FreeCBT began life as Quirk, a company created to help more folks get access to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Sadly, Quirk shut its doors, so we created FreeCBT. Our app is open-source on Github and is designed to be simple and easy to use.
We see FreeCBT as a "front-door" to professional help. Many people neglect seeking a therapist or psychiatrist because they don't feel their problem is "big enough" or they're not aware just how effective CBT can be.
If you need to reach the creators of FreeCBT for any reason, just send us an email.
FreeCBT treats your thoughts as the most sensitive possible data, because it is your most sensitive possible data.
So like rational people: we do not record or store your thoughts.
We don't want to know your thoughts. When you record something in FreeCBT, it lives on your phone, not on some server in Ohio or something. In the future, we may create a cloud-sync feature. If we do this, your thoughts will be client-side encrypted. They'll be encrypted on your phone and then sent to us, so no one at FreeCBT will ever be able to read your thoughts.
As much as we'd like to know as little as possible about you, we have to make a few compromises to keep the lights on. But we'd rather be as explicit about what we're doing as possible, so you can make an informed decision to trust us or not.
Error logs If FreeCBT has a bug, we want to know about it ASAP. If we don't, it can cause real harm, like corrupting your data. To avoid this, we collect logs from your phone that include:
This information is shared with Sentry, a bug-tracking third party tool that we trust.
Behavioral Data In order to create a product that's actually useful for people, we collect anonymous, event-based, behavioral data. That means when you do something in the app like follow up on a prediction, we get sent a message that looks like this:
User 15412315 followed up on a prediction
Nearly every tech product behavioral analytics, but FreeCBT specifically only uses anonymous behavioral analytics.
By anonymous, we mean we don't connect this to any personally identifiable information. In other words, we don't know that "George Freedman in Ohio" followed up on a prediction, just that someone followed up on a prediction.
If we could, we'd avoid anonymous analytics. But we've compromised here for two reasons.
The first is that our error logs are not good enough on their own to alert us of bugs. For example, if a bug disables an entire feature, we may not get any error logs since no one is able to access the feature. But if the number of people recording predictions drops to 0, then it's likely that it's broken.
The second is that we must build something that people actually want and use. That means that if we release a new feature and it isn't being used or it's somehow disliked, we'll just remove it. We're not in the business of creating a bloated product, we're in the business of making something that helps you feel better.
FreeCBT is created and maintained by Evan Rosson. Most of the hard work was done in the past, by the Quirk folks. I'm just a volunteer here to keep the lights on!
Quirk - FreeCBT's predecessor - was developed by Evan Conrad, who codes, draws the cute bubbles, and is generally worried about everything and Koby Conrad (Evan Conrad's brother), who does the marketing and business stuff, and is generally optimistic and calm about everything.
FreeCBT originally started as a tool Evan Conrad made to help with his panic attacks. It's still that, but now it helps all sorts of folks.
Special thanks to the clincial psychologist Dr. Mireille Reece, for her guidance on creating Quirk and other upcoming products. She's hosting the upcoming podcast Brain Science, you should check it out!
FreeCBT is also supported and translated by a whole number of people including:
Thanks also to the advice, auditing, support and feedback from just so many people including psychologists, therapists, individual users, founders, programmers, designers, friends and family.