About
Why Sameside exists
Most relationship help in the UK is either a £75-an-hour room that both of you have to agree to walk into, or an app that asks you a cute question a day. Between them is a gap the size of most marriages and most families.
Sameside was built to sit in that gap: the structure and depth of counselling — assessment, formulation, weekly sessions, measurement, referral — in software, privately, for the price of a takeaway. Not a chatbot: a method.
The two decisions everything else follows from
First, nobody in a circle ever sees anyone else’s answers. The coach is the only reader, and every sentence written for the whole circle is checked before anyone sees it — for verbatim phrases, for anything that reveals who said what, and for topics someone marked off-limits. Second, families of adults are first-class: parents and grown-up children, siblings, step-families. Every couples app stops at two people, and the people who most need help talking are often not a couple at all.
What it is built on
A structured knowledge base the coach reads before it writes: the Gottman Method, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Integrative Behavioural Couple Therapy (the basis of the OurRelationship programme, which has randomised trials behind it), attachment research, Bowen and structural family systems, PREP and the Speaker–Listener technique, Nonviolent Communication, solution-focused and narrative approaches. Progress is measured with the Couples Satisfaction Index, the four-item version used in couple-therapy research, at the start, every week and at a checkup.
Who builds it
A small independent team in the UK — product and engineering, not clinicians. That distinction matters, so it is stated plainly rather than blurred: the method comes from published clinical research and the people who developed it; the software that applies it comes from us. There is no therapist reading your answers, and the product says so on every page where it could possibly be mistaken for one.
How it makes money, and why that matters
One subscription, or one purchase of the eight-week programme. No advertising, no investors to satisfy, nothing sold to anyone. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a boast: the alternative business models for relationship data are all worse for the people in it, and the only way to be sure we never take one is not to need it.
Measured, not asserted
Every circle is measured with the Couples Satisfaction Index at the start, every week and at a checkup, so the question “is this working?” has an answer rather than an opinion. You see your own number and what moved it. We would rather hand you the instrument than ask you to take our word for it.
What it will never claim
It is a coaching tool with the structure of counselling. It is not therapy, it does not diagnose, and it will not tell you whether to stay. It refuses to build joint work where there is fear, control, violence, an ongoing undisclosed affair or active dependence, and it points to Relate and the BACP directory when a person is what is needed.
Read the workings
We publish the parts most products keep behind a login: how the coach thinks, how your data is protected, every company that touches it, and an honest comparison that says who the alternatives suit better.
Free to start. Private by design.
Start with twenty minutes, alone. Your personal plan is ready the moment you finish.