Everybody wants to get the best “deal” when you are making a significant investment. Dental implant treatment is sometimes confused with buying a commodity that you can wheel and deal with dentist to get the price down. Understand that dental implants are not a commodity. The implant itself isn’t expensive, but just like any product sold, you can buy knockoffs and get a cheaper product. Are they sterilized, cleaned and packaged correctly to avoid infection and problems? Do they have the best characteristics for long-term predictability and stability? Was the surface prepared properly? You can buy cheaper products, but the consequence of failure is increased as you take chances on cutting corners. It is not just the cost of the implant.
A short list of other components necessary for a dental implant solution would include: cover screw, healing abutment, impression coping, lab analog, digital scan body, transitional prosthesis to develop soft tissue and esthetics. These components are necessary to be included to make a tooth that connects to the implant. All of these components have a cost and all can be bought at different price points (again with different risks). Finally, you have to have a lab fabricate the custom abutment which is what connects to the implant and comes through the gums and a crown which is the shape, size and color of a tooth (again many material options with different price points and different levels of esthetics and function based on the experience and expertise of the lab. You can choose the best with the least risk or the cheapest with the highest risk or somewhere in between, but all of these factors go into pricing for a dental implant.