Everything in Kintsugi that helps someone in difficulty is free. Not free for a trial, not free until we change our minds — free, for everyone, permanently.
What free means here
The crisis route and every support signpost. The recovery module and its whole library of coping tools and wisdom. The journal, the planner and the focus timer. The practices. Sleep, movement and nourishment. The courses.
There is no circumstance in which somebody at three in the morning meets a paywall. That is the line the whole commercial model is built around, and it is what makes the rest of it defensible.
The free tier is not a crippled demo either. Somebody who never pays a penny should still find Kintsugi is on their side, because that is rather the point of it.
The test we apply
Would withholding this make a bad day worse? If yes, it is free.
What can reasonably be paid for is convenience, depth and polish — longer-range history and insight, richer export formats, themes, offline content, multi-device sync. Never need. And the plain export of your own data stays free regardless, because that is your legal right and not a feature to sell back to you.
How Kintsugi actually makes money
Mostly from businesses rather than from people in difficulty. Therapists, physios and other practitioners pay to be listed. Clubs and classes pay for their profile and sign-up tools. There is a small marketplace and an own-brand range.
That model was chosen because the incentive and the purpose point the same way: the money comes from connecting people to real help and real activities, which is what the product wants to do anyway. Paid placement is always disclosed, it never outranks or dilutes a crisis route or a clinical signpost, and a bad review is never suppressed because somebody paid.
There is also a way to chip in towards development if Kintsugi has helped you and you want to. Nothing is withheld from anyone who does not, and you will never be asked while you are in the middle of a craving — asking someone in that moment to fund software would be a small betrayal of it.
What we will not do
- No advertising. Serving ads against “person in addiction recovery” is exactly the audience predatory advertisers look for, and it would require tracking that has no place here.
- No selling, renting or mining your data. Not for any price.
- Nothing that charges more the more hooked, unwell or unable to leave you are.
- Nothing behind a paywall that would make a bad day worse for being there.
The figures
The shape above is settled. The actual numbers for the paid tier and for business listings are set when they are real, from proper costing rather than a plausible-sounding guess, and they will appear here in plain pounds including VAT the day they exist. Cancellation will take as few steps as signing up did.