In the past few years, there’s been a welcome shift in the tone of the conversation on mental health and its importance to the population’s overall well-being. Mental health applications have been instrumental in normalizing this conversation and elevating mental well-being to the same level of importance as physical health.
Today, 1 in 5 U.S. adults use mental health apps to proactively manage their mental well-being and access support on their terms. This growing demand is echoed in the investment landscape. In the first half of 2024, mental health startups topped the list of top-funded clinical indications in digital health, raising $682 million in VC funding.
So the question is: what does it take to develop a mental health app that not only makes a difference but also nabs substantial funding? With 13+ years of experience and a track record of 300+ projects, Orangesoft, a health tech development company, is here to provide the answer.
Launch a mental health app to bridge mental health gaps
Mental health applications have the power to deliver foundational benefits to mental health app users and make a true difference in their lives and the lives of mental health professionals.
Accessibility of mental health services
The mental health field has been historically under-staffed and overstretched. In the U.S., around 169 million of the population live in a mental health professional shortage area. People in rural areas or underserved communities have it even harder. Also, even those who have access to high-quality mental health services choose not to seek help because of the stigma associated with mental health problems.
Mental health applications — provided they’re built with accessibility in mind — can shatter the barriers to care. There’s no wait time involved, and every person with a smartphone can get support and a secure place to speak about their stressors, regardless of their whereabouts and financial status.
Lower costs of mental health services
46% of mental health patients skip treatment because they cannot afford it. Compared to in-person therapy, which costs around $100 to $350 per session, telebehavioral health applications offer more affordable therapy options starting from $50 per session, with the possibility of monthly or subscription-based billing.
The benefits also extend to the other side of care: self-paced interventions reduce therapists’ workloads, allowing healthcare professionals to spend less time reaching the same number of patients. Also, such apps can substitute some forms of in-person care, lower operating costs, and prevent higher acuity situations and comorbid conditions thanks to early identification and symptom recognition.
Improved treatment outcomes
Although self-help mental health apps cannot completely substitute for a licensed therapist, they can complement and augment traditional care in many ways — from convenient symptom tracking and goal setting to supporting patients’ adaptive coping skills usage outside of therapy sessions.
For example, only 18% of U.S. psychiatrists use symptom rating scales to monitor improvement. Mobile apps can address the gap in measurement-based care through real-time symptom tracking and remote monitoring, allowing psychiatrists to adjust treatments accordingly.
Moreover, the features built into mental health apps can improve treatment adherence, thus facilitating better care outcomes. For instance, Happify, a self-guided mental health app, makes CBT — a type of psychotherapy people often struggle to consistently follow through — less of a hassle for people by offering short, flexible CBT sessions that can be done anywhere and any time.
Types of top-funded mental health apps
As we mentioned in the intro, mental health applications, as a category, are seeing a major financial windfall — with thousands of startups pulling to the forefront. But there are still untapped opportunities in various app subcategories, waiting for innovative startups to pitch in.
