Abby
Abby is an AI thought companion for everyday mental load, available by text or voice around the clock. It remembers past conversations, adapts its persona and tone, and offers free matching with licensed therapists. Adults only.
What is Abby?
Abby is an AI thought companion for mental health, published by Abby Intelligence, Inc., a company based in West Hollywood, California and founded by Julian Sarokin. It is deliberately not a therapist. The homepage puts it bluntly: therapists diagnose and treat, and Abby does neither. What it claims instead is the conversation that comes before that one, the overthinking, the message you keep rereading, the decision you keep circling at 2am.
You reach Abby in a browser at chat.abby.gg, or through its iOS and Android apps. Conversations happen in writing or in Voice mode, around the clock. Three pillars carry the product. The first is memory: Abby connects tonight's conversation to earlier ones, and the reply process described on the site maps what is already known of your story, links it to those memories, spots the recurring pattern and names the need underneath it. The second is a preference for questions over advice. The third is free matching with a licensed therapist, built from your conversation history rather than from an intake form or a directory, and presented with a match score and a written rationale.
The companion is unusually configurable: six personas, six themed modes including Stoic, Mindfulness, Faith and Astrology, adjustable tone, answer length and willingness to contradict you, plus proactive check-ins. Abby claims 88 languages and lets you switch mid-sentence without losing context. A few tools sit on the public site as well, free and without an account, such as an Attachment Style Quiz.
Governance is put on display: the product is said to be designed with licensed therapists, an Ethics & Safety Board oversees it, studies go through an IRB process, and the site refers to WHO guidance on AI in health. The boundaries are written into the Terms, which reserve access to adults and list prohibited topics, clinical crisis among them, that can lead to account suspension and a referral to a clinician or to emergency services.
Alongside individual use, Abby sells an Enterprise and EAP offering to companies, schools and universities, clinics, government programmes, NGOs and sports programmes, promising a launch in days with no IT effort and no employer visibility into individual conversations.
What it does
- Talk something through by text or by voice, at any hour, with no appointment
- Pick up where you left off: Abby links what you say tonight to what you said months ago
- Get matched with a licensed therapist for free, from your conversation history rather than a form
- Receive proactive check-ins, daily or when the context calls for one
- Choose who answers you among six personas, from Empathetic Friend to Tough Coach
- Tune tone, answer length and how hard Abby pushes back, and switch on themed modes such as Stoic, Mindfulness, Strategist, Gratitude, Faith or Astrology
- Change language mid-sentence, across a claimed 88 languages, without losing the thread
When to use Abby / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Abby is the right fit.
When to use Abby
- Adults who need somewhere to put their thoughts outside office hours, when the rumination arrives at 2am
- People who cannot currently afford or access therapy and want a place to start rather than nothing at all
- People already in therapy who want to untangle what they are carrying between two sessions
- Employers, universities, health systems, public programmes, NGOs and sports programmes looking to extend or replace a traditional EAP
- Multilingual users who switch languages mid-sentence and want the conversation and its memory to follow
When not to use Abby
- Anyone under 18: the Terms of Service reserve Abby to adults and say so twice
- People in crisis or living with suicidal ideation. These are Prohibited Topics under the Terms, raising them can lead to account suspension or termination, and the site points to a clinician or to emergency services (988, 911 in the United States) instead
- Anyone seeking a diagnosis, a treatment or clinical care: Abby is not a healthcare provider, not a licensed therapist and not a medical device, and no clinical relationship is created
- People experiencing psychosis, extreme paranoia, detachment from reality, severe emotional dysregulation, obsessive fixation on another person or self-neglect that endangers the body, all of which are listed as prohibited uses
- Professionals and companies wanting to resell the outputs, plug Abby into their own stack or handle protected health information: use is strictly personal and non-commercial, there is no API, and the service sits outside the scope of HIPAA
How to use Abby
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Start from the free chat link on the homepage, or download the app from the App Store or Google Play
- Create an account with a name, an email address and a password; the first conversation needs no credit card
- If your employer, school or health plan provides Abby, sign in with the access code or organisational email address they gave you
- Start writing, or switch to Voice mode
- Pick a persona: Professional, Mindfulness Guru, Empathetic Friend, Problem-Solver, Tough Coach or Philosophical Guide
- Set the tone, the answer length (Concise, Balanced or Deep-dive), how much Abby is allowed to call you out, and the colour of the interface
- Switch on a themed mode if you want one, and decide how often Abby should check in on you
- When you feel ready, accept the licensed therapist Abby proposes: no form, no directory, and the matching is announced as free
