A private mental-health support chat and self-help playbook that runs entirely on your device. No account, no server, nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
Your data is stored locally and typically supports years of daily journaling before nearing browser storage limits.
Pro adds mood-pattern insights, journal/full-data export and backup & restore. Chat, all 10 playbook modes and every safety feature stay free forever — Pro is extra depth, not a gate on anything that helps in the moment.
Try it now with demo code AV-ALL-DEMO.
Most mental-health apps route what you type through a company's servers before you get a reply — even the well-regarded ones. That's not necessarily reckless, but it does mean a third party's infrastructure, policies, and business incentives sit between you and whatever you just admitted out loud for the first time. MindHarbor takes a different approach: the language model that powers its chat runs entirely inside your browser tab, using a technology called WebGPU to tap your own device's graphics hardware. Once the model has downloaded (a one-time process, cached afterward), your messages are processed locally and never transmitted anywhere — not to us, not to a cloud AI provider, not to anyone. There's no account to create, so there's no account to be breached, subpoenaed, or sold when a company changes hands. There's no "we may share anonymized data with partners" clause to read the fine print on, because there's no data pipeline at all. This matters most for exactly the kind of thing people bring to an app like this: the 2am worry you haven't told anyone, the thought pattern you're embarrassed by, the situation you're still working out how you feel about. You should be able to think out loud somewhere without wondering who else might eventually see it. We also built MindHarbor so it doesn't need a working AI model to be useful — every guided exercise (breathing, grounding, thought records, journaling prompts) is fully scripted and works even with the AI turned off, which also means it works on devices that don't support WebGPU at all, like most phones today. Load the AI when you want warmer, more personalized replies woven around those exercises; skip it entirely and you still get the complete self-help toolkit, guided step by step, at zero cost and zero data risk. This is what "private by design" looks like in practice, not just in a privacy policy.
The chat is only half of MindHarbor. The other half — arguably the more useful half — is a playbook of ten guided exercises drawn from well-established self-help approaches, mostly rooted in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and related evidence-informed practices. A CBT thought record walks you through catching an automatic thought, checking it against a list of common thinking traps (cognitive distortions like catastrophizing or all-or-nothing thinking), and writing a more balanced version — the same "catch it, check it, change it" structure taught in CBT workbooks and used by therapists, just self-guided. Two breathing exercises — box breathing and 4-7-8 breathing — come with an animated on-screen pacer so you're not counting in your head. The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique walks you through your five senses to interrupt a spiral of anxious thoughts and bring you back to the present moment. A worry-time tool teaches the "postpone, don't suppress" approach used for generalized anxiety — you schedule one daily worry appointment, and outside that window you note the worry and set it down rather than fighting to not think about it. Behavioural activation offers a tiered menu of tiny, achievable actions for exactly the days when doing anything at all feels impossible — the evidence behind this approach is one of the strongest in all of depression treatment, and it starts from "action before motivation," not the other way around. A self-compassion break walks through the three-part structure developed by researcher Kristin Neff: noticing the moment of difficulty, remembering you're not alone in struggling, and offering yourself some kindness. Gratitude practice uses the well-studied "Three Good Things" format, with an added "why" question that's the part most gratitude journaling skips — and the part that actually drives the wellbeing benefit shown in research. Add a mood check-in with a real trend chart and a CBT-informed sleep wind-down routine, and you have a genuinely complete toolkit, not just a chatbot with a friendly name.
It's worth being direct about what MindHarbor is not, because plenty of apps in this space blur the line in ways that aren't fair to users. MindHarbor is not therapy. It's not run by licensed clinicians, it doesn't diagnose anything, and it will never discuss medication. It's a self-help companion — closer to a well-organized workbook with a conversational interface than to treatment. That distinction matters because real therapy involves things no app can offer: a trained professional who knows your full history, who can adapt over months, who carries liability and accountability, and who can recognize risk in ways a script or a small language model genuinely cannot. If you're dealing with something serious — persistent low mood, trauma, substance use, relationship abuse, or thoughts of harming yourself — please also involve a real person: a therapist, a doctor, a counsellor, or, if things feel urgent, one of the free crisis lines always available from the "Get help now" button at the top of this app. That button isn't decoration. It opens instantly, works even if the AI model was never loaded, and lists free, confidential crisis lines for New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the UK and Ireland, plus a directory covering the rest of the world. We built MindHarbor to be genuinely useful alongside professional support and real relationships — a place to process a hard day, practice a technique between sessions, or just check in with yourself — not to replace any of that. If you're ever unsure whether what you're going through needs more than an app, that uncertainty is itself a good reason to reach out to a real person. There's no failure state in doing both.
MindHarbor's core experience — the chat, all ten playbook exercises, unlimited journaling, mood tracking, and every safety feature — is free with no catch and no time limit. We think a mental health tool that nags you to upgrade mid-conversation, or paywalls its crisis resources, has its priorities backwards, and we've built MindHarbor deliberately not to do that. What Pro adds is depth for people who want to go further: pattern insights on your mood trend (like noticing your mood tends to dip on certain days), one-tap export of your journal and full data backup, and (coming soon) additional playbook packs for specific themes. It's a single one-time purchase, not a subscription, and it unlocks on this device the same way every other AppVitamins Pro unlock works — no account required for that either. If you never buy anything, you still get the whole toolkit, forever, because the exercises that actually help someone through a hard week shouldn't depend on a credit card.