What does it cost, and why not just use ChatGPT?
Here you pay $19 a month. Meetings are not counted. Messages are not counted either.
Many people already talk to ChatGPT about their problems, and some already pay for it. So it is fair to ask what a therapy app adds. That is at the end of this page. First, the counting.
Two ways to count, and what they cost you
AI therapy apps usually sell in one of two ways.
A pack of sessions. Say five. If you come once a week, a month is four or five meetings, and the pack covers it. If you come twice a week, it is eight or nine, and the pack runs out in the middle of the month. If a hard week brings you back every evening, five meetings last five days.
A message allowance. A spoken turn of a minute or two is one message. So is "yes". A long meeting in text easily runs to fifty turns from each side. Near the end of an allowance, each reply starts to feel expensive.
Either count is fair to the seller, and either one changes the conversation. A person with two sessions left saves them for when things are bad enough. A person watching a message counter writes less.
Why there is nothing to count here
A human therapist sells hours because an hour is how a working day is divided between clients. A language model has no working day.
So a meeting here has no clock and ends when the conversation ends. You can come once a week or every night. The price for the month is the same.
What a month covers
- Meetings, as many as you need.
- Writing and speaking, in the same meeting.
- A therapist who remembers earlier meetings.
- The archive, readable and exportable at any time.
There is one limit, and it is not a count: a spending ceiling that stops automated abuse. It sits well above what a month of regular meetings uses, spoken ones included.
And ChatGPT?
ChatGPT remembers you too. It can draw on your past chats and on facts it has saved about you, and you can switch that off. So memory alone is not the difference.
The differences are elsewhere.
- It is an assistant for everything. Letters, recipes, code, and your problems in between. The therapist here does only therapy, in one school.
- Your chats sit in your account with the company. Here the archive is encrypted on your device, and only your password opens it.
- Its memory is about you in general. Here the memory is the history of your therapy: meetings, themes, notes. You can read it and export it as plain text.
What they share: both are language models, and both lean toward agreeing with you. Why that matters is a page of its own.
Trying it
The first two meetings are free and need no card. What happens when a subscription ends is on the pricing page.
The therapist is a language model. It works in the existential-humanistic tradition of Yalom and Frankl.
Epimelea is not medical care and not an emergency service. If you are in danger right now, call your local emergency number or find a crisis line at findahelpline.com.