New agencies
Do not buy software yet
You are licensed, you have a few clients, and everyone is trying to sell you a platform. There are four things worth doing before you spend anything, and one of them may mean you spend nothing.
Four things first
1. Find out whether you will bill Medicaid
This single answer determines almost everything else. Medicaid work brings EVV obligations, enrollment, and a payer with rules. Private pay work brings none of that. Many new agencies start private pay and add Medicaid later, which is a perfectly good order to do it in.
2. Find out what your state gives you free
If you will bill Medicaid, most states provide an EVV system at no cost, and it often includes scheduling and a caregiver app. It may be all you need for a year. Establishing this before you buy anything is the highest-value hour in this list, and no vendor is going to volunteer it.
3. Work out who sets your rules
State Medicaid agency for fee-for-service, each individual plan for managed care. Ask them directly, and ask whether a third-party system is even permitted. Our readiness check gives you the questions to ask in order.
4. Only then, look at what is missing
Buy to fill a gap you have actually hit, not one a salesperson described. At five caregivers you may genuinely not have a scheduling problem yet.
Three traps that catch new owners
The annual contract you sign in month one
Your agency will look different in six months. Committing for a year before you know your own shape, at a size where a wrong monthly cost genuinely hurts, is the most common expensive mistake. Ask what happens if you cancel in month three, and get the answer in writing.
Paying for a system built for someone ten times your size
Enterprise home care platforms are built for agencies with hundreds of caregivers and staff whose whole job is running them. At twelve caregivers you will use a fraction of it and pay for all of it, and the interface will fight you every day.
Starting on paper because it is free
Paper is genuinely fine at four caregivers. It stops being fine somewhere around ten, and the transition is much harder once you have a year of history in a filing cabinet and habits built around it. Watch for the moment payroll starts taking a full morning.
Where we fit, honestly
We are built for agencies with roughly 5 to 40 caregivers, which includes most agencies in their first two years. The Starter plan is $99 a month for up to 8 caregivers, published rather than quoted, with no contract and no setup fee.
Two things that matter specifically at your stage. There is nothing to unlearn later, because every plan includes every feature and the only thing that changes as you grow is the price band. And your data exports at any time in formats you can take elsewhere, so choosing us now does not trap you.
If your state gives you a free portal that covers everything you do, use that instead. We say so on our pricing page too, where it costs us signups.
Not the right fit if
- You are Medicare-certified home health and need clinical documentation or OASIS
- You have three caregivers and can hold the whole week in your head
- You want one system that also does billing, claims and accounting
- You have not yet checked what your state provides free, which is step two above
Start when you are ready, not before
14 day trial. No card required. The clock starts at your first caregiver check-in.