On June 30, 2025, Woebot Health shut down its consumer app.
If you do not know what Woebot was, here is the short version: it was a chatbot, built on cognitive behavioral therapy research, that talked to you about how you were feeling. It was free. It was used by millions of people. STAT News and MobiHealthNews covered the shutdown; the company cited the FDA regulatory environment around AI in clinical care and the cost of getting authorization for large language models.
Millions of people lost a mental health tool they used regularly, with essentially no notice.
I want to be honest about what I think this means.
Woebot was trying to build something clinical. It wanted to be approved as a medical device. That is why the FDA fight was existential for it — it had positioned itself as a treatment, not just a support tool, and the regulatory cost of that position became unworkable.
There is a different lane. It is the one where you build something that helps people without claiming to treat them. Where you curate a local directory and call every number on it. Where you build a tool that helps someone figure out who they are and then shows them who to call. Where the AI's job is to help a person find a human, not to be the human.
That is the lane I am building Steady in.
I am not a clinician. I have a Master of Divinity, not a license to practice therapy. I cannot do what Woebot was trying to do, and I am not trying to. I am doing what a former pastor with a phone and a website can do: make a list of who is actually available in Calhoun County and keep it current.
The formation layer — the Attune assessment that lives inside Steady, the personality and values mapping — is not clinical. It is not diagnostic. It is the kind of thing a good pastor does at the beginning of a care conversation: find out who the person is before you tell them what to do.
That is not medicine. It is attention.
The people who used Woebot needed something. They were not using it because nothing was wrong. They were using it at two in the morning when calling a therapist was not an option and they needed something to do with what they were feeling.
Those people are still there. The app is gone.
I built Steady because when I called 988 and then went looking for what else was available in Calhoun County, most of what I found either rang to a fax machine or had closed. The crisis lane is one thing. The week after the crisis — when you are trying to figure out what comes next — that is what I am building for.
The directory is at gatherstudio.app/steady.
If you are a provider in NE Alabama who is accepting new patients, I want to list you. I will verify you by calling.
Matt Headley is a former pastor and the founder of Gather Studio in Anniston, Alabama. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2025 and hospitalized at UAB's psychiatric center. He uses AI tools in his work and says so.
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