Sunbit Dental Review: Patient Financing at the Chairside

Sunbit dental financing does one thing well: it gets more patients to say yes to treatment they’d otherwise defer. With an approval rate above 85% and a 30-second application that won’t touch a patient’s credit score, it removes the two main friction points that kill case acceptance at checkout.

Here’s a clear-eyed look at how the product works, what it costs practices, where it fits in your tech stack, and where the trade-offs actually lie.

What Sunbit Is — and Isn’t

Sunbit is a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) fintech company that has built a specific vertical around healthcare, with dental as its largest segment. It’s not a dental membership plan, not insurance, and not in-house financing. Patients apply, get approved in roughly 30 seconds using only a government-issued ID, and choose a repayment plan. Loans are made by Transportation Alliance Bank, Inc. (dba TAB Bank), which sets the credit terms.

The practice’s role is minimal by design. You present the option, the patient applies on a tablet or phone, and Sunbit handles everything downstream — approval, payment to the practice, and collections if needed. The practice receives payment immediately and carries no liability if a patient stops paying. That’s a meaningful structural difference from in-house payment plans, where the front desk often ends up as an informal collections department.

According to Dentistry Today, Sunbit is now the second-largest dental patient financing solution in the U.S. and has been adopted by more than 12,000 practices.

How the Product Works at the Chair

The application flow is intentionally brief. No lengthy forms, no hard credit pull — the soft check means the inquiry won’t show up as a negative mark on a patient’s credit report, though account openings and payment activity are reported to a major credit bureau. Per Sunbit’s own reported figures, approvals exceed 85%, which is high enough that most practices promote it universally rather than selectively.

Once approved, patients choose from repayment windows ranging from 6 to 72 months. Every approved patient has access to a no-interest option; if they select it, they won’t accrue interest. There are no hidden fees and no late fees, per the company’s published terms.

Financing covers the $50–$20,000 range — broad enough to handle everything from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction.

The Integration Picture

This is where Sunbit has made real strides. The most significant recent development is its integration with CareStack’s practice management software. According to Dentistry Today, the CareStack integration embeds Sunbit’s financing application directly into the scheduler, treatment planning, and checkout workflows, with automatic ledger updates on approval — so the team never leaves the PMS to process financing. For practices already running CareStack, that’s a workflow simplification worth noting.

Beyond that, Sunbit has announced partnerships with Kleer (the dental membership platform), Overjet (dental AI), and Golden Proportions Marketing. The Kleer pairing is interesting strategically: per DrBicuspid, Kleer positions the combination as a way for practices to “remove many traditional financial barriers to care.” The Overjet collaboration is earlier-stage, focused on building connected tools for practices and patients, but signals where Sunbit wants to go in the broader digital dentistry ecosystem.

For practices using other Practice Software platforms, Sunbit operates via a standalone tablet or web interface. It’s workable, though not as clean as a native integration.

What the Numbers Look Like

Sunbit reports that Areo Dental Group treated 551 additional patients and generated over $775,000 in incremental revenue in one year of using the platform. These are vendor-reported figures, and a single case study shouldn’t be extrapolated to every practice. But the direction is consistent with what the broader financing literature suggests: when patients can pay in manageable monthly amounts, more of them proceed.

Over 600,000 patients have used Sunbit, with more than 90,000 returning for a second financing — a retention signal that’s easy to overlook. If patients associate your practice with a frictionless payment experience, they’re more likely to come back for elective work.

Honest Trade-Offs

Sunbit isn’t the only player here. CareCredit has deeper market penetration and longer tenure, and some patients already have a CareCredit card in their wallet. Sunbit’s edge is the soft credit check and higher approval rate, which matters most for patients who’ve been declined elsewhere.

On the cost side, Sunbit charges practices a merchant fee — the specifics aren’t publicly disclosed and vary by agreement. As with any financing product, practices should model whether the incremental case acceptance revenue outweighs the fee on financed transactions. Practices with a large uninsured or underinsured patient population tend to see the fastest return; those with mostly insured, high-income panels may find the lift more modest.

If you’re evaluating how Sunbit fits alongside your broader software stack, it’s worth reading up on best dental practice management software options that offer native financing integrations — an integrated workflow is almost always better than a bolt-on one.

The Bottom Line

For most practices, the case for offering Sunbit comes down to approval rates and risk transfer. An 85%+ approval rate means you can present it to every patient without awkwardness. Immediate practice payment and zero collections liability mean it behaves more like a payment processor than a financing partner. The main open question is fee structure — get that in writing before you sign, and model it against your typical procedure mix.