| Mental health app category | Description | Differentiating features | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telepsychiatry applications | Facilitate remote mental health consultations between patients and licensed mental health professionals; can be synchronous or asynchronous | Real-time video or audio conferencing, secure messaging, patient records management, prescription management, appointment scheduling, progress tracking, patient education | TalkSpace, Spring Health, Octave, Equip Health, Little Otter |
| Mindfulness and meditation apps | Promote mindfulness, reduce stress, and enhance overall well-being | Guided meditations, breathing exercises, mindfulness techniques, relaxation exercises, sleep tools, progress tracking, smart coaches | Headspace, Calm Health, The Way, Breathwrk |
| Stress and anxiety management apps | Help manage and alleviate specific anxiety symptoms; can aid in cognitive behavioral treatment | Evidence-based coping tools (relaxation techniques, breathing exercises, journaling prompts, mental imagery, meditations), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) modules, mood tracking, biofeedback | Aura, Reveri, Rootd, Dare, Spiritune |
| Self-help and CBT apps | Help individuals manage various mental health disorders and address their underlying causes; сover a broad range of mental health concerns; usually based on a therapeutic approach | CBT modules, goal-setting tools, skill-building exercises, relaxation techniques, journaling prompts, progress tracking, personalized treatment plans, emergency tools | Feeling Great, MindShift CBT, Inflow, Numo, Healios |
| Mental health tracking apps | Enable individuals to monitor their mood over time, identify triggers, and learn how external factors impact their wellbeing | Mood tracking, symptom tracking, sleep tracking, progress tracking, goal setting, coping strategies, medication reminders, journaling | Reflectly, Ahead, Moodfit, Bearable, Daylio |
| Addiction recovery apps | Support individuals in their journey to overcome addiction and help avoid relapses | Habit tracking (sobriety clock, milestones, money saved), relapse prevention tools (therapy, skill development, meditations), community forums, support groups, peer coaching, educational resources, affirmation exercises | Sober Sidekick, Less, Pelago, Recovery Path, WEconnect |
| Peer support and community apps | Supportive online communities that connect individuals based on shared mental health experiences | Community forums, group chats, peer support, social networking features, safe spaces for sharing | TalkLife, Marigold Health, 7 Cups, Wisdo |
| Corporate mental health and wellness apps | Support employees’ mental well-being within organizations; many are covered by health insurance plans | Stress management tools, mindfulness exercises, therapy resources, sleep improvement, self-assessment tools, employee assistance programs (EAPs), confidential counseling, peer support | Wellhub, Lyra Health, Modern Health, Spring Health, Unmind |
How to develop a mental health app, proven roadmap from Orangesoft
Mental health app development is a high-stakes initiative, as mental health apps have a direct impact on people's well-being and mental health. Not only should your application be good-looking, cutting-edge, and robust, but it should also provide accessible, personalized, and evidence-based support. To achieve this combination of traits, you need a multifaceted approach.
Product discovery
A successful mental health app starts with comprehensive research that dives into various app aspects, including its target audience, data security requirements, and specific software needs. Working with a mental health app development company, you can gain the necessary insights through product discovery — a collaborative, information-gathering exercise led by business analysts, UX/UI designers, software developers, and product managers.
Market research and target audience profiling
Whether you’re developing an app for mental health specialists, the other side of care, or both, you need to know exactly what solutions and functionalities they need to achieve their goals and address their needs. To make sure your app concept is aligned with user needs, a UX/UI team runs quantitative and qualitative research to elicit user personas, user journey maps, and information architecture of your future app.
To better illustrate the design concepts, your UX/UI team develops wireframes that outline the skeletal framework of your future mental health app.
Your mental health application development team also performs market research to gauge the competition, spot gaps or opportunities, and list and prioritize the non-negotiable app features.
Analysis of relevant data, data security, and compliance requirements
General mental health solutions like mindfulness and meditation applications are typically not required to comply with specific healthcare regulations like HIPAA. However, mental health apps that handle sensitive health information or provide therapeutic services are subject to regulations such as HITECH, FDA, FTC, OCR, NCPDP, CFR 42 Part 2, and EU MDR (for medical devices).
Most of these regulations require you to have an explicit understanding of what personal data your app collects and how it processes it. So, along with identifying applicable regulations, you and your team should identify the types of personal data your app will collect, process, and transfer — and the consent mechanisms needed for the data flow.
At this stage, your development team also plans data access controls, data encryption, and other security mechanisms mandated by ISO 27001. To double-check your data security, your mental health app developers can also map out data flows, which helps uncover potential security vulnerabilities.
Development planning
Based on the user needs, stakeholder input, regulatory requirements, and technical feasibility, your app development team determines functional and non-functional requirements for your mental health solution. The team also scopes your project and matches it with an optimal development approach.
Taking into account your scalability, performance, security, and maintainability requirements, developers identify the right architectural patterns and develop a system’s architecture. A secure technology stack is also necessary to ensure the applications’ long-term well-being. Based on the project’s scope, project managers prepare estimations, timelines, and team composition.
