Oh boy. I went through 14 months of suboxone treatment before my last relapse. The drama of suboxone doctors is familiar territory to me...
I'm not sure how much an appointment is going to cost you. That's going to depend on your insurance, tbh. My appointments were not very expensive, but I was working at the time and had good insurance through my employer. The suboxone itself is more expensive, but with insurance (my insurance, again, not sure what yours is like) it cost about $100 a month and then my first doctor gave me a reusable discount card that brought it down to $25. But every single time I went to the pharmacy to pick them up, they tried to over-charge me and I had to argue with them. You get no respect in the medical world as a suboxone patient, just warning you now, haha.
Finding a doctor is somewhat hard, but you should be able to just do a google search for doctors in your area, or search through your insurance's website. I'm not sure how it works in other states, but in Michigan, there are a limited number of doctors who are allowed to prescribe subs, and each of those doctors can only have a certain number of patients. Meaning it's much harder to find a sub doc than it is to find something like a family doctor. Another option might be to make an appointment with a primary care doctor, if you have one, and ask them if they can refer you? Once you get established with a sub doc, they see you every month or so to refill your script. My first doc did appointments every month for three months and then every three months after that. The second doc I had did appointments every month. Both did drug screens at every appointment, asked me if I was going to meetings, asked how my cravings were, etc. That's kind of the general deal.
Be careful with suboxone. It worked REALLY well for me for my first six months on it, but after that I felt like it ended up keeping me in the opiate cycle and making my cravings worse over time. I never got high on suboxone, but I started abusing it anyway. Not really sure why. I guess just because I'm a fucking junkie and it's a fucking opiate. But that became an issue because then I was craving suboxone every morning when I woke up, the same way I used to dope. I was prescribed 24 mg a day, which is a huge dose (My second doctor was shady asf.), and I ended up taking anywhere from 32-40 mg a day. So then I was withdrawing any time I was late getting my script, I was craving harder opiates constantly and I ended up just going cold turkey off the subs for two days so that I could get high, then going out and banging a bunch of h. Long story short - In my personal experience, subs worked great in the short term, but in the long term they were a clusterfuck. Everyone is different, though, so they could work great for you. For many people I know, subs have been a lifesaver! Especially because of the fact that they eliminate the option of impulsive relapse. That alone is extremely helpful, or at least was to me.
Another word of advice: spit and don't swallow. It works just as well and the taste is way more tolerable if you're not swallowing the stuff. Subs taste like the devil himself if the devil were a lime-flavored orange.
Good luck, friend! And seriously, kudos to you getting clean. I just got clean a couple of months ago. You're in good company.