SoberPals is starting with the 12-Step Facilitation Recovery Support Plan: a private recovery-support plan that helps people find meetings, plan attendance, record recovery actions, contact support, and track recovery signals like craving, mood, sleep, and recovery confidence.
Our goal is simple: help people turn good intentions into small, measurable actions in real life. Every check-in, meeting plan, support contact, and reset action can help us learn what people need when follow-through is hard.
Many people leave treatment, counseling, sober living, or a recovery conversation with a plan: go to meetings, call support, stay connected, track warning signs, and ask for help before things get worse. The challenge is not always knowing what to do. The challenge is doing it at the right moment, in the middle of real life.
SoberPals is built around that follow-through gap. The platform helps users take concrete recovery actions, record what happened, notice barriers, and choose whether to share progress with people they trust. For researchers and partners, this creates an opportunity to study recovery engagement as it actually happens: one action, one barrier, one reset, and one support connection at a time.
The 2020 Cochrane review led by John F. Kelly, Keith Humphreys, and colleagues found that manualized Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve-Step Facilitation interventions generally perform as well as other established treatments on most clinical outcomes, while producing stronger abstinence-related outcomes. SoberPals is inspired by that recovery-engagement opportunity: helping people translate recommendations like “go to meetings, call support, and stay connected” into small, measurable actions.
For SoberPals, the opportunity is practical. We want to help people translate recommendations like “go to meetings,” “call support,” and “stay connected” into small, measurable actions they can actually take. The goal is not to replace treatment, sponsorship, therapy, peer support, or recovery communities. The goal is to help people use them.
SoberPals is not AA, NA, SMART Recovery, Recovery Dharma, or any other fellowship. It is a neutral recovery-engagement platform designed to help people find and follow through with the recovery supports that fit them. AA and TSF currently have the strongest evidence base, while emerging research on SMART Recovery and other mutual-help pathways highlights the need to better understand which supports help which people, through which mechanisms, and under what conditions.
That is why SoberPals is being built to support recovery engagement broadly, not to privilege a single fellowship.
Recovery support often breaks down between moments of care. A person may know they should attend a meeting, contact a sponsor, check in with themselves, or ask for help, but still struggle to take the next step. SoberPals is designed to make that next step smaller, clearer, and easier to act on.
The product hypothesis is that recovery actions become more likely when they are visible, timely, low-burden, and connected to real support. If users can find meetings, record attendance, contact support, check in on craving or mood, and use reset tools without shame, they may be more likely to re-engage after setbacks. If barriers are captured early, plans can improve instead of being abandoned.
For partners, each small action creates a privacy-controlled learning opportunity. We can begin to study which applets are used, which barriers get in the way, which supports help people return to their plan, and which configurations improve engagement in different settings.
Many people leave treatment, counseling, sober living, or a recovery conversation with a plan. The hard part is not always knowing what to do. The hard part is taking the next step when craving, isolation, low confidence, poor sleep, or daily stress gets in the way.
SoberPals helps turn recovery recommendations into repeatable actions. A user can find a meeting, make a plan to attend, check in or manually log attendance, contact a support person, track recovery signals, and use reset or safety tools when they need more support.
These actions may seem small, but they are the practical building blocks of recovery engagement. They are also measurable. SoberPals is designed to help users act without feeling watched, punished, or judged. Progress stays private unless the user chooses to share it.
This is the opportunity for researchers, providers, and recovery organizations: build tools that support follow-through, then learn from real-world engagement patterns while protecting user choice and privacy.
Digital health has improved access to care, but follow-through between care moments remains hard to measure and support. SoberPals focuses on the daily actions that happen between appointments, meetings, and support conversations — the moments where recovery plans either become real or fade away.
The first SoberPals beta is built around TSF-PLAN, the 12-Step Facilitation Recovery Support Plan. It is designed to give users private, practical tools for recovery engagement from the first day they open the app.
The plan helps users find meetings, plan attendance, record recovery actions, contact support, and track signals like craving, mood, sleep, and recovery confidence. Reset and Safety Plans are included so users have a manual path to support when they feel off track or need help now.
