Show HN: Profound – AI therapist and personal coach
Profound is an AI therapist and personal coach that will prioritize your privacy, remember you on a personal level, and integrate with therapy tools like assessments and journals. It is available today on ios, android, and web.

--- How it Started ---

I've been an avid user of LLMs (happy to discuss how I use them for coding in a comment thread). But I realized I got much better personal responses by dumping a ton of info about myself into the system prompt. Instead of "general assistant response" it felt much more like "friend that really knows me".

This led me to think about building a high-fidelity long-term memory layer to augment the LLM. This is conceptually similar to the test-time compute paradigm because you give it more time/compute to do memory-related tasks before and after the actual response. It's worked really well for me personally.

This personalization epiphany came around the same time as having personal frustration using other online therapy solutions I'd tried. Not that they weren't qualified professionals, but they just can't really get to know you fully in the short time you have with them. At least that was my experience. This is not to say others don't have excellent experiences, but this happened to me and I'm sure it has happened to others as well.

All of this came together into the idea for a deeply personal AI therapist - one that you could dump everything into (even the most trivial details about your life) and it would accept them with infinite patience and availability.

--- The Stack ---

- Flutter. I love Flutter. This is actually my first Flutter app, but it was an amazing experience. Helped to get launched on android, ios, and web in one fell swoop. Probably #1 feature here is that everything is fully integrated end-to-end. You have this amazing DX console for debugging everything from styling to state to performance.

- Drift + Powersync + Supabase (client-side sqlite DB with centralized syncing to postgres). Also love this setup. Huge shoutout to Simon Binder, open source author of Drift and now engineer at Powersync. This makes Profound a local-first app. Rather than two different storage patterns for front-end data and back-end data, its the same SQL schema in both places. Greatly simplifies the architecture and makes everything feel snappier. It works well when you don't have a social network where users mostly interact with eachother. In the case of Profound, all of your own data can fit in a single sqlite instance and you don't need anything else. You can read more about the syncing philosophy here: https://docs.powersync.com/intro/powersync-philosophy

- Cloudflare Workers + Pages. I have a lot of experience with doing the same type of services in AWS: Lambda + Route 53 + S3 + CloudFront. But Cloudflare made it way easier in terms of DX (and I think they have a much lower-latency network for edge). Another thing that is really cool: you can use javascript-native RPC between cloudflare workers. This made it really easy for the services I deployed to talk to eachother without a whole bunch of fuss. I have a service-oriented architecture and deploy each one independently. Read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/javascript-native-rpc/

--- Other Values ---

- Privacy is sacred. This product can't exist at all if people don't trust it. The long-term goal for this is homomorphic encryption. But that's not technically feasible yet with LLMs. So the best we have now is a few basic privacy foundations (no sharing/selling data, humans like employees can't read messages, no using data for ads) and use a privacy-preserving system like Clio (from Anthropic) for analytics.

--- Feedback Welcome ---

You can see the modules that are "coming soon" in the app. Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions. I built this solo in the last 4 months but hoping to get another couple of folks to help build the next feature set a bit faster. I'm aware of some Android issues for auth and subscription, but fixing those now.