Three mail-order aligner brands stopped selling. Here is the dated record.

If you are reading this because a course you paid for stopped arriving, or because you are deciding whether to buy one now, the useful thing is not an opinion about direct-to-consumer dentistry. It is the record: who stopped selling, when, in whose words, and what the people already wearing the trays were told.

Everything below is taken from a company press release, a regulator's own page or an attorney general's settlement notice. Tray Count links to none of these three brands and never will — they are not businesses you can buy from, and two of them left regulators cleaning up after them.

What it looks like laid out by date

Read as a list, the closures stop looking like three separate business failures and start looking like one market correcting.

SmileDirectClub: bankruptcy, then the lights off

SmileDirectClub filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of September 2023, reporting nearly $900 million in debt. Less than three months later, in December 2023, it posted a notice saying it had "made the incredibly difficult decision to wind down its global operations, effective immediately".

For anyone mid-course, that notice did three things at once. It cancelled unshipped orders. It ended the "Lifetime Smile Guarantee", which had been a headline selling point. And it told customers on the company's SmilePay instalment plan that they were still expected to keep paying — for a treatment nobody was supervising any more. Customers were pointed at local dentists.

That last part did not stand. On 2 December 2024 the New York Attorney General announced a settlement recovering $4.8 million for consumers wrongly charged after the company stopped providing services, covering more than 28,000 people nationwide, 2,265 of them New Yorkers. The settlement notice describes the company's own website as having "continued to misleadingly advise consumers... that they must make any remaining monthly installment payments in full", and puts the typical cost of a course at "a $250 up-front payment, followed by 26 monthly installment payments of approximately $89 per month, for a total of more than $2,500".

There was an earlier warning, too. On 22 June 2023 — three months before the bankruptcy filing — the District of Columbia Attorney General announced that SmileDirectClub had to release more than 17,000 consumers nationwide from non-disclosure agreements they had signed in order to get refunds, stop requiring those agreements, and pay $500,000. The District's own words: the company "promised a simple, safe, and affordable way to straighten teeth and touted five-star reviews — but behind the scenes, the company silenced dissatisfied consumers."

Take those two settlements together and the ordinary consumer signal — a wall of five-star reviews — turns out to have been partly a product of the refund process.

Byte: suspended by its owner, in consultation with the FDA

Byte was owned by Dentsply Sirona, a listed dental manufacturer, which makes its version of events unusually well documented.

On 24 October 2024 the company announced the "voluntary suspension of sales and marketing of its Byte Aligners and Impression Kits", along with suspended shipment and processing of new and recently placed orders. Its press release states that "the Company's decision was made in consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)" and that it would "continue to work closely with the FDA and other regulatory authorities". The same filing put Byte at roughly 5% of group revenue for the first nine months of that year.

On 14 January 2025 the company confirmed it was "not reinstating the at-home Byte Aligner Systems and Impression Kits", said it would "continue to provide support for non-contraindicated Byte Aligner patients currently undergoing treatment", and described refocusing the business "around treatments that include expanded in-person dentist oversight".

That phrase — non-contraindicated — is worth pausing on. It implies a set of patients who should not have been in treatment at all, which is precisely what an in-person examination exists to identify. Litigation over the Byte business is continuing; a federal court has allowed a case against Dentsply Sirona to proceed. We report the allegations in those filings as allegations, and none of them is established fact.

Candid: the first to leave, and the quietest about it

Candid went first and went cleanly. On 24 January 2022 it announced "the closing of its direct-to-consumer business and all 45 of its Studio locations", and moved entirely to CandidPro, sold through dentists and orthodontists. Its own release notes that the direct-to-consumer business had served nearly 100,000 patients.

Because Candid pivoted rather than collapsed, its exit attracted a fraction of the coverage the other two got. It is arguably the more informative event: a company with working studios, a dentist network and money in the bank looked at selling aligners directly to consumers and decided the model was not the one to keep.

What the regulators concluded

The FDA's consumer page on clear dental aligners, content current as of 9 September 2026, states that clear aligners "are prescription devices, meaning they are only safe to use under the supervision of a licensed practitioner, such as a dentist or orthodontist", and that "the FDA has not authorized clear aligners that are marketed directly to consumers without supervision by a dentist or orthodontist". It lists the adverse effects it associates with unsupervised use: "new or worsening dental pain", "jaw pain", "bite problems", "worsening tooth misalignment" and "new gaps between teeth".

In the UK, the General Dental Council's statement on direct-to-consumer orthodontics says that "at present, there is no effective substitute for a physical, clinical examination as the foundation for that assessment", and that "direct interaction between patient and practitioner is essential for providing patients the opportunity to ask questions, provide consent, and be satisfied that the course of treatment proposed is likely to meet their needs and expectations".

The American Association of Orthodontists surveyed its members between 24 November 2021 and 10 January 2022 and reported that 77 percent of respondents had seen patients come to them for retreatment after mail-order treatment that did not include an in-person examination first, with 61 percent seeing such patients at least quarterly. It is a survey of orthodontists, not of patients, and it is their own trade body — read it as one, and it still says something.

What this means if you are buying now

Sellers still ship aligners to your door, and this site links two of them on its clear aligner price page, with the disclosure attached. The closures do not make those companies the same as the ones that failed. What they do is turn a set of vague worries into specific, answerable questions.

1. Who is the licensed clinician responsible for your treatment? You should be able to write down a name and check it on a register.
2. Has anyone examined your mouth in person and looked at X-rays before any tray is made?
3. What happens to your treatment plan, your remaining trays and your instalment payments if the seller stops trading? Get the answer before you pay, not after.
4. If something goes wrong halfway, who fixes it, and at whose cost?

Nobody needs to guess at the consequences of leaving those unanswered. Three companies have already run the experiment.

Next: the in-office and at-home options set side by side, or what the before-and-after photographs cannot tell you about any of them.