Dental Software Contracts and Exit Fees

PickMyPMS Editorial · Last reviewed Sep 30, 2026

The number that matters

Of the 40 systems tracked on this site, most publish something about how long you are committed for. Far fewer publish what happens when you want out, and almost none publish a price for it.

A contract term is easy to find because it is a selling point: twelve months sounds reasonable. The notice period, the auto-renewal clause and the cost of getting your records out are the parts you meet at the end, and they are where the money is.

What locks you in

Three clauses do the work, and they compound.

The initial term is usually twelve months. Open Dental, Oryx, Curve Dental, Practice-Web and Dentrix Ascend all run twelve. Eaglesoft’s Service Club plans require a 24-month enrolment, the longest we found. ABELDent’s Microsoft Marketplace plans are one-year subscriptions billed from the go-live date.

The auto-renewal clause is what turns one year into several. Most of these renew for another full term unless you give notice in time. Archy renews in successive one-month periods, which is unusually forgiving. Open Dental, Oryx and DSN Software’s cloud product go month-to-month after year one, which is the friendliest shape on this list.

The notice period runs backwards from the end of your term, not forwards from the day you decide. Curve Dental and Practice-Web want 90 days’ written notice. Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend and OrthoTrac want 60. Archy, CareStack, Cloud 9 and Denticon want 30. If you are on a twelve-month term with 90 days’ notice, your actual window to leave without paying for another year is nine months into a twelve-month cycle.

Cloud 9 and Denticon are worth reading twice. Non-renewal takes 30 days’ notice, but cancelling for convenience takes 60, and the fees for the rest of the current term become due immediately.

What it costs to leave

Three vendors publish a figure, and they are the only ones on this site that do.

Archy gives you one export of your data at no cost in a structured, common format, provided you ask in writing on or before the termination date. Miss that and continued access runs $200 a month, after which Archy deletes the data.

Cloud 9 and Denticon, both Planet DDS products, charge $995 per extract for XVWeb patient and imaging data. Their written terms expect the practice to pull its own copy before termination; after that you have ten business days to ask them to post it somewhere, and it stays available for 30 days.

iDentalSoft does not call it an exit fee, but cancelling before the initial term ends carries a charge equal to the lesser of the remaining payments or three months of fees.

Everyone else publishes nothing on the subject, which is not the same as free: you find out what it costs when you ask, which is the worst moment to be negotiating it.

Getting your records out

This is the part that decides how painful a move is, and the terms vary more than the prices do.

Open Dental sits at one end: the data is in an open MySQL database the practice controls, so there is nothing to request. Oryx exports structured data as CSV and gives you documents, images, radiographs and DICOM files in their original formats, with no export fee stated, and says it does not delete anything until you have had time to pull it.

Dentrix Ascend gives you a copy in SQL database format on request when the agreement ends, and can delete anything you have not asked for within 90 days. CareStack will help you export for up to 90 days after expiry, in a format CareStack chooses, billed at its hourly rates, with ten days’ notice and a 15-day delivery target. Curve Dental lets you download from inside the application in a format compatible with Excel, but its published page does not cover images, documents, or access after cancellation.

Read those four again. Same product category, four very different answers to “can I take my records with me.”

What to ask before you sign

Five questions, in the order they will cost you money:

1. What is the initial term, and what does the renewal term become?
2. How many days before the end of the term is notice due, and does it have to be in writing?
3. If I cancel for convenience mid-term, what becomes payable immediately?
4. What is the format of a full data export, what does it cost, and how long after termination can I request it?
5. Does that export include images, documents and radiographs, or only the structured records?

Get the answers on the order form, not in an email from a rep. Every figure in the table below came from a vendor’s own published terms, and in most cases those terms are the only place the answer is written down.

Where these come from

Every row links to the document it came from and the date we last checked it. “Not published” means we could not find the vendor stating it anywhere public. It does not mean no term exists: for several of these products the initial term is set on an order form that is never published, which is itself worth knowing before you ask for a quote.