Industry: Mental Health Tech

Mental Health Tech — What's Going On (May 2026)

The Short Version

Mental health tech looks huge from the outside, but most of it is out of reach for a solo founder. Companies like TherapyBridge, CareQueue, and the big workplace mental-health platforms need networks of therapists, deals with insurance companies, or venture-capital money to get started. The real solo path is inside a therapist's own private practice: SimplePractice ($29–99/month) and TherapyNotes ($49+/month) already dominate general practice management, but three real gaps remain — getting approved by insurance companies, scheduling and billing for group therapy, and documenting required progress check-ins. These jobs aren't exciting, but they're exactly the kind of specific, unglamorous problem a solo founder can build and sell for $19–49/month.

How Big Is This, Really?

How much money are we talking about:

  • Grand View Research: mental health apps were worth $7.48 billion in 2024, growing to $17.52 billion by 2030 (about 14.6% bigger every year)
  • Note: this number is just for apps — the total amount spent on digital mental health, including bigger platforms, is much larger

Who's actually paying for this:

  • Solo therapists and counselors in private practice — mostly using SimplePractice ($29–99/month) or TherapyNotes ($49+/month). This is the best target for a solo founder.
  • Group practices (2–20 therapists) — using SimplePractice Groups or TheraNest ($39+/month). Their needs are more complicated.
  • Big mental-health platforms — Spring Health, Lyra, BetterHelp — these need investor funding and networks of therapists. Not something one person could build.
  • Hospitals and health systems — served by giant systems like Epic and Cerner. Out of reach.
  • Workplace mental-health programs — served by companies like Magellan and ComPsych, selling to businesses. Not something one person could sell into.

Who a solo founder should target: solo and small-group therapists (counselors, social workers, psychologists) running their own private practice. They pay for their own software out of pocket, hate dealing with insurance paperwork, and have specific problems that SimplePractice doesn't fully solve.

The Real Problems People Have

Getting approved by insurance companies is a nightmare (seen on r/therapists, r/psychotherapy):

  • Getting approved to accept a specific insurance plan takes 60–120 days, and therapists often apply to 10 or more insurance companies at once
  • A common complaint: "I applied to 8 insurance plans 4 months ago and I have no idea where any of them stand"
  • The approval process involves a shared credentialing database (called CAQH), regular attestations, and reapplying every 2 years — therapists lose track of all of it
  • There's no dedicated $19–29/month tool for this; therapists use spreadsheets, or pay a service $300–500 per insurance plan to handle it for them

Group therapy billing is clunky (seen on r/therapists):

  • SimplePractice handles one-on-one sessions well, but group therapy — several clients in one session, each billed separately — is awkward
  • A common problem: running a therapy group with 8 members who each have different insurance copays and deductibles
  • TheraNest and TherapyNotes handle this a bit better, but neither makes it easy to track who showed up and bill insurance for each person at the same time
  • What people actually want: "I need something that lets me schedule group sessions and automatically generate a separate insurance claim for each person"

Required progress check-ins take too much manual work (seen on r/therapists, r/socialwork):

  • Insurance companies (especially Medicare and Medicaid) now require therapists to regularly measure client progress using standard questionnaires (commonly known by their initials — PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5) and attach them to treatment plans
  • Therapists give these questionnaires by hand, score them by hand, and then retype the scores into their notes
  • SimplePractice has basic support for this, but it doesn't generate the specific report format some insurance companies require
  • A common complaint: "I have to manually calculate and write up progress scores for every Medicare client every 6 sessions"

Who Else Is Already Doing This

Full practice management (already established)

  • SimplePractice — $29–99/month, dominates the solo-therapist market; weak on group therapy and getting approved by insurance
  • TherapyNotes — $49+/month, strong on documentation, weaker on billing workflow
  • TheraNest — $39+/month, better suited to group practices
  • What this means: don't try to build a full competing system. Find the specific jobs these tools ignore

Getting approved by insurance

  • Medallion — $250+/month, manages credentialing for many types of healthcare providers — overkill for one therapist
  • MD Staff — built for hospital-level credentialing
  • Manual services — $300–500 per insurance plan, a one-time service that does the paperwork for you
  • The gap: a $19–29/month do-it-yourself tracker for solo therapists getting approved by insurance companies

Group therapy tools

  • No dedicated product exists; everyone uses SimplePractice or TherapyNotes with manual workarounds
  • The gap: a $39/month tool for scheduling group therapy sessions and splitting the billing automatically

Progress check-in tracking

  • Greenspace — progress tracking built for larger practices and health systems
  • Blueprint — progress tracking built for big organizations
  • The gap: a $19/month tool that automatically scores standard check-in questionnaires and documents the session for solo therapists

What You Could Actually Build

BEST BET — An insurance-approval tracker for therapists

  • The problem: solo therapists applying to 5–15 insurance plans at once lose track of application status, deadlines, and reapproval dates
  • Who would pay: therapists trying to get approved by insurance companies or keep their approval current, at $19–29/month
  • What to build: a tracker for each insurance application (company name, date applied, status, required documents, decision date, reapproval date) plus reminders to update your credentialing profile plus a dashboard showing where every application stands
  • How to find customers: r/therapists, r/psychotherapy, therapy continuing-education communities, the National Association of Social Workers
  • Competition check: no dedicated tool exists; spreadsheets are the only alternative
  • Verdict: Niche — a real problem with a clear, willing payer, but a fairly small group (about 200,000 private-practice therapists in the US)

COULD WORK — A group-therapy billing assistant

  • The problem: running a therapy group means tracking attendance, copays, and separate insurance claims for 6–12 people at once
  • Who would pay: group-practice owners, as a $39/month add-on
  • What to build: a group-session scheduler → an attendance tracker → automatically generate an individual insurance claim for each attendee with the right billing codes → track who's paid their copay
  • Competition check: SimplePractice does this poorly; TheraNest does it a bit better, but not cleanly
  • Verdict: Niche — a smaller market than tools for individual therapists, since only group-practice owners would buy it

COULD WORK — A progress check-in dashboard

  • The problem: insurance-required progress check-ins create manual paperwork every single session
  • Who would pay: therapists who accept insurance, at $19/month
  • What to build: let clients fill out standard progress questionnaires digitally through a link → automatically score them → generate a note ready to paste into records → track progress over time
  • Competition check: Blueprint and Greenspace are built for big organizations; SimplePractice's version is basic
  • Verdict: Vitamin — meaning it's genuinely useful, but insurance companies may require specific software integrations, which makes it harder for a standalone tool to catch on

The Bottom Line

Mental health tech scores about a 5 out of 10 for solo founders — the overall market is huge, but the part a solo founder can actually reach is narrow and already fairly crowded. SimplePractice has captured most solo therapists with excellent reach and word of mouth. The remaining gaps are real but small: tools for insurance approval and group billing serve a smaller slice of a smaller slice. The strongest path is the insurance-approval tracker — it's genuinely underserved, therapists already pay for it today ($300–500 per insurance plan through manual services), and a $29/month tracker is a much cheaper alternative. The total number of possible customers is limited (about 200,000 private-practice therapists in the US), but the people who do have this problem feel it strongly.

Where These Numbers Come From