DENTAI: a Recall Max competitor built on our own terms.
Two years of engineering against a $600/month incumbent that owns the dental reminder market. Live production infrastructure. First clinical deployment April 26, 2026.
At a glance
Problem
Dental practices pay Recall Max ~$600/mo for reminders and nothing else. Locked into one PMS (ABELDent, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental), waiting years for basic features. Patient flow, video consults, admin — scattered across five tools.
What we built
A unified platform with three separate frontends (admin, clinic staff, patient), a WebSocket bridge for bidirectional PMS sync, SMS + voice reminders, video consultations, and three independent JWT auth flows. All on infrastructure we own.
Result
Production live on DigitalOcean Toronto (PIPEDA-compliant). First clinical deployment at co-founder's practice, April 26, 2026. Addressable market: 230,000 North American dental practices. Pricing anchor: $7.2M ARR at 1,000 practices.
The hard parts we solved
Integration · the PMS bridge
Bidirectional sync without vendor APIs
ABELDent doesn't expose a public API. We built a bridge app installed on the dental office's local server that opens an outbound WebSocket to DENTAI — no inbound port, no VPN, no compliance nightmare. Patient records sync nightly, appointments every minute, and DENTAI pushes creates/cancels back immediately. The same pattern extends to Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and Open Dental.
Auth · three user classes
Three independent auth flows in one monorepo
Staff log in with passwords and belong to a clinic. Patients log in with phone + OTP + date of birth (no password — compliance). Admins impersonate clinics for support. Three JWT systems, three session models, one NestJS application. We standardized the guards so adding a new user class is a half-day of work.
Real-time · video + presence
WebRTC teledoc without a signaling provider
Video consultations run simple-peer over our own Socket.io signaling. No Twilio Video, no Agora, no per-minute fees. Doctors see which patients are in the waiting room in real time. SSR compatibility was the trick — we load the peer library dynamically on mount.
Compliance · Canadian market
PIPEDA-ready from day one
Production runs in DigitalOcean Toronto. Patient data never leaves Canadian data centers. SMS routes through Canadian numbers. The same data-residency architecture maps directly to HIPAA/BAA — just pointed at a different region.
Why this matters if you're shipping vertical SaaS
DENTAI is the proof we can build a full production healthcare platform end-to-end — from the bridge software on the customer's server, through the compliance layer, to the patient-facing UI. If you're replacing a $600/month incumbent in dental, vet, physical therapy, optometry, or any specialty PMS market, we've already mapped the hard parts.
- Bridge-app architecture — works with any PMS, no vendor API required
- Three-auth model — staff, patients, admins, all independent
- SSR-safe WebRTC — own your video infra, no per-minute fees
- Data-residency deployment — PIPEDA today, HIPAA/GDPR tomorrow
DENTAI is a joint product with a dentist co-founder, built on ULTRATECH SPACE engineering. This case study describes the technical architecture and patterns reusable for other vertical SaaS builds. All customer data resides in PIPEDA-compliant infrastructure the clinic controls.