PharmaBro vs OpenLoop: the 2026 comparison

There are broadly two kinds of telehealth infrastructure company, and the difference is not technical.

The first kind makes money when you do. It charges a fee for the service it provides, publishes that fee, and its revenue does not climb just because your ad spend worked. It has no structural reason to design charges into your growth.

The second kind makes money from you. Its revenue is attached to your billings, so every incremental patient your marketing acquired also enlarges the platform's cut. Feature parity is irrelevant to this distinction; it is a question of where the incentive points.

PharmaBro is built the first way. OpenLoop, on the terms operators report, is built the second way. Everything below follows from that.

A one-time setup fee, then a flat monthly platform fee. Launch is $15,000 setup and $1,500 a month for 0 to 500 active patients. Grow is $25,000 and $3,000 for 501 to 2,000. Scale is $50,000 and $5,000 for 2,001 to 5,000. Those numbers are published on the pricing page, not quoted on a call.

A transaction fee that falls as you grow. 3% on Launch, 2% on Grow, 1.5% on Scale. This is the one variable line in PharmaBro's pricing and it is worth being precise about: it is a percentage, and we will treat it as one in the math below rather than describing the platform as purely flat.

Consultation fees apply in month one only. $30 per consult on Launch, $28 on Grow, $25 on Scale. Refills carry no consult fee at any tier, which matters because refills are where a subscription telehealth brand actually lives.

LegitScript certification is included at $0, on every tier. It is filed and managed for you, typically in 7 to 14 days, running in parallel with the build rather than after it.

You own the payment relationship. Your brand connects its own Stripe account through OAuth. Patient payments settle directly into it. PharmaBro never holds the funds, is never the merchant of record, and cannot delay a payout. Your card tokens, patient records, and order history are exportable in full within 24 hours, any day, without a support ticket.

OpenLoop does not publish pricing. Based on operator-reported terms, it charges a percentage of patient billings, commonly cited around 35%, and acts as merchant of record on those payments.

Both halves of that sentence matter, and they are separate problems.

The percentage is charged on revenue you generated

A revenue share is not a platform fee. It is a claim on the output of your own ad spend, your own creative, your own landing pages, and your own retention work. When your CAC improves, the platform's revenue improves with it, and you did the work. At scale this is the single largest line item in a telehealth P&L that has nothing to do with the cost of delivering the service.

Merchant of record decides what happens when you leave

When the platform is merchant of record, the patient's payment relationship is with the platform, not with your brand. Payout timing, chargeback handling, processor relationships, and — critically — the stored card tokens sit on their side. Migrating means re-collecting payment details from every active subscriber, which in practice means losing a meaningful share of them. The switching cost is not the migration project; it is the churn.

Monthly platform cost as a brand grows, at $299 per patient per month. PharmaBro is modelled on its published tiers including the transaction fee; OpenLoop at the operator-reported 35% of billings.

At 100 patients PharmaBro costs roughly a quarter of OpenLoop. At 3,000 it costs roughly one seventeenth, because PharmaBro's transaction fee steps down to 1.5% at Scale while a revenue share does not step down at all. The gap widens with success rather than closing.

In January 2026 OpenLoop disclosed a data breach affecting approximately 716,000 patients, reported through the HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal.

Security incidents happen to serious companies, and this section is not an argument that they do not. The relevant point for a brand operator is structural: brands running on OpenLoop had to handle patient notification and the resulting trust damage for records they did not control. The patients were yours. The relationship was yours. The breach, and the systems, were not.

That is the ownership question again, arriving from an unexpected direction. It is worth asking any infrastructure vendor — PharmaBro included — where patient records physically sit, who is the covered entity, what the BAA says, and how fast you can get a complete export.

OpenLoop is not a thin operation, and pretending otherwise would make this page less useful. It has one of the largest clinical networks in the category, an established enterprise client list, and a compliance posture built for buyers with procurement processes and security reviews.

There are real cases where it is the better fit. If you need deep clinical customisation, unusual specialty coverage, or you are an enterprise buyer for whom a revenue share is an acceptable trade against network breadth and vendor maturity, OpenLoop is a credible choice and PharmaBro may not be.

What we would push back on is the idea that the pricing model is a detail to settle later. For a direct-to-consumer brand buying its own traffic, it is the whole economics.

At 300 patients, the gap is about $326,000 a year. At 1,000, it is over a million. Those numbers are not a feature comparison; they are the cost of the pricing model itself.

PharmaBro's position fits in a sentence: a published setup fee, a published monthly fee, a transaction fee that falls as you scale, LegitScript included, payments settling into a Stripe account your brand owns, and a full data export available any day you ask for one.

If OpenLoop's clinical network is what your brand actually needs, take it. If what you need is to keep the upside your marketing generated, the arithmetic above is the argument.