CliniCore vs Koko

The disagreement is about one word: entered

Koko's fix for billing gaps, in their own words, is a consultation flow “where every service performed in the consultation flows onto the invoice, prices come from a rate list.” That is a good design. It removes an entire class of error — the service that was recorded but priced from memory, or recorded and then forgotten at checkout.

But read the sentence again and notice what it assumes. Every service performed flows onto the invoice, provided somebody entered it as a structured line item during the consult. The plumbing is guaranteed from the entry field onward. It cannot be guaranteed before the entry field, and before the entry field is exactly where the money goes.

Think about the failure mode you actually recognise. You expressed the anal glands while the owner was holding the dog. You gave the B-complex injection because the animal looked flat. You flushed the wound before you sutured it. You said all of it out loud, and some of it ended up in the note. Nobody opened a billing screen and typed it in, because your hands were full and the next owner was already at the door. A system that bills what was entered has nothing to work with here. There is no line item to carry forward.

CliniCore starts one step earlier. The scribe captures what you said. The daily leakage scan reads the clinical note, the labs and the prescriptions, compares them against the invoice, and shows you what is missing before the day closes. It is not a reminder that you should bill carefully. It is a list of specific things you did today and did not charge for.

Why per-message WhatsApp billing works against you

Koko publishes its pricing model but not its prices. What they do publish is the shape: “a one-time onboarding fee, followed by monthly billing based only on WhatsApp message usage. No annual maintenance charges and no hidden costs.”

For a very small clinic sending few messages, that is genuinely cheap, and the “unlimited staff users on every plan” promise alongside it is a good one. But look at what the model prices. The thing being metered is the reminder — which is to say, the thing that recovers the overdue vaccination, wins back the lapsed patient, and stops the no-show. Koko's own five-leak post says three of the five leaks are closed by messaging. Under a per-message model, closing them costs more.

That is not a scandal, it is a pricing choice, and reasonable people make it. It does mean your monthly bill moves with your outreach, which makes it hard to forecast and creates a small, constant incentive to send less. CliniCore includes WhatsApp reminders in the plan fee and does not meter them. We would rather absorb the message cost and have you send every reminder that is due.

Publishing the price is the whole argument

Koko does not publish a rupee figure anywhere we could find, on any page, as of 1 September 2026. The route to a number is a thirty-minute demo. Their FAQ is explicit that the demo is free and carries no obligation, which is fair, and plenty of good companies sell this way.

CliniCore's prices are on the pricing page: ₹1,999 a month for Core, ₹3,499 for Revenue, ₹4,999 for Hospital, with annual billing charged at ten months. You can read that, decide we are too expensive, and never speak to us. We think that trade is worth it. A demo-gated price means the number you are quoted can depend on how you answered the discovery questions, and you will never know whether it did.

The same logic runs through the trial. Koko offers a demo. CliniCore offers fourteen days in the actual product with no card, because the only honest way to find out whether software survives your Tuesday morning OPD is to run your Tuesday morning OPD on it.

The migration question nobody is answering

We could not find any statement from Koko about moving your existing data in — not on the homepage, not on the demo page. That is not an accusation that they cannot do it; it is a statement that they do not say. It matters because migration is where switching costs live, and silence on the subject is what keeps clinics on software they have stopped liking.

CliniCore's import wizard is self-serve and free. It brings across owners, pets, medicines and vaccinations from Excel or CSV, maps the columns for you, and validates row by row so you find the twelve bad phone numbers before they are in your database rather than after. That is the honest scope: it is not a magic importer for every legacy system, and complicated histories still take a conversation. But there is no migration invoice at the end of it.

Where we would tell you to buy Koko

If you want a pet-parent app, buy Koko. We do not have one and we are not building one this year — our bet is that in India the owner is already on WhatsApp and will not download a second app for their vet, but that is a bet, not a proven fact, and you may disagree.

If you run or refer heavily into a diagnostic lab and want the lab and the clinic on one vendor, buy Koko. Koko Labs is a real second product and CliniCore has nothing equivalent; we handle lab reports as attachments to the record, not as a lab operating system.

If you want AI that summarises a long patient history before you walk into the room, Koko has it today and we do not. What we have is AI pointed at a different target — the money you already earned. Those are different products for different problems, and you should buy the one that matches the problem keeping you up.