When we launched BCeph, the most common question we received wasn't about accuracy or landmark placement or which analysis systems were supported. It was: "how much does it cost?" The answer — nothing, no trial period, no credit card required — was met with a follow-up that felt almost accusatory: "but how?"
It's a fair question. The dominant cephalometric software market is expensive. Institutional licenses run into thousands per year. The idea that a capable, multi-analysis cephalometric tool could simply be free, and remain free, requires an explanation. This is that explanation.
The Architecture That Makes It Possible
Most software-as-a-service products are expensive to run because the heavy computation happens on servers — servers that cost money per request, per gigabyte stored, per user session. The provider charges users to cover those costs.
BCeph was built from the start as a local-first application. When you open BCeph in your browser, the entire application loads to your device. When you upload a cephalometric image, it loads into your browser's memory and, by default, is not sent to a server. When you place landmarks, the coordinates are computed on your device. When you run a Steiner or Ricketts or McNamara analysis, the calculations happen in your JavaScript runtime.
BCeph's infrastructure costs are therefore the cost of serving a static website: some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, hosted on a CDN. That cost is negligible relative to the number of analyses being run — and it does not scale with usage the way a server-side application does. A thousand clinicians running BCeph simultaneously costs essentially the same as one clinician running it.
What this means for you: BCeph works offline once it has loaded, and by default nothing is uploaded — your work stays in your browser. If you sign in for cloud backup, your cases sync to your own private Google Firebase account (no BAA — use anonymised case IDs). See our privacy page for the full technical breakdown.
The Sustainability Model
Free does not mean financially unsupported. BCeph is developed by Bayan Healthcare Analytics, which funds its continued development. What makes the model work is the architecture described above: serving BCeph costs little more than hosting a static website, and that cost does not scale with usage — so there is no per-user expense to recover, and no pressure to paywall the core.
This structure is deliberate. The value of BCeph as a platform — the reason clinicians use it, the reason it gets recommended, the reason residents learn on it — is that the core tool is genuinely useful and genuinely free. Restricting that core would undermine the very thing that makes BCeph worth building.
The Clinical Argument
Beyond the architecture and the business model, there is a straightforward clinical reason to keep BCeph free: access to cephalometric analysis should not be a function of practice revenue.
Consider the contexts where free access matters most. A resident in a hospital-based orthodontic training programme, without a commercial software licence, doing research or preparing for a case presentation. A dentist in a lower-income setting, seeing patients who need orthodontic assessment but working in a practice that cannot justify a multi-thousand-dollar annual software subscription. A student learning to trace, without access to the institutional software their teaching hospital uses. An educator in a programme that trains orthodontists without the budget to licence software for every student.
None of these users are edge cases. They represent a substantial proportion of the people who need cephalometric tools and cannot access them under the current commercial model. The software comparison we publish shows the range of tools available and their pricing — the disparity between what BCeph offers and what comparable tools cost is real.
We don't think the solution to this is charity. We think it is building a tool where free access and financial sustainability are structurally compatible — which is what the local-first architecture makes possible.