Why I'm building Adap

There are already a lot of apps for how you feel. I didn’t want to build another one. I’m building Adap because the whole category has something rotten at its center, and I think it can be done differently, not with a better slogan, but with a different structure.

The thing the brochures don’t say

Most apps for anxiety, low moods, or the 2am spiral are one of three things. A library of meditations you never open. A chatbot that listens but can’t actually do anything. Or a free app whose real business is knowing that you were anxious at 2am on a Tuesday, and selling that.

The third one is the one people would rather not think about, so here it is plainly. In 2023 the US Federal Trade Commission acted against BetterHelp for handing the email addresses and mental-health questionnaire answers of its users to advertising platforms. Around the same time Cerebral disclosed that it had exposed the data of millions of patients to third parties through tracking pixels baked into its own product.

Those weren’t leaks. Nobody broke in. That was the business model working exactly as designed. When the product is free, the thing being sold is the pattern of your worst nights.

A place to think shouldn’t become a profile

I think there should be somewhere you can say what’s actually going on (badly, in half a sentence, the way you type at midnight) that isn’t quietly turning your inner life into someone’s revenue.

That belief is the whole reason Adap exists. Not “privacy” as a feature bullet. The plain idea that a place to think is a different kind of thing from an ad network, and building it like one is a choice you can refuse to make.

What Adap actually is

Adap is a private companion you can talk to. When it helps, it helps in the moment: a couple of minutes of breathing when your chest is tight, grounding when everything’s too much, reframing when you’re stuck in a loop. Not a course. Not a streak. Not a mood grid with seven emoji.

It is not therapy, and it is not a crisis line; those are different things and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest kind of product. It’s the thing for the ordinary hard evening, and it’s careful about saying so. You can read what it is and where your data lives on the homepage.

Built so it can’t, not just promised it won’t

“We won’t sell your data” is a promise. Promises change when the funding runs out. The thing I care about is the difference between won’t and can’t, and that difference is architecture, not a privacy policy.

So the commitments are structural. Your conversations are never used to train models, mine or anyone’s. Your memory is yours: an open format you can export and delete whenever you want. Hosted in the EU. No advertising trackers, no cross-site tracking, no ad SDKs. And every real decision, trade-off, and mistake gets written down in public, including how it’s actually built.

One person, on purpose

Adap is built independently, by one person, based in the Netherlands. That’s the whole team, and it’s deliberate. One person building in the open, accountable for it, is harder to quietly turn into the thing I’m describing above than a company with a board and a runway and a growth target.

I’m building the thing I wanted to exist and couldn’t find. If that’s something you’d want too, the early group is where it starts.