Patryk Korzeniowski
Every month you look at three invoices. ZnanyLekarz, Booksy, the agency that runs your website. Together, 4 to 7 thousand zlotys. The clinic adds one treatment chair and the sum scales linearly. Someone from management asks: maybe our own booking system?
The question is a good one, but it almost always comes too late. Most often only after the clinic has spent two years on the portal, gathered hundreds of reviews, half of the patients return through ZnanyLekarz, and no one really knows what happens if you just switch the account off. Or too early, when the practice has 40 visits a month and each portal does the marketing work that someone else would otherwise need to do.
This piece breaks the decision into parts. What a portal really costs, what your own system really costs, at what scale one beats the other, and in which scenario a hybrid works better than either option alone.
What you buy on ZnanyLekarz or Booksy
ZnanyLekarz and Booksy are not booking systems. They are acquisition channels with a booking system bundled inside. They should be assessed like any other marketing channel: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, leaflets. With one difference: a piece of your data stays in the portal's wallet.
What you get. A clinic profile visible when patients search by specialty and city. Doctor profiles with reviews collected over the years. An online booking calendar. SMS and email notifications to the patient included in the subscription. Mobile app access. Help with photos, descriptions and profile optimisation. Traffic from the portal's very strong SEO under phrases like cardiologist Warsaw Mokotow.
What you pay. The model varies between portals and changes every few months. A realistic bill for a clinic of 5 to 15 people in a larger Polish city in 2026: subscription of 800 to 2,500 PLN per month for the clinic profile plus 200 to 500 PLN per month for each doctor profile. Featured listings, ads on the search list and top positions all cost extra. Check current pricing directly at znanylekarz.pl and booksy.com, because no two months look quite the same.
For a practice with two full-time doctors the realistic bill is 2 to 4 thousand PLN monthly. For a clinic with ten doctors: 5 to 10 thousand PLN monthly. Plus featured listings when you want to grow faster.
What you buy with your own booking system
Your own booking system is not an application you buy once. It is either a module integrated with the clinic website, or a SaaS dedicated to the Polish medical sector. You can also build a tailored solution to specific clinic needs, as an extension of the existing website and an integration with your EHR.
What you get. Full control of the patient database (email, phone, visit history, preferences). No commission per visit. The ability to integrate with the existing EHR (Mediporta, KSWeb, Eskulap, KS-SOMED, AMMS). Your own branding on the entire booking path. Full freedom in no-show policy, deposits, packages and vouchers. Access to analytics data the portal will not hand over.
What you pay. Realistic tiers in Poland in 2026: a dedicated medical SaaS costs 500 to 2,000 PLN per month depending on the number of doctors, plus a one-off onboarding and configuration cost of 3 to 8 thousand. Custom integration with the existing website (a tailored build) costs 25 to 50 thousand PLN one-off, plus 200 to 600 PLN per month for maintenance. Patient SMS messages cost operator rates (Twilio, SMSAPI, Serwer SMS), realistically 8 to 20 grosz per message, added to the bill every month regardless of the scenario.
The break-even threshold is not calculated from the cost of the system itself. It is calculated from the cost of the portal that, thanks to the own system, you no longer need or that you are gradually leaving.
Three portal costs you do not see in the price list
The subscription price is only part of the bill. The rest does not appear on the invoice, but it shapes the structure of the clinic revenue over the long run.
1. The patient database is not yours. The portal holds the contact details of all patients who booked through their channel. Your clinic only has a record of the visit that took place. If one day you decide to leave the portal, you will not take that list of patients with you. GDPR gives you grounds to receive the data of a patient you yourself treated (as a medical entity with medical documentation), but not the contact list of the portal. Over 3 to 5 years you gather patients you will lose as a channel on the day you part ways with the portal.
2. The ranking belongs to someone else's algorithm. The portal decides where your profile appears in the results. You can climb, you can fall. The rules are opaque. A clinic that a year ago was top 3 for gynaecologist Wroclaw can drop overnight to position 12, because the portal changed the weight of reviews or admitted a new competitor with a higher subscription. The same applies to Google SEO. Your domain builds your authority, the profile on the portal builds the portal authority, not yours.
3. Commissions scale linearly, not in steps. The more visits come from the portal, the higher the bill. In your own system the marginal cost of one more visit is close to zero (an SMS plus a fraction of a percent on the hosting bill). Every extra visit from the portal costs you as much as the first one that month. For a growing clinic this matters 12 and 24 months after launch, when the portal decision returns with a different weight than in the first year.
When the portal is the right choice
Despite everything above, the portal is not a mistake. There are scenarios where staying with ZnanyLekarz or Booksy is the more economically sound choice than building your own.
Small scale. A solo practice with 30 to 60 monthly visits. The portal profile sells itself, reviews gather along the way, the subscription cost is lower than any own module. Here the portal wins operationally, even if the practice loses control of the database in the long run.