Designing the application
Following the user insights researched during the discovery stage, your UX/UI team prepares interactive prototypes that simulate the functionality and user experience of a mental health app.
Keep in mind that a mental health app may not do the job without prioritizing accessibility in design. That’s why when developing app design, your UX/UI team should consider physical, sensory, and cognitive limitations — and how these overlap with mental disorders. Ideally, your team should perform user accessibility testing before solidifying app prototypes to make sure your application is truly inclusive.
Overall, your accessibility requirements should be guided by the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standard. This standard provides specific guidelines for creating content that is perceivable (P), operable (O), understandable (U), and robust (R) — also known as POUR guidelines.
Besides design adjustments, accessibility calls for back-end technical or coding considerations. This may involve compatibility with assistive technologies like screen readers and voice recognition software.
Along with the main designs, your UX/UI team also prepares explicit consent forms and privacy policies that detail data processing methods, storage duration, and third-party data sharing. After app prototypes are tested by real users and approved by project stakeholders, they are turned into final design layouts and handed over to the development team.
MVP development and testing
Next comes the minimum viable product development stage, where developers code the key features of your mental health solution, develop the application’s front and back end, and implement necessary security features.
If your mental health app handles Protected Health Information (PHI), your development team must also implement robust backup mechanisms to ensure data integrity and availability in case of system failures or cyberattacks. At this stage, mental health app developers also set up necessary integrations.
In parallel with the development, the quality assurance and testing team validates each aspect of your solution, making sure it is developed according to predefined benchmarks and applicable regulations. Since the very beginning of the app development process, the QA team is also in charge of creating and maintaining project documentation — an important artifact to ensure certification compliance.
Conducting legal and security checks
With a functional application and comprehensive project documentation on hand, you can run a HIPAA compliance assessment or GDPR compliance audit to make sure your application is fully ready for the market. If necessary, you can involve a third-party compliance expert to run the necessary checks.
Some mental health solutions might also need to obtain approval from the FDA or other regulators — or acquire telehealth licensing. If your application introduces novel mental health treatment methods or therapeutic interventions, you need to conduct clinical validation to assess its real impact on mental health outcomes.
Launching and scaling
Perfected and approved by the regulators, your mental health application can finally enter the market. When the application is launched on the app stores or other target environments, your development team monitors its performance and introduces the necessary improvements, such as bug fixes, security patches, and OS updates. User feedback is regularly collected, assessed, and prioritized to inform the development of new features.
When the application gains some traction and garners a loyal user base, your team can prepare it for further growth by adjusting its architecture and codebase.
14 key features for a market-ready mental health app
While mental health apps come in many flavors, they share some features that allow them to support users in managing their mental well-being and achieving their goals.
Sign up/Sign in
When a user first opens your mental health application, they should be welcomed with a simple and clear entry into the app. Here’s what your app’s registration should include:
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Email and text message verification
- Social login
- Explicit data consent forms (can be included in the onboarding process)
The sign-up process is followed by user onboarding, designed to introduce users to the key features and functionalities of the product and collect basic user data for further personalization.
To promote engagement and connect with users on an emotional level, your application can display the following signals during the onboarding process:
- Social proof (the number of users, expert reviews)
- Clear value propositions (screens with high-level summary information on mental health app benefits and the results it delivers)
- Incentives (rewards for the completed registration, visual representation of the completion, etc), and more.
Make sure your onboarding process is concise and limits the required information to essential details. You can also leverage social media integrations to minimize data entry.
User profile
The user profile serves as the management hub for personal information health, providing a personalized space for users to track their mental health journey, set goals, and access tailored resources.
Must-have elements for this feature include:
- Personal information
- Health information (typically self-reported)
- Preferences (notifications, theme)
- Emergency contacts
- Goal setting
- Symptom tracking
- Data sharing
Self-monitoring tools
Self-monitoring tools are frequently featured in many mental health apps — from self-improvement apps to mental wellness apps and therapy apps — allowing users to track their symptoms, moods, and behaviors over time.