- Organisations go through the enterprise contact form (name, email, organisation, role, headcount), get an answer within one business day and then a pilot proposal
- To stop, delete your account in the app or write to hello@abby.gg; an active subscription runs until the end of the current billing period
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Persistent memory is the real differentiator: Abby ties tonight's conversation to what was said months earlier, instead of restarting from zero
- Matching with a licensed therapist is announced as free and starts from the conversation itself, with no directory to browse and no intake form
- Available around the clock, with proactive check-ins, where a traditional EAP answers during office hours
- Fine-grained control over how the AI behaves: persona, tone, answer length, level of contradiction, themed modes
- Displayed governance: an Ethics & Safety Board of licensed therapists, an IRB process for studies, a reference to WHO guidance, and boundaries repeated rather than buried
- Some privacy work is visible: a subprocessor list by category, Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers, and an unambiguous statement that employers see nothing of individual conversations
- Present on web, iOS and Android, with a free first conversation and a full refund possible within 24 hours of a first subscription purchase
Cons
- No price is published anywhere: no pricing page, no figure on the free trial, refund or comparison pages, so you cannot know what you will pay before signing up
- The DPA the privacy policy points to is not there: the page reads “Coming Soon…”
- Subprocessors are disclosed as ten generic categories without a single named vendor, and no data hosting country or region is disclosed at all
- Models are trained on anonymised and aggregated conversation data by default, with no documented opt-out
- No EU representative under Article 27 is designated, although the privacy policy explicitly addresses EU residents
- Reserved to adults, with a broad list of prohibited topics that can cost you your account, and crisis referrals limited to United States numbers (988, 911)
- No API and no documented third-party integration; audience figures such as “10,000,000+ conversations” cannot be verified, homepage testimonials and match examples are flagged as illustrative, and refunds are capped at 24 hours on a first purchase
Pricing & Plans
Abby publishes no price at all. There is no pricing page on the site, /pricing and /plans return 404, and no amount appears on the free trial, refund or comparison pages; the chat.abby.gg application returns a page on any route, so its pricing URL proves nothing. What the site does state is that the first conversation is free and requires no credit card, and that every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, which confirms that paid plans exist without revealing what they cost. Therapist matching and the tools published on the site (Attachment Style Quiz, Should I Text Them Back?) are announced as free. A subscription can be cancelled at any time and remains active until the end of the current billing period; a full refund is possible within 24 hours of a first purchase, with no refund on renewals and no refund beyond that window. Purchases made through the App Store or Google Play follow the platform's own billing and refund rules. Organisations are quoted individually, in a pilot proposal issued after contact. No lowest price point, no currency and no billing unit can therefore be reported here.
- the site names no plan and publishes no amount
- on any page
- Free first conversation
- with no credit card required
- Paid subscription plans do exist
- since the homepage FAQ states that every plan starts with a 7-day free trial
- but neither their names nor their prices are disclosed publicly
- Enterprise and EAP offering for organisations
- quoted individually after contact through the enterprise form
- the therapist matching and the site tools (Attachment Style Quiz
- Should I Text Them Back?)
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Abby handles your data.
GDPR overview
Abby never writes that it is GDPR compliant, but its privacy policy, last updated on 11 July 2025, carries a dedicated “European Union, UK, and Switzerland (GDPR)” section. It grants access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, portability, withdrawal of consent and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Requests go to privacy@abby.gg, with an announced response window of 30 to 45 days and possible identity verification; a data protection officer is reachable at dpo@abby.gg. Transfers out of the EU, the UK and Switzerland rely on Standard Contractual Clauses, and the policy states that data in those territories is retained in accordance with GDPR requirements. Abby acts as controller for direct users and as processor under a DPA for organisations. CCPA/CPRA, PIPEDA, LGPD and PIPL are addressed too. No EU representative under Article 27 is named anywhere on the site.
Who owns the data?
Under sections 5 and 6 of the Terms, you own your Inputs, the messages, questions and preferences you write or upload, provided you have the right to share them. Abby Intelligence, Inc. owns the application, platform, technology and design. Outputs may be read, copied, downloaded and used personally, but reselling, republishing or exploiting them commercially requires Abby's written consent. In exchange you grant Abby a licence to use, store, process and analyse Inputs and Outputs to run and improve the service, including AI training, analytics and product development. Export and deletion go through the in-app tools or hello@abby.gg. Customer Data supplied by an organisation falls under the DPA.
