Epimelea
Whose life is this, and why is it like this.
Freedom and choice, loneliness, meaning, mortality — what every life is made of. Here there is a conversation that keeps going as long as it needs to.
A place to say
what you have said to no one.
Existential therapy with an AI therapist. In writing or out loud, at any hour.
Start therapy The first meeting is free. $19 a month after that.
What kind of therapy this is
Existential-humanistic, the school of Yalom and Frankl. A conversation about freedom and choice, loneliness, meaning, mortality. Every life is made of them.
The therapist gives no advice and hands out no exercises. The questions come from the therapist, the answers from you.
A meeting lasts as long as it needs to. No timer, no limit on how many.
The therapist remembers your whole history. Three years on, the first meeting is as clear as yesterday’s.
You can write or speak, by day or at night. The voice does not turn cheerful when things are hard.
Existential-humanistic psychotherapy.
The school of Yalom and Frankl. A conversation about how you have arranged your life, and what you can choose differently.
You can say anything here.
Therapy only works when you are frank. Everything is encrypted on your device: neither the people close to you nor the people who made the app can read it.
The therapist knows your whole history.
After each meeting what matters stays, not a summary. Three years on, the first meeting is as clear as yesterday’s.
In writing or out loud.
Write, or talk without looking at the screen, by day or at night. The form switches in the middle of a meeting: start in text, move to voice, go back.
It is quiet here. On purpose.
No feeds, no badges, no notifications. The app never asks for your attention and counts nothing: no streaks, no points, no habits.
Stored in the cloud, owned by you.
Opens on your devices with the archive name and your password. Exports as text you can hand to a human therapist, or read yourself years later.
Come in. The door is open.
The first meeting is free, with nothing to buy. After that, one subscription, everything included.
How this differs from a chatbot
Many people have already tried this with a chatbot. An assistant helps with everything, from letters to recipes. A therapist does one thing: therapy, by rules written for that work.
An assistant is built to be useful and to agree with you. A therapist asks what you would rather not answer.
A chat is built around the conversation: close the window and it is over. Here everything is built around the archive. Nothing starts over.
In a chat you are a row in a company’s database: email, phone, and everything you have written. Here there is no account and no row. The archive opens only with your password.
The biggest secret in your life
Therapy works only if you speak openly. What stops that is one thought: someone will read this. Your children, your family, whoever picks up your phone, the people behind the app, hackers.
So the app is built differently. There is nothing here for any of them to read:
- what you write is encrypted on your device, and only your password opens it. No one else has that password, not even the server. If someone stole everything on the server, there would be nothing in it to read;
- no email, no “sign in with Google”, no phone number. Your name is not here;
- no ads, no selling of data. No one studies what you talk about;
- what you delete is gone for good. No one can bring it back.
One caveat: the therapist is a language model, and your words reach it unencrypted. There is no other way to answer them. If you speak out loud, your voice also goes to the service that turns it into text. These companies keep a copy for thirty days and then delete it. Apart from that copy, your words are nowhere but on your device.
The archive is yours
The archive is kept in the cloud, and that is the main copy; the one on your device is a working copy. Phones fall in water, get lost, get replaced, and years of therapy cannot be left on one alone. From any device you sign in with the archive name and your password, and the whole history is there. In the cloud nothing can be read: the archive opens on your device, and only with your password.
On your device the archive is closed too, and it opens only while you are in the app. You set the lock yourself: the app locks after a time you choose, or the moment you switch to something else. It opens with your password, a short code or your fingerprint.
Years of work must survive a new phone, a move to another platform, and the end of this project. The archive exports to a folder of plain files. Any text editor opens them — today and in ten years.
It is quiet here
The app never reminds you of itself. No streaks, no notifications counting the days you were away, no feed.
What you will not find here
Epimelea is not a medical service and not a substitute for a psychiatrist, a diagnosis, or medication. It is not emergency help: if you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line — findahelpline.com lists them by country.
What it costs
$19 a month
- No limit on how many meetings or how long they run.
- Voice and text, on every device you sign in from.
A subscription covers new meetings. Everything written stays open after it ends: the archive is yours either way. Renews monthly. Cancel any time.
Where it runs
In a browser, on iPhone and on Android — the same archive on all of them.
The App Store and Google Play apps are coming soon.
The name
ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ, epimeleia heautou — “care of the self”. An ancient practice: not a cure administered once, but work a person does on themselves over years, in dialogue with another. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault called it the ancestor of therapy. He also noticed that modern therapy kept the dialogue and lost the length. The name is about the length.