Why Aster
Every reason to be skeptical of us, answered
You are being asked to move your patient records — the thing your practice legally cannot lose — to software you have never heard of, made by people you have never met. That deserves more than a testimonial carousel.
So this page is the version we would want if we were you: what we are, what we are not, and what happens to your data on our worst day.
Who builds this
Aster is built by a small team in Canada. We are not venture-funded and we are not trying to become a platform for everything — we are building practice management software for Canadian allied health clinics, and nothing else.
We started it because the tools in this market punish the thing a clinic owner is trying to do. Hire a practitioner, and the bill goes up. Want to bill insurance, add a line item. Want your notes drafted for you, add another. None of that is unreasonable as a business model. It is just a strange thing to build a clinic on.
A note on the competition
Jane is genuinely good software. It is the benchmark in this market for a reason: the scheduling is excellent, the support has a reputation people go out of their way to mention, and thousands of clinics run happily on it. If you are on Jane and content with what you pay, we are not going to pretend you have a problem. Our argument is narrower than that, and it is below.
The obvious objections
You have no customers. Why would I be first?
We do not have thousands of clinics, and we are not going to invent a number for this page. What we have instead is a product built to a written specification, with the parts that lose people money tested rather than assumed — the ledger balances to the cent under randomised sequences of invoices, payments, refunds and reversals, and double-booking is blocked by the database rather than by a warning dialog.
Being early should come with something in return. Early clinics get direct access to the people building it, and changes shipped in days rather than quarters.
What happens to my patient records if you go out of business?
This is the right question, and most vendors answer it with reassurance rather than mechanism. Ours is a mechanism: you can export your entire clinic — every patient, every chart entry, every invoice — at any time, without asking us, in formats that open in other software. A practitioner leaving your clinic can export their own notes, because their college requires it.
We will not hold your data hostage as a retention tactic, and the export is not a support ticket. It is a button.
How is it this much cheaper? What is the catch?
Two honest reasons. The first is that we are new and have to earn the first hundred clinics, so the price reflects that. The second is where the money is usually made: we charge per practitioner like everyone else, but a tenth practitioner costs us almost nothing to serve, so we do not also charge you for insurance billing, an AI scribe seat, or a tier upgrade to see where your patients came from. The rate per practitioner falls as you grow rather than the bill widening.
The genuine risk, stated plainly: AI transcription and text messages cost us real money per use. If a clinic's usage turned out to be far beyond what we modelled, we would have to introduce a fair-use limit rather than quietly degrade the service. We would tell you before that happened, not after.
Is it actually finished?
Partly, and we would rather you hear that from us. The core of a clinic day is built and working: the schedule, patient records, charting with sign-and-lock, invoicing and payments, Canadian insurance with split patient and insurer invoices, online booking, and the day-end reports.
Not finished yet: the patient portal, the telehealth screen, and the AI Scribe recording interface. If any of those is essential to how you work today, we are not the right choice this quarter — and we would rather say so now than during your onboarding.
Who helps me when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday?
The people who wrote the code. That is an advantage of being small, and it stops being true at some size — but it is true now, and it is worth more than a ticket queue when your schedule will not load and you have a waiting room.
I am not technical. Is this going to be a project?
Setting up a clinic and publishing a bookable page takes about ten minutes. Moving your history from Jane, Cliniko or Noterro is the part that takes real care, and we do it with you against your actual export file — showing you exactly what will land before anything is written.
We also suggest running both systems in parallel for a few weeks. The test we care about is whether your day-end totals match what your old software says. If they do not, we have not finished.
Security and privacy, specifically
Claims here are meant to be checkable. If your college or insurer asks you for detail we have not published, ask us and we will write it down.
- Patient records stay in Canada
- Database and application both run in Canadian regions. We are not a US platform with a Canadian billing address, and your patients' records are not processed elsewhere.
- One clinic cannot see another's data — enforced by the database
- Isolation is a row-level security policy in Postgres, not a filter in application code. A bug in a query returns nothing rather than another clinic's patients.
- The access log records reads, not just writes
- Knowing who looked at a chart is the point of a health-care audit trail, and it is what PHIPA asks for. The log is append-only: it cannot be edited or deleted by anyone, including us.
- Two-factor authentication for every staff account
- Standard TOTP, so it works with any authenticator app.
- Your clinic is the custodian of the record; we are the processor
- We will sign a data processing agreement, and we will keep the list of every service that touches your data current and available on request.
What we have not done yet
An independent penetration test and a completed privacy impact assessment are scheduled, not finished. We will not accept real patient records until both are done. If you are reading this and that has changed, this paragraph will have changed with it.
Should you actually switch?
Switching practice management software is genuinely disruptive. Here is our honest read on when it is worth it and when it is not.
Probably worth a look
- You are growing, and every practitioner you add costs more than a licence — a scribe seat, an insurance add-on, a tier upgrade
- You are paying separately for insurance billing, AI notes, or group telehealth
- Your patient data being processed outside Canada is a problem for you
- You want to know how patients found you, and your current tool cannot tell you
Probably not, yet
- Telehealth or a patient portal is central to how you work today
- You are mid-audit, mid-move, or otherwise already at capacity
- You are happy with what you have and the bill does not bother you
- You need US insurance billing — we do not do it and do not plan to
How you leave
We would rather you knew this before you started than discovered it afterwards.
- Your whole clinic, exportedEvery patient, chart entry, invoice and payment, in open formats. Available to the account owner at any time.
- A single patient recordFor a records request, or when a patient asks — which they are entitled to do.
- A practitioner’s own chartsWhen someone leaves your clinic, they can take their notes. Their college requires it, so the software should not be the obstacle.
- No exit fee, no notice period, no retention callCancel from inside the app.
Try it before you believe us
Set up a clinic with real treatments and prices, publish a booking page, and take a test booking. Ten minutes, no card, and nothing to cancel if you walk away. A 10-practitioner clinic is $350 a month if you stay.