What Is the True Cost of AlignerCo?

Between the time, energy and money involved, straightening your teeth can sometimes feel like an intimidating process. Fortunately, at-home clear aligner services like AlignerCo have made this process a lot easier — and much less expensive.

AlignerCo’s sticker price is just $995, compared to Invisalign’s $5,000 average. But spending nearly a thousand dollars is still a significant investment, and you may be wondering what your bottom-line cost will be. This can be difficult to calculate on your own between discounts, financing, add-ons, and aftercare.

That’s what we’re here to clear up. In this guide, we’ll lay out all the factors that play a role in your total treatment cost, and give you a better idea of the amount you can expect to spend on AlignerCo treatment.

Sticker Price

AlignerCo’s sticker price is $995 for their standard SmileAdvantage package, which requires 20–22 hours of wear per day. With this package, you’ll pay the full amount upfront, and it includes your dental impression kit, 3D treatment plan, aligners, and one set of aftercare retainers.

Their nighttime aligner plan, NightAdvantage (8–10 hours of wear a day), comes with all the bells and whistles of the daytime plan. If you pay upfront, NightAdvantage costs $1,195.

If possible, paying upfront for your AlignerCo treatment will end up costing you less in the long run. However, if you don’t have an extra $1,000 lying around, AlignerCo offers multiple financing options, which we will explore later!

Additional Costs

Impression Kit

When you pay for one of AlignerCo’s treatment plans upfront, they’ll include an impression kit with your package. If their team later determines that you’re not eligible for treatment, they’ll issue a full refund.

If you want to avoid that by completing the impression kit before buying the $995 treatment plan, you can buy the impression kit on its own for $75, or $59.99 when it’s on sale.

Whitening

AlignerCo’s whitening kit is an additional option if you want to make your smile shine even brighter. This kit comes with a thermoform mouth tray, an LED light, and three containers of whitening gel. When you run out, you can purchase additional whitening pens for $14.99 each.

Sometimes their sale prices on their full packages will include the perk of a complimentary whitening kit, so keep your eye out if you like your pearly white extra pearly.

Pull tool

This $15 tool helps you take out your aligners. It may make removal easy, but perhaps the simple joy of not having to shove your fingers into your mouth is enough to deem this a priority.

Chewies

Chewies are little cylinders made of a soft, spongy material that help you get your aligners into position. This $15 product is not absolutely essential for the aligners to work, but certainly a helpful add-on.

Retainers

After you finish any teeth-straightening treatment (whether it’s at-home aligners, Invisalign, or braces), you need to wear a nightly retainer in perpetuity to keep your teeth in place. Each clear aligner company has a different system and price for their retainers, so it’s important to know ahead of time which one will work best for you.

AlignerCo offers an aftercare package called the Smile Protection Plan. For $680 (or $549 on sale), they will mail you eight spare retainers—four years’ worth. This puts the cost of each retainer at $62.38 if you get them on sale. They’ll ship all eight retainers at once, so you won’t have to wait for a new one if you lose or break yours.

Your initial aligner package comes with your first set of retainers (upper and lower). After that, the Smile Protection Plan is a good way to ensure you preserve the smile you’ve worked so hard for.

Discounts and Promotions

AlignerCo’s price is already pretty low, but they’ll also run occasional sales on their aligners and other products. These sales don’t always correspond with major holidays, so if you are someone with a discount alarm set to go off Black Friday and Black Friday alone, it may behoove you to check their site for sales on a more regular basis instead.

AlignerCo offers discounts for folks currently enlisted or who have previously served in the military. They also offer the same discount to teens. If you are a teen, veteran, or active military member, you can receive an additional $50 off your total, even off of a sale price. And if you refer a friend who ends up purchasing treatment, they’ll get $100 off and you’ll get $100.

Refinements

If you follow your treatment plan, and at the end of your treatment you do not think that your smile matches the Smile Projection outlined for you by AlignerCo’s techs, then you can apply for refinements to adjust your smile further. AlignerCo’s reviews suggest this process is relatively simple, as long as you have followed your treatment plan.

If you didn’t follow your treatment plan — or AlignerCo decides that your smile does match your Smile Projection presented at the beginning of treatment — then your refinements will cost around $200. With at-home aligners, it’s relatively common to need a little refinement after completing treatment — so we wouldn’t panic too much about it (as long as you stick to your treatment plan).

Financing Options

AlignerCo offers financing options through two different third-party companies, Affirm and partial.ly. Each of these lenders charge fees, so the particulars of each company are definitely something to consider when choosing which financing option works best for you.

Affirm requires a soft credit check. This won’t affect your credit score, but means not everyone will be approved. The options for monthly payment amounts will vary based on your credit score. So if your credit score is on the lower side, Affirm may end up charging you more in fees than if your score were higher.

Partial.ly doesn’t require a credit check, so everyone is approved. The fees with this lender do not vary, you will just put $595 down (for the daytime aligner package), and then pay $100 a month for six months. This brings your grand total to $1,195, which is $200 more than paying for the package upfront.

If you choose AlignerCo’s NightOnly plan, the NightFlex Easy plan will cost $795 down, then six monthly payments of $100.

Insurance

AlignerCo does not accept insurance, however if you have a Health Savings Account (HSA) or a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), AlignerCo accepts payments from either. These tax-free funds — which may receive contributions from your employer — could be more convenient than paying out of pocket.

How Does The Cost Compare to Other Treatment Options?

At-home clear aligners have made teeth straightening significantly more affordable than traditional in-office options like braces or Invisalign (which average around $5,000 for treatment). The average cost of at-home clear aligner treatment is $2,000—which makes AlignerCo’s remarkably low price of $995 even more impressive.

Sometimes when goods and services have a significantly lower price than their competitors, it can feel as though there must be some inherent sacrifice in quality. But according to our research, it doesn’t appear that with AlignerCo you are making a large sacrifice to get this deal.

That said, there are some perks to paying a few hundred dollars more to get treatment through a competitor like Byte — whose price tag includes their HyperByte device. Byte also puts a lifetime guarantee on your smile, so if your teeth ever shift out of place, they’ll send you new aligners for free.

All in all, when comparing the overall value of these brands, AlignerCo comes up slightly shorter than the competition. However, we think they more than make up for this with their super-low prices.

Final Thoughts

Impossible is a big word to throw around, but it actually is impossible to find a teeth-straightening treatment option that costs less than AlignerCo. That being said, it’s important to consider your priorities before moving forward with AlignerCo treatment. If budget is your primary focus in pursuing a new smile, AlignerCo might be the right path forward for you!