Seasonal coverage or a new specialty. A clinic launching a new specialty or onboarding a new doctor has a real problem of zero visibility. The portal puts them on the surface of local traffic in 2 to 4 weeks, where own SEO needs 6 to 12 months to build. The portal becomes a form of advertising with built-in conversion.
No own marketing. A clinic that does not want, or cannot, sustain its own process of collecting Google reviews, local SEO, blog content and social media profiles. The portal does this for you, at the cost of margin and control. Sometimes this is an acceptable compromise, especially for smaller entities.
The threshold where your own solution pays back faster
A simplistic calculation a clinic director can do alone in 15 minutes on a sheet of paper.
Take the monthly sum you pay the portals. Add commissions. Add featured listings. Estimate how many hours per week the receptionist or manager spends coordinating between the portal and the clinic calendar (rewriting bookings, resolving time conflicts, manual confirmations). Value those hours realistically, with employer cost, not just the gross salary.
The annual sum of these items is your benchmark. If it exceeds 50 to 70 thousand PLN per year, a custom own system is the economically right call already in year one. For a clinic of 5 to 30 people with 150+ visits per week and 5 to 10 thousand PLN of monthly portal fees, the threshold typically falls in month 4 to 8 after the own system goes live. This matches the return described in the analysis of pricing tiers for a clinic website, where the full acquisition machine with booking returns in a similar horizon.
For a dedicated medical SaaS the threshold falls earlier, typically after 3 to 6 months. In exchange, you accept a feature set arranged by the vendor, not built around your specific clinic. This is a sound choice at a scale where payoff is measured in months, not quarters.
The hybrid is often the answer
The most common variant in clinics of 5 to 30 people, after 2 to 3 years on a portal, is not to switch the portal off overnight. That is usually a recipe for losing patients who got used to booking in one specific place.
The hybrid model. Your own booking system on the clinic website as the primary solution, the portal as an acquisition channel for new patients. A patient who comes in for the first time through the portal receives a normal visit, but from the second visit on, the clinic system proactively nudges them toward direct booking (a thank-you email after the visit with a link to the patient panel, a link to the next direct booking without commission, optionally a newsletter for regular patients).
In practice, after 12 to 18 months of the hybrid, the structure of visits shifts: regulars book directly (zero commission), new patients come from the portal (a paid acquisition channel). The clinic pays the portal for what the portal really does well (acquiring new clients through strong SEO), not for every visit by a patient who already knows you and types the address into the browser themselves.
This model needs one thing most clinics do not do: encouragement to book directly in the post-visit communication. SMS after the visit, thank-you email, a patient panel available after the first booking. This is a one-off cost in the design phase of the own system, and cheap to run afterwards.
Questions worth asking yourself before the decision
Before you sign a new contract with the portal, or start a project to build your own system, run an internal audit in five areas.
- How much do you actually pay the portals monthly, including featured listings and commissions? How many work hours per week go to portal-calendar coordination?
- What share of your visits are first-time patients from the portal, and what share are returning patients who could be booking directly?
- Do you have your own process for collecting Google reviews outside the portal? Do you have your own patient contact base, independent of the portal?
- Can the existing EHR sync with an own booking system? If yes, at what cost (one-off connector or ongoing API licence)?
- If the portal changes its business model or disappears from the market (as has happened with Booksy pricing), what stays with you and what do you use the next day?
The first three questions are about plain economics. The fourth is about the operational possibility of migration. The fifth is about a business risk few people think about until it happens. Booksy changed its pricing terms several times since 2020, ZnanyLekarz redefined its subscription model in 2024. A clinic that has the portal as its only channel is a customer of the portal, not the other way round.
Instead of a summary
The portal is not a mistake, the own system is not a holy grail. They are two different cost and control structures, each appropriate for a different phase of clinic growth.
A solo practice and a small clinic up to 30 to 50 monthly visits usually win on the portal. A clinic of 5 to 30 people with 150+ visits per week usually wins on the hybrid: own booking system as the primary solution, the portal as an acquisition channel for new patients. A large clinic or a multi-site network usually has no choice: the portal does not scale economically or operationally to an entity of this size, and here the own system is the natural choice.
If you do not know which scenario you are in, there is one path. A free automated scan in 48 hours shows how the clinic website looks today (WCAG, GDPR, performance, medical schema.org). A paid audit at PLN 4,900 is something else: two weeks, a manual business-SEO-compliance-UX analysis plus a concrete recommendation on whether an own system pays off for your clinic, which SaaS fits, or whether the hybrid is the right road. A one-hour conversation with the author of the audit is included. The audit fee is 100 percent credited against the package price if you decide to continue working with us within 60 days.
If you run a larger clinic and are thinking about compliance with sector regulations, see also NIS2 in 2026: who it applies to and what to do now. The booking system is one of the points reviewed when assessing the security maturity of a medical entity, regardless of whether you chose a portal, a dedicated SaaS or your own integration.
