Using AI to Compare Two Dental Quotes Side by Side

Two quotes for the same tooth can come back £600 apart, and the headline total usually tells you almost nothing about why. One practice bundles the scan, the crown and the follow-up into a single figure. The other lists the implant on its own and leaves the crown as a line in small print saying “restoration fee payable on completion”. If you compare the totals, you’re comparing two different things.

AI tools can’t tell you whether you need the treatment. What they can do well, quickly and for free, is take two messy documents and line them up item by item so the gaps show. When you compare dental quotes, that’s the useful part, and it’s what this guide covers.

Why the totals mislead you

UK practices don’t have a standard format for private treatment plans. Some print every stage. Others give a “from” price. Some include the consultation and X-rays in the total, while others charge for them separately before the plan is even written. NHS plans in England come on an FP17DC form with a band charge, but plenty of NHS plans also include private extras (a white filling on a back tooth, a hygienist visit, a tooth-coloured crown instead of a metal one), and these sit on a separate line or a separate sheet.

So the question isn’t “which quote is cheaper?” It’s “what does each quote actually include, and what will I end up paying once the missing bits are added?” A chatbot is surprisingly good at answering that second question, as long as you give it both documents and a clear instruction.

What you need before you start

Get both quotes in a form you can paste or upload. A PDF is ideal. A clear phone photo of a printed plan works too, because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot can all read text from a photo or PDF you attach.

Before uploading, black out or crop out your name, address, date of birth and NHS number. The AI doesn’t need any of them to compare prices. If your plan uses tooth numbers like “UR6” or “36”, leave those in, because they’re how you check both practices are quoting for the same tooth.

You should also have each practice’s price list if it’s on their website. Many quotes leave out items that the price list covers, and the AI can cross-reference the two.

The prompt that does the work

Most people paste in a quote and ask “is this a fair price?” That gets you a vague answer. Ask for a table instead, and tell the AI to flag anything missing.

I've attached two dental treatment quotes from different UK practices
for what I think is the same treatment. Please:

1. List every item on each quote in a single table, one row per item,
   with a column for Practice A and a column for Practice B.
2. Where one practice lists an item and the other doesn't, write
   "not listed" rather than leaving it blank.
3. Underneath, list any items that are normally part of this treatment
   but aren't on either quote.
4. Give me a "likely real total" for each practice, assuming the
   missing items are charged at typical UK private prices. Show your
   working and say clearly which figures are estimates.
5. Write 5 questions I should email to each practice to fill the gaps.

Don't tell me which practice to choose. Just make the differences clear.

That last line matters. Left to itself, a chatbot will often try to reassure you or pick a winner. You want the comparison, not the verdict.

Worked example: two implant quotes

Here’s a realistic pair of quotes for a single implant replacing a lower left molar (tooth 36). Practice A’s letter headlines £1,995. Practice B’s headlines £2,750. On the face of it, A is £755 cheaper.

This is the kind of table ChatGPT produced when given both documents and the prompt above:

Underneath it wrote:

Missing from both quotes: temporary tooth during healing (if wanted),
hygiene visits required to keep the guarantee valid.

Likely real total, Practice A:
  Consultation £60 + scan £150 + implant £1,995 = £2,205 (stated)
  + abutment and crown: Practice A's website price list shows
    "implant restoration from £895" → £895
  = £3,100 minimum
  + bone graft if needed (typical UK range £350–£600, estimate)
  = roughly £3,450–£3,700 if grafting is required

Likely real total, Practice B:
  £2,750 (stated, includes scan, consultation, abutment and crown)
  + £400 bone graft if required
  = £2,750–£3,150

So the “cheaper” quote is at least £350 more expensive, and could be over £500 more. Nobody was being dishonest. Practice A’s letter was just a quote for the surgical stage, which is a common way to present implant fees. You’d only notice by reading the fine print and the website side by side, which most people won’t do the evening they get the letter.

Treat the AI’s estimates as estimates. In this example the £895 came from the practice’s own price list, so it’s solid. The bone graft range is a typical figure, not a quote, and the questions the AI drafted are how you turn it into a real number.

Worked example: NHS plan with private add-ons

Mixed NHS and private plans confuse people more than fully private ones, because two different pricing systems sit on one sheet of paper.

Say you’re in England and have been told you need a root canal and a crown on an upper molar. Practice C’s plan shows “Band 3: £326.70” (the England Band 3 charge from April 2025; check nhs.uk for the current figure, as it usually changes each April). It also shows “Private upgrade: E.max crown £595”. Practice D, a fully private practice, quotes £850 for the molar root canal and £750 for the crown, so £1,600 in total.

Paste both in and ask the AI to separate what the NHS band covers from what’s private, and you get something like:

The useful thing the AI pointed out was that the Band 3 charge already pays for a crown. The £595 isn’t the price of a crown; it’s the price of choosing a different material. You’re entitled to the NHS version, which on a back tooth may be metal or metal with a tooth-coloured layer, depending on what’s clinically appropriate. That changes the decision from “£921 or £1,665” to “do I care what the crown on a back molar looks like enough to pay £595 for it?”

You’ll also notice that Practice D’s £65 exam wasn’t in their headline. It only appeared because the AI went through the letter line by line.

Getting the AI to spot what both quotes left out

The third instruction in the prompt, “list items normally part of this treatment that aren’t on either quote”, catches the costs that turn up later. For implants that’s often the temporary tooth, extra X-rays at the review and the hygiene visits a guarantee depends on. With braces and clear aligners like Invisalign, retainers and replacement retainers are the usual extras (often £150–£300 per set). Bridges and dentures tend to leave out the adjustment appointments.

AI tools are fairly reliable at listing typical stages of common treatments because this information is widely published. They’re less reliable at prices for unusual treatments or at anything specific to your mouth, so treat their price ranges as a prompt to ask, not an answer. If you want more on what chatbots get right and wrong about dental questions generally, the guide to asking AI about your teeth goes through it.

Turning the gaps into an email

Once you have the table, the questions the AI drafts are worth sending almost as written. For the implant example above, Claude produced these for Practice A:

1. Does the £1,995 include the abutment and crown? If not, what is the
   total fee for both for tooth 36?
2. Will I need a bone graft? If you can't say until surgery, what is
   the fee if one is needed?
3. Are any review appointments or follow-up X-rays charged separately?
4. Do you offer a guarantee on the implant or crown, and what are the
   conditions?
5. Is the £60 consultation fee deducted if I go ahead?

A practice that answers clearly and in writing is telling you something useful too. If one practice sends back a full itemised breakdown within a day and the other replies “it depends, best to book in”, that’s information you didn’t have before.

A few things that trip people up

Check the tooth numbers match. UK practices use either the Palmer system (UR6, LL6) or the FDI system (16, 36), and the AI can translate between them if you ask. If one practice is quoting for a different tooth, or for two teeth where the other quoted one, the comparison is meaningless until you’ve sorted that out.

Watch for “from” prices. A crown “from £550” might be £550 for a front tooth and £750 for a molar. Ask the AI to highlight every “from” figure, then ask the practice to confirm the exact one.

Don’t upload the X-rays expecting a second opinion on the diagnosis. General-purpose chatbots aren’t built to read dental radiographs reliably, and they’ll sometimes describe things confidently that aren’t there. If you doubt whether you need the treatment at all, a second dentist looking at you in person is the way to find out, and the comparison table is a good thing to take along.

Finally, ask the AI to redo the table whenever a practice replies with new figures. Paste the reply in, say “update the table with this”, and you’ll have a current, like-for-like comparison to look at before deciding which practice gets the deposit.