Reper
Support for addiction, with an account without a name, saved conversations and a daily usage budget.
Context
Health · supportPeople with a gambling, alcohol or drug addiction avoid talking about it, out of shame or out of fear of how they will be looked at. The question usually turns up at the hour when you do not call anyone, and if the only way to ask it is to give your name and book an appointment, the question stays unasked and the moment passes. It had to be a place you enter without a name, at any hour, where you find something to do right then.
Architecture
We do not write the passwords ourselves.
An in-house authentication system gets wrong exactly the things nobody sees until a breach, so we use a mature one, kept on our own server.
Conversations sit in a database of their own, which refuses another user's rows by itself.
What gets written here is health data; one mistake in the code must not be enough to bring it out.
The usage budget is set per day, per account.
The service stays open at any hour without a single account being able to consume all of it.
What I built
An account of your own, without a name
Signing up asks for an email and a password — your name is asked nowhere — and the conversation picks up exactly where it was left.
Tools for the moment of craving
Beyond the conversation, the app offers a self-assessment map of the stage you are at, an emotion wheel and the urge-surfing technique for riding out a craving through breathing.
The stages of change
The “How we work” page explains the process in stages — precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance — with relapse treated as part of the road, not as failure.
Confidential by construction
This project’s data sits in a database separate from the other applications, and the rule “everyone sees only their own rows” is written into the database, not just into the code.
Daily budget
Use of the assistant is capped by a daily budget, set per account.
How it looks
Stack
Result
- Having to give your name and book an appointment before you can ask the first question.
- Office hours as the limit on when you can ask.
- You get in with your own account, at any hour, and the conversation picks up where it stopped.
- The self-assessment map, the emotion wheel and the urge-surfing technique are at hand right in the moment of the craving.
Anca Resort
Want something similar?
Describe your workflow and I tell you what would change compared with the project above — and how long it would take.