The families searching for you can finally find you.

No — the free tier is permanent and needs no card. Your free profile shows your photo and name, practice and neighbourhood, service types, ages and languages, and your education and certifications — and parents can send you inquiries with no limits, ever. Paid tiers add depth on top: your full approach and philosophy, publications and affiliations, a response-time badge, video, and the trust seal.

Unclaimed listings are built from public professional sources — registries, practice websites, and other published information. That's deliberately basic: it proves you exist, nothing more. Claiming your profile lets you correct anything we got wrong and complete everything we couldn't know.

Yes. Every profile page carries a link to request a correction or removal, or you can email hello@thealderindex.com — we handle removal requests promptly, no questions asked.

A parent's inquiry arrives with the child's age, the concern in the parent's own words, and their preferences (like languages or home visits). You reply or politely decline from your dashboard, and the whole conversation stays in one threaded chat. No tier ever caps how many inquiries you can receive.

When you claim your profile you upload your professional registration documents, and a human reviews every claim before it goes live — that review is what keeps the directory trustworthy. The Premium or Professional seal itself needs no extra step: it appears automatically the moment your subscription starts.

Premium is everything parents weigh when they're choosing: the verified seal, your full approach and publications, a response-time badge, and higher placement in the sort — plus the progress-reporting suite for the families who choose you. Professional extends your reach to parents who aren't searching yet: a 60-second intro video, editorial features, and deeper funnel analytics. Put simply: Premium makes you the one parents already searching choose; Professional reaches the parents who aren't searching yet.

The order serves parents first, and every layer is one we can say out loud. Practitioners currently accepting clients appear before those with waitlists. Within the same availability, paid tiers rank above Free listings. Within the same tier, your responsiveness — how reliably and quickly you answer inquiries — and how complete your profile is decide the order. Profiles that are nearly equal take turns day to day, so no one is permanently buried. Nobody can buy the top slot outright — but a paid tier ranks you above Free listings of equal availability, and answering inquiries quickly moves you up on any tier.

Founding slots are capped per specialty: 5 founding solo practitioners and 1 founding clinic in each. While your specialty still has an open slot, you lock the founding rate on whatever tier you choose — permanently. It survives a lapse: pause and resubscribe, and your founding rate comes back with you. Once a specialty is full, the standard rate applies.

Every paid membership is covered by the First-Inquiry Guarantee. If your first parent inquiry hasn't arrived within 90 days of subscribing, billing pauses — free — until it does, and resumes the day after your first inquiry lands. You keep your full profile, your verified seal, and your placement while paused. It applies to every paid tier including Practice Suite, happens automatically with nothing to claim, and doesn't affect a founding rate.

Nothing is deleted. Your account drops to Free, and your paid-tier content simply stops showing publicly. The moment you resubscribe, everything reappears exactly as it was — your approach, publications, video, analytics, and progress tools all come straight back.

Yes — every member of the clinic gets full Professional features automatically, with no per-seat upgrades to manage. The base covers your first 5 seats, and declining bracket rates apply as you add more members above that. Your clinic and every covered practitioner also carry the lavender clinic seal and the square photo style in the directory — parents can spot a clinic team at a glance.

The progress tools — goal plans, session logging, home practice, and parent progress reports — currently support Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Feeding Therapy and Physiotherapy. Support for more specialties is coming: we're designing each one with practitioners in that field rather than shipping a generic version. Premium's visibility benefits apply to every specialty today — the verified seal, your full approach and publications, higher placement in the sort, and the review tools don't depend on your discipline.