An online course for dental CAD designers
Get hired by dental labs.
Stop bidding at $5 a crown.
You already know how to design a crown. Margin teaches the part no software course covers: building a portfolio labs believe, setting a price that holds, and finding the labs that pay it.
- 6 modules
- about 11 hours
- Any software
- exocad · 3Shape · Blender
- Founding price
- $149 · lifetime
Here is the whole problem. A lab in Chicago needs someone to design forty units a week. You can do it. They will never find you, because nothing you have shown them proves it. Everything below fixes that, in order.
The skill is not the bottleneck.
Being findable is.
US dental labs have lost more than 30% of their workforce since 20044
Buyers cannot tell you apart
On the big freelance platforms a beginner and a ten-year technician sit in the same list. Crowns are advertised at $5. When skill is invisible, price is the only thing left to compete on, and it only goes down.
You have no way to show the work
Labs ask for three years of experience because they have nothing better to ask for. What they actually complain about is specific: open margins, over-contoured cervicals, designers who push knobs without understanding the case.
Your best cases are the ones you cannot post
Scans, CBCTs and patient photos are protected health information. Post them raw and you are breaking the law. Post nothing and you look like a beginner. There is a correct way through this and almost nobody teaches it.
The same crown pays $5 or $480.
These are live rates being paid right now, not forecasts. What separates the bottom rung from the top is not design skill. It is who is asking, what they have been shown, and whether you named a price without flinching.
between the bottom rung and the top. Same profession, same software, a different buyer.
Bar length is the rate. The thick track is the full $0–480 scale; the thin one zooms to $0–100 so the early rungs stay readable. Sources: live listings on Fiverr, CadCam Masters, Cad Crowd and DSD Planning Center, 2026.
Then: the retainer
Past ~250 units a month, per-unit pricing stops making sense for the lab. That is when you propose a monthly contract, and overflow capacity becomes predictable income.
Six modules. Zero of them about software.
You already know exocad, 3Shape or Blender, or you are learning them somewhere else. Margin only covers the career half: 43 lessons, about eleven hours, each one ending in something you can send to a lab.
Six cases, presented the same way every time, with every trace of the patient removed. This is the module that gets you past “three years experience required” without a CV.
After this module, you can
- Strip every identifier from scans, CBCTs and photos, and know the written-authorization rule
- Present before and after CAD renders in one standard case format
- Build a six-case portfolio that answers “3+ years experience” without a CV
Gig platforms are for practice, not a career. This maps the four places dental design work is bought, and which one you should be in right now.
After this module, you can
- Map the four tiers: gig platforms, dental marketplaces, direct-to-lab, full-time remote
- Read a marketplace listing like a buyer and position against it
- Know the specialty tiers remote employers hire for, and pick yours
What every job type really pays, why labs outsource at all, and the exact monthly volume at which you should stop charging per unit and propose a retainer.
After this module, you can
- Price every job type, from single crowns to full arch and smile design
- Use the lab’s own cost math as your negotiating floor
- Move a per-unit client onto a monthly retainer at the right volume
A screen recording of you working is the most persuasive thing you own. This is how to record it, where to post it, and how to be the specialist in a design group rather than the spammer.
After this module, you can
- Produce a CAD screen-recording reel with zero patient-data risk
- Run a 30-day posting system for Instagram and LinkedIn
- Turn answers in design communities into inbound requests
Labs are short-staffed and they know it. You are selling overflow capacity, not begging for a job. This includes the message, the follow-up rhythm, and a twenty-lab sprint to run in your first month.
After this module, you can
- Write the overflow-capacity pitch labs say yes to
- Run a twenty-lab outreach sprint with a follow-up cadence
- Deliver files the lab’s own CAD can open and edit
Agreements, secure file transfer, revision limits and turnaround promises. The paperwork is what makes a lab comfortable sending you forty units a week instead of one.
