Fieldwork openCloses 30 September 2026

What these machines cost to keep

Manufacturers publish nothing about servicing cost, breakdown rates or repair bills, and no clinic can find it out alone. So we are asking the only people who know: the owners.

Everyone who completes the survey gets the compiled findings when fieldwork closes on 30 September 2026. There is no prize and no payment — the results are the exchange.

Fieldwork is open until 30 September 2026

The earlier you take part, the more your machine shapes what gets published: a category needs five owners before anything about it can be reported, so the first few to answer decide whether it appears at all.

Take the survey

What you get back

Six findings, broken down by device category wherever at least five owners have reported it. Below that we publish nothing — a figure from three clinics is not a finding.

Annual servicing cost by device type

What owners actually pay each year to keep a laser, an RF platform or a HIFU device running — and how much of the purchase price that adds up to over a typical seven-year life.

Breakdown rates

How often each category of machine has needed a repair, and how many owners describe faults as a recurring problem rather than a one-off.

Downtime

Total time out of action because of faults — the cost nobody quotes for, measured in rooms that could not treat.

Repair bills

The largest single repair owners have paid, and how often warranty or contract covered it versus how often it did not.

Support response times

How quickly manufacturers and distributors actually attend once a fault is reported, by brand where enough owners report the same one.

Consumable lock-in

Which platforms tie you to the manufacturer’s own tips and consumables, and which leave the running cost negotiable.

Responses are confidential, not anonymous: we ask for a work email so we know each one comes from a real clinic, and that is exactly why the findings can be trusted. Findings are aggregates only. No individual response is ever published, no clinic is named, and no supplier or manufacturer is given access to the underlying data — including for their own machines. The survey is self-reported, so we will describe it as surveyed, never as invoice-verified.