Why We Moved Away From Free Therapy
We used to give therapy away. For a long stretch, the deal was simple: reach out, pay little or nothing, talk to a real licensed therapist. It felt like the kind thing to do. It also quietly failed almost everyone it was meant to help. So we changed it. Here is the honest version of why.
TL;DR
- We started completely free. It mostly attracted spam and forms filled with random, fake information.
- More than 1,300 people reached out to us over time.
- About 1 in 10 ever actually booked and showed up. About 1 in 20 came back for a second session.
- We followed up with people up to three times each, across email, text, and chat. Most still went quiet.
- Free did not lower the barrier to healing. It lowered the cost of walking away.
How it started: completely free
We opened the doors with no fee at all. Anyone could book. The thinking was obvious: remove every barrier and people will get the help they need.
What we mostly got was noise. Spam submissions, fake names, random characters typed into every field. The forms filled up. The calendar stayed empty.
The people who did enter real information were a different story, and a more human one. Many were hesitant, unsure whether therapy was for them, half-bracing to be sold something. A smaller group showed up, did the work, and told us it genuinely helped. That group, and their words, was the entire reason to keep going.
So we tried to protect them from the noise. We introduced a small, fully refundable security fee: the lowest amount we could charge that would filter out spam and signal a real intention to show up. It was never about the money. It was a commitment check, priced as low as we could make it.
And to keep it fair, we promised the fee would be fully adjusted toward your next session. Therapy is rarely one and done; it works over several sessions. So the "fee" was really just a held deposit that came right back to you the moment you continued.
The numbers, the real ones
Of those 1,300-plus inquiries, roughly 10 percent ever converted into an actual session. Roughly 5 percent came back for a second one. Of the sessions that did get booked, about half ended in a no-show or a last-minute cancellation.
Across 1,300+ inquiries during our free and near-free era.
Figures from our own records across more than 1,300 inquiries during the free era.
And that refundable credit, the clever little mechanism designed to bring people back? Out of everyone who took it, almost nobody ever redeemed it. It turned out the discount was never the thing standing between people and their next session.
We did everything we could
This is the part we are quietly proud of, even though it did not save the model.
We did not just wait. We followed up with people up to three times each, across email, text, and chat, trying to help them take the next step. When someone had questions, we answered them on whatever channel they preferred. And when a session ran long, our therapists did not start a meter for overtime. They stayed, because the person in front of them mattered more than the clock. We are endlessly grateful to them for that.
And still, most people went quiet. Booked and never arrived, or read every follow-up and disappeared.
What "free" actually did
Here is the uncomfortable lesson. When something costs nothing, it is worth exactly that to your calendar on a hard week.
Free did not remove the barrier to therapy. It removed the reason to show up. A therapist would block out an hour. Nobody would arrive. Multiply that by hundreds of empty slots and you do not have a charity, you have a slow way to burn out the very people you are trying to pay fairly.
If you have ever started therapy and drifted away from it, you know this feeling from the inside. We wrote about that pattern in why people don't continue with therapy. Cost is part of it, but commitment is the bigger half.
Therapy that you actually show up for
One licensed therapist, personally matched to you. No subscription. Book your first session on First Therapy.
We did not kill free. We made it honest.
Free still exists. It is just not for everyone, and that is the point.
Every month we sponsor a limited number of fully free sessions for people who genuinely cannot pay. Not a marketing funnel, not a trial. A small, real number of seats set aside for people in a hard spot. If that is you, apply for a free spot and tell us honestly what is going on. We read every one.
The difference is that scarcity makes it mean something. A free seat that someone fought for gets used. A free seat handed to everyone gets wasted. We learned that the expensive way.
The bottom line
Fighting mental health issues are important and we want to help the best way possible. What thousands of conversations taught us is that price was never the real barrier. Commitment was. A small, fair fee does more for follow-through than "free" ever did, and setting aside a few genuinely free seats does more good than spreading "free" so thin that nobody shows up.
If you have been meaning to start, book your first session. And if money is the thing in the way, we kept a door open for that too.