Reuse rights
You can reuse your own material freely for personal purposes: Outputs may be read, copied, downloaded and acted upon without asking Abby for permission. Only commercial reuse, meaning resale, publication or building a product on top of them, requires Abby's written agreement. On the publisher's side, the privacy policy updated on 11 July 2025 covers Inputs, Outputs, account, usage and device data and approximate location derived from IP rather than GPS. It is used to personalise replies, manage accounts and billing, provide support, secure the service and meet legal obligations, with marketing on opt-in only. Models are trained on anonymised and aggregated data, from which synthetic data may also be derived; Abby states that any use of non-anonymised data for AI training would require explicit user opt-in described in the in-app privacy settings. Abby says it does not sell personal data and does not share Inputs or Outputs for advertising. Sharing is limited to subprocessors (ten published categories), corporate transfers and legal obligations. Processing is automated, with no systematic human review of conversations; human review happens on anonymised and aggregated data only. In organisational deployments, individual conversations are never passed to the employer, who sees anonymised engagement figures only.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Abby names no hosting country and no hosting region. Neither the privacy policy updated on 11 July 2025, nor the Terms, nor the subprocessor page identifies a jurisdiction where conversations are stored. The first of the ten published subprocessor categories is “Cloud Infrastructure & Hosting”, whose stated purpose is to host, store and back up the Abby application and user data, but no provider is named. The policy says only that Abby works with cloud providers maintaining global infrastructure to support regional data storage requirements, and that certain data may be stored within specific geographic regions where the law requires it. International transfers from the EU, the UK and Switzerland are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses, and data is described as encrypted in transit and at rest. For technical context only, and outside anything the publisher declares: the abby.gg marketing site resolves to 198.12.240.170, hosted by GoDaddy.com, LLC in Ashburn, United States, which says nothing about where the conversations themselves live. Anyone with a data residency requirement will have to obtain that commitment contractually, since the public documentation does not provide it.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Abby.
- The Terms list prohibited topics, including suicidal ideation, psychosis, extreme paranoia, obsessive fixation and self-neglect. Raising them can get an account suspended rather than supported, and the crisis numbers offered are American only (988, 911) for a service marketed in dozens of languages
- Emotional reliance is the structural risk: persistent memory, proactive check-ins and a persona tuned to feel warm make it easy to let an always-available AI stand in for human relationships and for professional care
- No public price means no way to budget: the free trial converts into a paid subscription whose amount only becomes visible inside the application
- Your conversations feed model training in anonymised and aggregated form by default, and no opt-out is documented
- Transparency gaps that matter to anyone handling sensitive material: the DPA page reads “Coming Soon…”, subprocessors are listed by category with no vendor named, and no hosting country or region is disclosed
- Legal exposure sits in the United States: Delaware law, mandatory JAMS arbitration in Los Angeles, liability capped at USD 100, and no EU representative under Article 27
- Abby is outside the scope of HIPAA and reserved to adults: never enter protected health information, expect nothing clinical, and treat the homepage testimonials and match examples as illustrative, since the site says they are
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure: create an account with a name, an email address and a password, and start talking, or download the iOS or Android app. Personalisation runs through simple in-app settings, persona, tone, answer length and check-in frequency, with no technical parameters. There is no API and no third-party integration to wire up. On the organisation side, Abby promises a launch “in days, not quarters” with “no IT lift”, access being granted through a code or an organisational email address.
Deployment
Apps stores
Supported languages
Behind Abby
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Abby.
Frequently asked questions
Is Abby a form of therapy?
What makes Abby different from a general-purpose AI assistant?
How much does Abby cost?
Can I get a refund?
Are my conversations private?
Is my data used to train Abby's AI?
Can I delete my data?
How does the free therapist matching work?
Which devices and languages does Abby support?
Is there an offer for companies, schools and other organisations?
Should you pick Abby?
Abby occupies a clearly drawn space: a conversational companion for everyday emotional load, never clinical care. That boundary is not buried in small print. It is repeated on the homepage, in the Terms and on the Ethics & Safety Board page, next to a list of prohibited topics that can cost you your account rather than earn you support. Read that list before signing up; it is the single most important thing to know about this product.
Within those limits the offering is well built. Memory that persists across sessions, proactive check-ins, six personas and six modes, adjustable tone and pushback, a claimed 88 languages with mid-sentence switching, and free matching with a licensed therapist drawn from your own conversations rather than an intake form. It runs on web, iOS and Android, the first conversation costs nothing, and organisations can deploy it as an EAP complement without their people's conversations ever reaching them.
The reservations are mostly about transparency. Abby publishes no price at all, so you cannot budget before you sign up. The DPA the privacy policy points to still reads “Coming Soon…”. Subprocessors are listed by category with no vendor named, no hosting country or region is disclosed, training on anonymised data has no documented opt-out, and no EU Article 27 representative is designated even though the policy addresses EU residents. The legal frame is entirely American: Delaware law, JAMS arbitration in Los Angeles, liability capped at USD 100, crisis referrals to 988 and 911.
Worth a try if you are an adult who wants a thinking partner between therapy sessions, or before you can afford one, and if you accept opaque pricing and a US-centric legal footing. It is not a substitute for care, and not a place for anyone in distress.
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