Self-monitoring tools can include the following components:
- Mood tracking (mood scales, list of emotions)
- Symptom tracking (checklists, severity ratings for each symptom)
- Behavior tracking (journals, checklists, sleep trackers, substance use trackers)
- Coping strategy tracking
Based on the input data, self-monitoring tools can provide recommendations for users or notify users of potential triggers.
Guided meditation and mindfulness exercises
Many mental health apps offer a structured approach to mindfulness through guided audio or video meditations and mindfulness exercises. This feature should be augmented by the following capabilities:
- High-quality audio and soothing background soundscapes
- Granular customization options (duration, difficulty level, topic)
- Progress tracking
- Community features (competitions, forums)
Educational content
According to a study, a lot of mental health and depression apps often provide brief and incomplete educational content, with 1 in 5 apps providing non–evidence-based information.
That’s why resources provided by your application, whether it’s condition-specific content programs, coping strategies, or mental health practices, should be sourced from reputable mental health organizations and reviewed by mental healthcare providers.
Here’s how to make sure your educational content moves the needle:
- Avoid complex medical jargon — opt for clear and simple glossaries
- Include visually appealing graphics, infographics, and videos to make the content easily digestible
- Incorporate quizzes, polls, or interactive exercises
- Offer personalized recommendations based on user data
Notifications and reminders
Notifications and reminders, such as journaling prompts, mindfulness practice reminders, and medication reminders, help users check in with their mental state throughout the day and stay consistent with their practices.
The rule of thumb is to deliver personalized alerts based on user data, allowing users to customize notification frequency and timing. You can also enable different notification channels, such as text messages, push notifications, and emails, and set up integration with calendars.
Emergency resources
Crises may emerge at any time among people with mental health problems. In times like these, your mental health app should provide users with instant access to crisis-specific resources, such as crisis hotline directory, crisis text lines, safety plans, and harm-prevention tools.
Note that crisis management tools should be readily available and easily accessible within the app. You can place a crisis banner on the bottom of every screen or include an explicit crisis resources document in the app.
AI-powered insights and recommendations
A good mental health app is one that speaks the same language as your target users and adjusts to meet their unique mental health needs. All this is impossible without artificial intelligence that takes many forms in mental health apps:
- Personalized recommendations — based on analyzed user data, AI algorithms generate personalized treatment plans, including CBT techniques, mindfulness exercises, and more.
- Adaptive therapy — mental health apps can adjust treatment plans based on user progress.
- Symptom assessment — AI algorithms can analyze symptoms jotted down by the user and flag early signs of worsening mental health.
Audio/video calls and chats
If your application revolves around telemedicine features or has them as a supplementary feature, you also need to integrate high-quality video and audio conferencing features.
Here’s what to take heed of:
- Make sure your application is optimized for various network conditions (data minimization, offline capabilities, testing across speeds, etc).
- Implement robust encryption and security measures to protect patient privacy.
- Make telemedicine accessible by including features such as closed captioning and screen reader compatibility.
- Enable real-time/asynchronous text-based communication for efficient messaging.
- Enable screen sharing and document sharing (treatment plans, progress notes, etc).
- If necessary, ensure seamless integration with electronic health records (EHRs).
Goal setting and progress tracking
The practice of setting goals and seeing tangible progress with them helps individuals improve their emotional well-being and provides them with a sense of purpose. Gamified elements such as progress bars, quests, challenges, social features, rewards, and digital avatars support users on this quest while also improving in-app engagement.
Integration with wearable devices
By connecting a mental health app to wearables, you enable individuals and mental health specialists to track physiological metrics like heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels — and have a deeper understanding of a person’s well-being. These metrics are then turned into personalized insights to adjust treatment plans, identify trends, and determine patterns in mood, activity, and physiological responses.
