The pain industry has a business model, and it depends on you staying in pain. Subscription apps that charge you monthly for as long as you hurt. Coaching upsells that start at $50 and climb. Content libraries so vast you could scroll for an hour before you even start. Pain journals that ask you to rate your suffering every single day, as if putting a number on it will make it stop.
It won't. Focusing on your pain creates more pain. This is not an opinion. It is one of the most consistent findings in modern pain neuroscience. The brain learns what you pay attention to. If every morning starts with logging how much you hurt, you are training the system to keep the alarm on.
We built Relief because everything else gets this backwards.
The leading pain retraining apps charge $70 to $130 a year and auto-renew without warning. Some offer coaching add-ons at $200, $500, even more. They give you content libraries with hundreds of sessions and tell you to pick the ones that feel right. They ask you to journal about your pain, rate your pain, track your pain on a graph over time. They build streaks and badges and gamification loops designed to keep you engaged, which is another word for subscribed.
Read their reviews. The 1-star ones. You will see the same pattern over and over: people who paid for months, who dutifully logged their symptoms, who talked about their pain every single day, and got worse. Not because the science is wrong, but because the product is designed to retain, not to resolve.
A subscription pain app has no incentive for you to get better. Every month you stay in pain is another month of revenue. The model is broken at the root.
Relief is a one-time purchase. $14.99. No subscription. No auto-renewal. No coaching upsell. No premium tier. No hidden costs. The first few sessions are free so you can try it before you spend anything. If you buy it and it doesn't work for you, you get a full refund through the App Store. No questions.
We do not make more money when you stay in pain longer.
This changes everything about how the product is designed. We have no reason to pad the program. No reason to add content for the sake of engagement. No reason to keep you opening the app after you're done. The program is 42 sessions across 6 chapters. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you finish, you delete the app. That is the intended outcome.
We believe that focusing on pain keeps you in pain. So there are no pain ratings in Relief. You never log your symptoms. You never journal about how it feels. You never track flares on a graph. Instead, you collect evidence that the pain isn't what your brain thinks it is. The attention goes toward safety, not threat. This is how the research works. This is how the brain updates.
We believe that choice is the enemy of action when you're in pain. So there is no content library. No catalogue of sessions to browse. You open the app, you press play, and the program tells you what to do today. One session. 5 to 10 minutes. Then you're done.
We believe that streaks and badges have no place in pain retraining. Pain doesn't follow a calendar. Some days you can't do a session. That's fine. You skip a day, you pick up where you left off. There is no streak to protect, no fire emoji to maintain, no guilt mechanism disguised as motivation. The program waits for you.
We believe that a pain app should make you think about your pain less, not more. If you are spending time inside the app browsing content, managing settings, reading community posts about other people's pain, the app is making things worse. Relief is designed to be opened, used, and closed. Quickly. Every day. Until you don't need it.
We did not invent any of this. The science behind Relief comes from peer-reviewed research across multiple institutions: the University of Colorado, Stanford, the University of South Australia, and others. Pain reprocessing therapy. Pain neuroscience education. Graded exposure. These are established clinical techniques with published trial data.
What we did is put them into a format that works. A structured program. Audio-led. Short daily sessions. No decisions required. The same principles that work in a clinical setting, delivered in a way that someone can actually stick with, alone, at home, for $14.99.
We collect almost no data. No accounts. No email required to use the app. No analytics. No tracking. Your evidence entries, your safe messages, your progress — all of it stays on your device. We don't know who you are and we don't want to. Your pain is not our data.
The pain industry tells you that healing takes time, which is true, and then builds a subscription around it, which is predatory. It tells you to engage with your pain every day, which the neuroscience says is counterproductive. It tells you to choose from a library of options, when the research shows that removing decisions is what lets people actually start.
Relief does one thing. It teaches your brain that the pain signal is not a threat. 42 sessions. No subscription. No upsells. No pain tracking. Designed to be finished. Designed to be deleted.
We built this for people who want to get better, not people who want to keep paying.