Six Questions to Ask Before You Sign Up for a Therapy App

Therapy apps and platforms spend heavily to be the first thing you see when you search for help. Before you hand one your intake answers and your credit card, these six questions will tell you most of what you need to know about whose interests it serves.

1. Will I talk to a licensed human, and can I check the license?

Several states passed laws this year limiting artificial intelligence (AI) in therapy, and California added new rules for chatbots used by minors in September.¹ Those laws exist because companies were blurring the line. In May, Pennsylvania sued Character.AI after chatbots on the platform presented themselves as licensed psychiatrists, one of them with a license number that was not valid.²

Ask whether the person you will talk to is a licensed clinician, and get their full name and license type. Every state licensing board has a free online lookup where you can confirm the license is real and active.

2. How does the company make money?

The answer tells you what the company is built to do. BetterHelp spent $518.5 million on advertising and marketing in 2025, about twice its total cost of delivering care, according to its parent company's annual report.³ Some platforms charge therapists instead of clients. Headway, which handles insurance billing for therapists, announced in early October a new opt-in marketplace that charges clinicians $9.99 for each session booked through it, and many clinicians have objected.⁴

None of this is hidden, but you usually have to look for it. A subscription, a per-session fee or a cut of the therapist's pay all shape how a company treats its clients and its clinicians.

3. What happens to what I type in the intake?

Intake forms ask about your mood, your history and sometimes your medications. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged that BetterHelp had shared that kind of information with Facebook, Snapchat and other platforms for advertising, and the company agreed to pay $7.8 million to settle.⁵ Read the privacy policy for the words "advertising," "partners" and "sell," and if the answer is unclear, assume the worst until the company tells you otherwise in writing.

4. Can I choose my therapist?

Some services assign you to whoever has an open slot. The relationship between client and therapist is one of the strongest predictors of whether therapy helps, so you should be able to see who you are choosing and why. A good service will show you several options and let you decide, and it will make it easy to switch if the first fit is wrong.

5. If I use insurance, are these therapists taking new clients?

Insurance directories are full of clinicians who are not taking anyone. In February, New York's attorney general settled with EmblemHealth after finding that more than 80% of the behavioral health providers it listed as accepting new patients were effectively unavailable.⁶ On app platforms, insurance may cover only part of the network. BetterHelp says that as of July, more than 8,000 of its more than 30,000 therapists were credentialed to accept insurance.⁷ Ask how many clinicians near you take your plan and have openings this month.

6. How does the company define "improvement"?

Outcome claims are marketing until you read the footnotes. In September, BetterHelp launched a brand campaign citing new outcome data, including that 78% of clients with elevated depression symptoms who met its analysis criteria "showed symptom improvement within 12 weeks." The footnote defines improvement as any point decrease on the PHQ-9 depression questionnaire, and it uses the same any-point standard for anxiety on the GAD-7.⁷ A one-point drop on a 27-point scale can be ordinary week-to-week variation, which makes it a low bar for calling therapy a success.

How StartHere.care answers these questions

Every therapist on StartHere.care has at least one license we verified before the profile could go live. No chatbot talks to clients, and no AI decides who gets matched.

We make no money from your search or your sessions. Therapists list for free, clients search for free, and there are no investors to answer to.

We do not sell what you tell us in intake, and we do not send it to advertising platforms. We use it to find therapists who fit.

You see the therapists who match how you want to be helped, you choose whom to contact, and you reach them directly. If you tell us your insurance, including Medicaid, we only show therapists who accept it and are taking new clients.

If you are in crisis right now, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Ready to look? Start your search here. It takes about three minutes and costs nothing.

Sources

1. CalMatters on California's new chatbot and online safety laws, September 2026.
2. Pennsylvania Governor's Office, lawsuit against Character.AI, May 5, 2026.
3. Teladoc Health, Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025, filed with the SEC, 2026.
4. Behavioral Health Business on Headway's new marketplace fee, October 2, 2026.
5. Federal Trade Commission, press release on BetterHelp, March 2, 2023.
6. New York Attorney General, settlement with EmblemHealth, February 19, 2026.
7. Teladoc Health, BetterHelp launches "We Believe in Better", September 9, 2026.