The plan is private by default. Users can keep it for themselves or choose to share selected progress with a TSF counselor, sponsor, sober living program, provider, or trusted support person. The purpose is not surveillance. The purpose is to help people build recovery momentum through small actions that can be supported and improved over time.
A user can find a meeting, plan to attend, check in or manually record attendance, contact support, track craving, mood, sleep, and recovery confidence, and use Reset or Safety support tools when they need extra help.
SoberPals is starting with recovery engagement because the need is urgent and the actions are measurable. Recovery support often depends on repeated behaviors: showing up to meetings, contacting support, noticing craving or mood changes, completing daily routines, and asking for help before crisis.
These are exactly the kinds of behaviors that applets and Measured Action Plans can support. A meeting applet can help someone plan and record attendance. A support applet can make calling someone easier. A subjective tracker can help a person notice craving, mood, sleep, or confidence. A Reset Plan can help someone re-engage after a hard day.
Starting here lets us test the core SoberPals platform with real-world recovery actions while building the foundation for future health-support plans.
partners to understand whether digital recovery-action support improves meeting engagement, support contact, self-awareness, and re-engagement after missed actions.
We also want to study which applets are most associated with continued engagement, which barriers predict disengagement, and whether tools like “Talk to someone,” Reset Plans, and recovery-confidence check-ins help users reach support earlier. Different settings may need different plan configurations. Outpatient programs, IOPs, sober living homes, self-directed recovery users, and peer-support organizations may each benefit from a different version of the same underlying platform.
The larger question is simple: what helps people keep taking the next recovery action when life gets hard?
SoberPals is built around reusable applets, bundles, and Measured Action Plans. This matters because the platform is not meant to become a collection of one-off tools. A meeting check-in, a craving tracker, a support call, a sleep log, a medication routine, and a reset action should all be configurable pieces of a larger support plan.
This architecture lets partners create program codes, configure applets, distribute plans, and study engagement without rebuilding the product for every setting. It also prepares SoberPals to support future Welvida use cases beyond recovery, including medication routines, sleep, movement, mood activation, nephrology, transplant-care support, and other health-support domains.
The same structure that helps someone attend a recovery meeting can later help someone follow a kidney-care plan, track symptoms, build a sleep routine, or stay connected to support after discharge.
SoberPals is designed around user choice. A person can use a recovery-support plan privately, without sharing progress with an organization. They can also choose to share selected progress with a TSF counselor, sponsor, provider, sober living program, research partner, or trusted support person.
This distinction is central to the product. Recovery data should help people receive support, not make them feel watched. Sharing should be clear, intentional, and reversible. Sensitive check-ins, notes, and support actions should remain private unless the user chooses otherwise.
For partners and researchers, this creates a privacy-first model for studying recovery engagement. The goal is to learn what supports follow-through while respecting the person using the tool.
We are looking for beta partners, research collaborators, and organizations that want to study how recovery support works in real-world settings. SoberPals can help partners test evidence-informed support plans, co-design program codes, study applet-based engagement, and learn which barriers and reset actions matter most.
Our long-term goal is to build a platform that helps people take the next right step while helping organizations and researchers discover what actually improves engagement, adherence, and outcomes.
If you are a treatment program, sober living organization, peer-support network, researcher, foundation, or investor interested in recovery engagement, we would like to talk.
The research section is anchored in Cochrane’s author interview, which states that the updated review included 27 comparative investigations and around 11,000 participants, and that AA/Twelve-Step Facilitation (TSF) generally performed as well as other interventions on most clinical outcomes while doing better on abstinence and reducing healthcare costs. Cochrane also notes that AA is not suited to everyone and that other peer-support organizations such as SMART Recovery, LifeRing, and Women for Sobriety look promising but need more research. The current SoberPals product direction also aligns with the platform architecture Welvida has been developing: reusable applets, bundles, and MAPs rather than one-off screens, with TSF, Reset, and Safety Plan components represented as configured Measured Action Plans (MAP) rather than hardcoded workflows.
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Built by Welvida. Beta sponsored by the MV Foundation.