tools — all of it is unbilled and all of it is real. Practitioners describe working harder to get someone in the door than the prospective client does.
What do people actually get wrong about the cost?
Buying the tier above the one they need. Software pricing pages are built to make the lower tier look irresponsible. Most of what the higher tier adds is for practices with staff.
Paying twice without noticing. Video bundled into records software and also paid for separately is the most common one; forms and file storage are close behind.
Treating cheap as a failure. It is not. One practitioner said plainly that colleagues pay for a second line on their phone plan and they cannot afford it; another said they could not financially sustain the platform they were on. Those are constraints to design around, not evidence of doing it wrong.
Assuming an answering service is the obvious fix for missed calls. Reported pricing for that category runs to hundreds of dollars a month, and practitioners describe it as hard to justify — and separately, hard to trust with a first conversation. Whatever the right answer to missed calls is for you, it is worth pricing before assuming.
What's the smallest bill that is still a real practice?
Registration. Insurance. One records subscription. An email address on a domain you own. A second line on your mobile plan, or blocked outbound caller ID and no published number at all. A directory profile. Payment processing.
That is a complete, defensible solo practice, and the recurring software portion of it is small enough that most people are surprised. Nothing on that list is a compromise — it is what a practice with one clinician and no staff actually requires.
Everything beyond it should be bought in response to a specific repeated problem: "I miss every call because I'm in session and have no window to return them" is a specific repeated problem. "My setup feels unprofessional" is a feeling, and it is responsible for more five-vendor stacks than any real need.
What should I plan for that isn't monthly?
The costs that catch people are annual or one-off:
Registration and insurance renewals, which arrive together and large
Continuing education and supervision
An accountant, once income makes tax non-trivial
Switching costs when you leave a software tool — export, rebuild forms, re-enter clients, and re-tell everyone your new number if the phone changes
That last one is worth pricing before you choose anything, not after. A tool you can leave cheaply is worth paying slightly more for than one you cannot.
The honest bottom line
The unavoidable costs of a Canadian solo practice are registration, insurance, records, being reachable and payment processing. Everything else is a choice, and most of the anxiety about cost in this profession attaches to the choices rather than to the unavoidable part.
If money is tight, the order to cut in is: bundles first, then anything with "suite" in the name, then anything doing a job another tool already does, then the tier you are on. Cut the phone line last — not because it is expensive, but because the callers who never reach you are the only cost on this page that never shows up on a statement.
About Rivet
Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.
One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.