Open Dental
👤 Dr. Jordan Sparks (Practicing dentist and self-taught coder; ran support from his own dental office, then closed the practice to build full-time.)🌐 sitejordansparks.com
A dentist taught himself to code, gave the software away under GPL, and sold the support to 20,000 practices.
Will it work? · our read
Hard to displace. GPL built the trust and the base. Going proprietary in 2024 spends that goodwill. The real moat now is data lock-in and eServices, not open ideals.
01How the money moves
A practice installs Open Dental's PM software
→
It pays a monthly support fee, then adds eServices
→
Support + eServices fees recur across about 20,000 practices
02The numbers
about 20,000
practices run it
opendental
$149-199/mo
US fee per location
fees page
GPL to 2024
open source, now closed
wikipedia
A must-have tool, priced to undercut, that practices can't easily leave. opendental.com
First-party revenue undisclosed; about 20,000 practices pay $149-199/mo plus eServices.
🔒
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
opendental.com — support & eServices feesOpen Dental blog — history & 300+ staffWikipedia — GPL until v24.4, then proprietaryenlyft — about 4.86% US dental-software shareGrowjo — 3rd-party revenue estimate (unreliable)
Existence, founder story, founding year (2003), the GPL-to-proprietary switch at v24.4 (2024), pricing ($149-199/mo/location) and the about 20,000-practices figure are all first-party or documented (opendental.com, its blog, the license page, Wikipedia, and founder Jordan Sparks' own site in Salem, OR). Revenue is NOT disclosed first-party. Third-party estimates conflict wildly and are unreliable (Growjo about $18.6M at a stale 128 employees; other trackers span $6M to $250M; headcount itself is disputed at 128-500). The '$30-50M/yr' figure is OUR floor model = about 20,000 stated practices times the published US support fee, base support only, before eServices and excluding free developing-country installs — order-of-magnitude, not precise. Market share (about 4.86% US) is an enlyft estimate. The license-change drama is documented, not invented. not independently confirmed because no first-party revenue exists. We never score you.