Key considerations for wearable integration include:
- Wearable health data must be securely stored, transmitted, and compliant with healthcare privacy regulations such as HIPAA — if applicable.
- Adopt data minimization to bring down data security risks.
- Get informed consent from users about data collection and usage.
- Data from wearables can be integrated into electronic health records.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
While rule-based chatbots with preapproved scripts still have a place in some mental health apps, competitive solutions incorporate gen AI-based chatbots and virtual assistants that build on foundation models such as GPT, LaMDA, LLaMA, Claude, and others. Such chatbots create a fluid, human-like conversational experience. According to a study, 80% of people who used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for mental health advice deem it an effective alternative to regular therapy.
Keep in mind that along with robust NLP and ML capabilities, a mental health chatbot must be trained on evidence-based data such as CBT, IPT, and DBT techniques. Also, the chatbot should be designed to recognize when a conversation requires human intervention, such as in cases of severe distress or suicidal ideation. In such instances, the shutdown message should include referrals to suicide prevention resources.
Dashboards and data visualizations
Dashboards and data visualizations allow users to understand complex health and well-being metrics and provide them with a quick and easy way to monitor their performance.
What to keep in mind when integrating dashboards and other visualizations into a mental health app:
- Limit the amount of information displayed on a dashboard to a minimum.
- Incorporate visualizations to highlight positive progress and achievements.
- Clearly label visualizations and provide context to prevent misunderstandings.
- Make sure your visualizations are accessible to all users (accessible color palettes, multiple cues, etc).
Communities and group chat
Many mental health applications include communities and groups, whether it’s to improve accountability, enable collective learning, or provide emotional support. If you’re making this feature a part of your mental health app, make sure the community is actively moderated, implements encrypted messaging, and allows users to participate anonymously should they prefer so. In some applications, communities are also overseen by mental health professionals.
Monetization models for mental health apps
While the overall revenue strategy for your application can vary based on its purpose and target audience (direct-to-consumer, self-insured employer benefits, value-based reimbursement, and others), you can implement that strategy using a combination of specific monetization models.
Freemium model
Your mental health app offers basic features for free but charges a premium for advanced features such as personalized treatment plans, premium content, community features, meditation coaches, and other add-ons.
Subscriptions
Users pay a recurring monthly, quarterly, or annual fee to access your app's features. Mental health apps may offer multiple subscription tiers with varying levels of access and features.
In-app purchases
Users can buy either consumable (meditation, therapy session) or non-consumable (ad-free experience) offerings in addition to the cost of downloading the app or as a part of the freemium experience.
In-app advertising
Within this monetization model, the application generates revenue by displaying ads to the user. This monetization model is used when app owners want to keep a cost-free app experience.
Affiliate marketing
Mental health companies can collaborate with other businesses, such as fitness apps, wearable device companies, healthcare providers and organizations, health and wellness product retailers, and other players to offer joint promotions.
What concerns to address when building a mental health application
To vie for investors’ and user’s attention with something more than marketing claims, your mental health app requires a strong foundation of data security and clinical evidence.
User engagement and usability
The effectiveness of your mental health application is the direct result of its sustained use. However, only a mere 4% of users who downloaded a mental health app continue to use it after 15 days, and only 3% stick around after 30 days.
Poor usability can be part of the reason why users take your app for a spin and then disengage. To avoid that, make sure your application is accessible, has a clear information architecture, and sports an initiative and easy-to-navigate interface.
Personalization is also central to improving adherence and user engagement. But make sure to take a sensible approach to personalization — the one that prioritizes data security and encourages users to seek professional help when necessary. Gamified elements also encourage users to persevere with their mental health goals and ensure sustained motivation.
Privacy and data security
A 2023 study found that 17 of the 27 analyzed mental health apps fell short in terms of user privacy and data security. And this tendency is sadly echoed even by popular applications. For example, Cerebral, a popular mental health telemedicine platform, was fined for disclosing users’ personal health information to third parties for ads.
