Call five dental offices, say “I don’t have insurance — what does a cleaning cost?”, and you’ll collect five variations of “it depends on what the doctor finds.” That answer isn’t malicious, but it’s useless for budgeting, and the people asking are precisely the people who need a number. Here is ours, from a fee schedule published before we’ve opened.

The straight answer

  • Adult cleaning: $105
  • Child cleaning: $79

But the search phrase hides an assumption. At a dental office, “just a cleaning” almost always travels with company, so the realistic totals look like this:

  • Routine checkup visit: periodic exam ($60) + cleaning ($105) = $165, or $230 in a year when bitewing X-rays ($65) are due.
  • First visit as a new patient: comprehensive exam ($95) + full-mouth X-ray series ($135) + cleaning ($105) = $335.

Two calibration notes on those X-rays. The full-mouth series repeats every three to five years, not every visit. Bitewings are typically a once-a-year event. An office that images you at every cleaning should be able to explain why — and “it’s our protocol” is not a clinical reason.

Why won’t anyone quote this over the phone?

Because most practices are priced for insurance first. The “list” fee is engineered to be discounted by a network contract, the real number varies by which contract, and the cash patient is an afterthought routed to “come in and we’ll do an exam.” The result is genuinely absurd: the person paying with their own money — the one for whom the price matters most — is the only one who can’t see it. That’s the specific absurdity our public founding fee schedule exists to end. Every figure in this article comes from it, and every treatment gets a written quote before it starts.

The fork in the road: when a cleaning isn’t a “cleaning”

The most common ugly surprise in dental pricing isn’t the cleaning itself — it’s the mid-visit upgrade. If the exam finds gum disease, a standard polish is no longer the clinically correct procedure, and the pricing changes lane:

  • Gingivitis cleaning (full mouth): $160 ($128 for members)
  • Deep cleaning — scaling and root planing: $250 per quadrant ($199), and most cases involve two to four quadrants
  • Gum maintenance visits afterward: $140 ($112)

Both of these things are true at once: gum disease is real, common, and quiet, so sometimes the upgrade is exactly right — and an upgrade that triples the bill deserves evidence. Ask to see your pocket-depth measurements (healthy gums probe at shallow depths; disease shows up as numbers, not vibes), and get the full quadrant count and total in writing before the chair reclines. At our studio the written-total-first rule isn’t a courtesy, it’s policy, and the per-quadrant price was on the internet before you walked in.

No insurance: pay per visit, or join the membership?

Run the cash pattern first. The classic twice-a-year routine at our published fees — two exams, two cleanings, bitewings once — comes to $395 a year. Perfectly reasonable, and some people prefer exactly that: pay when you go, nothing on autopay.

Now the membership version. The adult plan is $39 a month ($468 a year) and covers every routine cleaning, exam, and X-ray — not two visits but the full ~90-day rhythm the studio runs on, up to four covered checkups a year — plus a whitening touch-up at each one and 15–25% off everything else on the schedule. The founding rate makes the same plan $348 a year, locked for life, for the first 500 members. That’s less than the two-visit cash pattern while covering twice the care.

For kids the same shape holds: the child plan is $25 a month ($300 a year) against roughly $430 à la carte for two cleanings, two exams, X-rays, and twice-yearly fluoride.

Do I have to pay for the exam? I just want my teeth cleaned.

A fair question with an honest answer: your first cleaning comes with an exam because someone with a dental license needs to confirm a routine cleaning is what your mouth actually needs — that’s patient safety, not bundling. The $60 periodic exams afterward are the cheapest thing a dentist does and the most valuable: it’s the six minutes where a $245 problem gets caught while it’s still a $0 conversation. Members never see either fee — exams and cleanings alike are covered.

Doesn’t visiting every 90 days just cost more?

Only if each visit costs money. For members it doesn’t — frequency is included — and frequency is the entire strategy. Plaque never gets a six-month head start, a suspicious spot gets watched across three short visits instead of discovered at one long one, and the expensive chapter of dentistry (a two-surface filling is $245; a crown is $1,250) tends to stay unwritten. What happens inside those quick visits, minute by minute, is laid out on the cleanings and checkups page.

One footnote for the partially insured: if you have a plan through work and you’re weighing whether it’s worth using here, the insurance page shows where each major Florida carrier stands with us and how out-of-network filing works.

The bottom line

Without insurance, a cleaning here is $105, a full checkup visit is $230, and a new-patient visit is $335 — printed, not “depends.” Or it’s $29 a month with everything routine included, if you’re one of the first 500 people on the list when we open in the Ponte Vedra–Nocatee corridor in September 2026. Claim one of the founding spots — the fee schedule will keep being public either way; the $29 rate won’t keep being available.