After this module, you can
- Set a revision policy and turnaround promise that protect your time
- Handle patient-adjacent files with agreement-grade discipline
- Choose a specialty and own it publicly
Three frames. Zero patient data.
This is the case-study format Margin teaches, and the one every graduate uses. Three photographs and four numbers. A lab manager can judge you in about eight seconds, which is all the time you get.
The case, as received
The prepared arch and what the dentist actually sent. No patient, no name, no scan file, just a physical model, photographed.
The design call
One close frame on the part a lab inspects first: the margin and the emergence profile. This is where you show judgement, not software.
The finished unit
The restoration as it left the lab. Same lighting, same angle discipline, every time, so a stranger can compare your cases to each other.
Module 1 covers the part people get wrong: a photograph of a stone model is not protected health information, a screenshot of the scan file usually is. Knowing the difference is what lets you publish at all.
We did not invent the demand.
Every number on this page comes from a live listing, an industry body or a published market report, and each one is numbered down to its source. The shortage is structural. Designers who make themselves easy to hire will absorb it.
Labs cannot hire technicians fast enough. Remote design capacity is how they stay open.
That is the trade body’s own projection, and it is driven by the staffing shortage, not by falling demand.
Against $5–20 to outsource it. The economics of hiring you were settled before you applied.
Every one of them is a lab or clinic that already works the way you do.
The ceiling is not low. Reaching it is a positioning problem, not a skill problem.
Taught by the person on the other side of the hiring email.
Margin is made by NB Digital Dentistry, the studio of Nico Beliko, digital-transformation lead at a dental clinic in Aruba. He runs scan to design to delivery every week, and he hires the exact kind of designer this course produces. The curriculum is his hiring checklist, turned outward.
- Perspective
- The person who hires you
- Method
- Every lesson ends in an artifact
- Software
- exocad · 3Shape · Blender
$149, once, and you keep it.
The courses this market already buys teach the software. None of them teach you how to get paid for using it. Margin costs less than all of them, because it is the missing half rather than a replacement.
What this market already pays9
- 6 modules, 43 lessons, about 11 hours
- The case-study template, ready to fill in
- Outreach scripts and a 20-lab sprint tracker
- A pricing calculator with the full rate ladder
- Agreement, revision-policy and turnaround templates
- Lifetime access, including every future update
Requested. You will get an email when the cohort opens.
Asked,
answered.
Anything else, ask through the seat request form and it gets answered before you pay anything.
The course
No, on purpose. Excellent software courses already exist. Margin is the layer none of them cover: portfolio, pricing, outreach, and the professional wrapper that turns skill into income. It pairs with any design stack.
You are exactly who it is for. Every lesson ends in an artifact, a case study, a script, a policy, not a theory. If you can design a crown, you can follow a checklist that gets that crown seen by the right lab.
About 11 hours of lessons across 6 modules, built to be applied the same week. The outreach sprint in Module 5 typically fills a pipeline within a month of consistent sending.
Compliance
Raw scans, CBCTs and photos are protected health information, and posting them without written authorization is a violation. Module 1 teaches the anonymization workflow: render-only presentation, stripped identifiers, and when written consent is still required. Showing your work compliantly is a skill, and it is the first one we teach.
Module 6 covers the professional layer: business associate agreements, secure file transfer, revision policies and turnaround commitments, the paperwork that makes a US lab comfortable sending you volume.
Enrollment
Q4 2026. Founding seats are requested by email and confirmed in order of request. Founding members keep the $149 price and lifetime access to every future version.
Most of this profession lives outside the US, and that is who Margin is built for. If $149 is a real barrier where you live, write to us and we will sort out purchasing-power pricing for your region.
30 days, no questions. If the system does not change how labs respond to you, you should not pay for it.
Founding cohort · Q4 2026
Be the designer labs go looking for.
The demand is already there and the shortage is already here. What is missing is a portfolio, a price and a pipeline. That is six modules of work, not six years.