To buck this trend and cultivate a trusted relationship with your users, make sure to address the following privacy and data security considerations:
- Does your application collect, use, and/or transmit sensitive data? If yes, what security measures (encryption, authentication, incident response plan, etc) have you incorporated to protect it?
- Do you have the necessary safeguards in place to comply with regulations?
- Is there a clear and accessible privacy policy in place?
- What specific data is absolutely necessary for the app?
- Where will user data be stored? Will it be encrypted both at rest and in transit?
- Will user data be shared with third-party services? If so, what safeguards are in place?
Ethical use of AI and ML
Unless your AI algorithms are trained on diverse datasets, the AI engine of your mental health app can spawn biases and inaccuracies that can lead to the ineffectiveness of the app and even harmful outcomes. Along with representative datasets, make sure you collect the absolute minimum of sensitive data and have anonymization measures in place to protect individual identities yet allow your AI models to learn.
Keep in mind that AI algorithms aren’t a set-and-forget app feature. You need to continuously monitor them for bias and data drift and take corrective actions, such as calibration or retraining if needed.
User safety
Mental health applications are a valuable tool but they cannot replace professional help in times of crisis. That’s why your application should be able to identify potential risks, such as suicidal ideation, and trigger emergency protocols when necessary.
User safety monitoring is a complex task that requires a combination of natural language processing, behavioral analytics, and AI-powered risk assessment. We also recommend collaborating with mental health professionals to develop and refine your risk assessment and emergency algorithms.
Evidence-based practices
Many app developers claim that their mental health applications are clinically effective or built on evidence-based practices — though they have little actual data to support their claims, which can dampen users’ trust. Contrastingly, evidence-based mental health apps often have a stronger business case (which is important if you’re seeking funding) and have more credibility in the users’ eyes.
So, if your app is billed to deliver therapeutic benefits or claims to treat, manage, or prevent mental health conditions, it has to be supported by scientific research or clinical trials. By partnering with trusted mental health specialists, you can also make sure that your app's content, techniques, and strategies are rooted in scientific research and clinical best practices.
How much does it cost to create a mental health app?
Short answer: it depends. No mental health app is the same, and each project is different in terms of its specific goals, tech requirements, target platforms, the level of clinical integration required, regulatory requirements, and other variables. To give you a general understanding of the price range, our experts have prepared a ballpark estimation based on the previous projects our company has delivered.
| Features | Approximate time, hours | Approximate cost, $ |
|---|---|---|
Mobile (patient-focused) app | ||
| Project setup | 111 | 5,566 |
| Sign in/Sign up | 94 | 4,697 |
| Onboarding questionnary | 30 | 1,515 |
| Profile management | 82 | 4,091 |
| Mood tracking | 27 | 1,364 |
| Symptom tracking | 27 | 1,364 |
| Behavior tracking | 27 | 1,364 |
| Personalized audio and video exercises | 97 | 4,848 |
| Progress dashboard | 45 | 2,273 |
| Reminders | 42 | 2,121 |
| Deployment and integration | 52 | 2,576 |
| Basic analytics | 45 | 2,235 |
General | ||
| Admin panel | 70 | 3,500 |
| Design | 120 | 6,000 |
| Product discovery | 120 | 6,000 |
| Total | 990 | 49,510 |
Keep in mind that this estimation accounts only for the costs associated with MVP development. By building an MVP first, you can validate your product concept early and gather valuable user feedback needed for full-fledged development.
You can contact our team directly to get a free estimate for your project.
Your prescription for mental health app success
Mental health applications have the potential to heal the digital divide, allowing more individuals with mental health issues to access proactive and timely care and support. However, to bridge gaps instead of growing them, mental health startups should consider the specific tech, regulatory, and business challenges that come with mental health solutions — and account for them early in the development process.
If you’re looking for a trusted health tech partner to implement your solution, Orangesoft is up for the challenge. Contact us, and we’ll help your mental health app create a lasting impact.
