Compared with
Couples apps, and this
The category is built around togetherness: shared exercises, daily questions, a streak. That is a real thing that helps real couples. It is not what this is for, and the difference is worth being precise about before you spend a month on the wrong tool.
What those apps are good at
Habit and contact. A prompt that arrives on a Tuesday, a question neither of you would have thought to ask, a small shared ritual that keeps two people in touch with the state of things. For a relationship that is basically working and wants to keep working, that is genuinely valuable, and it is a different job from the one here.
This starts from a disagreement, not an activity
Every part of the design assumes two people who do not currently agree. The first thing it asks for is not a shared exercise — it is your account of what happened, written without seeing theirs.
It also assumes the conversation is the point. The product is for preparing for and holding a specific difficult conversation with a real person, and for recording what was actually agreed afterwards, rather than for maintaining a practice over months.
Each person has their own private context
A shared activity implies shared material. Here the default is the opposite: what you write is yours unless you choose otherwise, and there is a level above private — never shared — for context your guide can use to help you and will never quote, summarise, count or hint at. The three levels.
That matters most in the situation the category tends not to design for: when the two people are not equally safe, or not equally willing, or when one of them is working out whether to stay.
It works with one person
Most of it does not need anybody else to agree to anything. You can prepare, draft, and think it through alone, and never invite the other person at all. An app built around a pair usually cannot start until both have joined.
Not every relationship here is romantic
A landlord and a tenant, two colleagues, adult siblings dividing a parent’s care, flatmates, co-parents who are no longer together. The shape of the problem is the same and the vocabulary of couples apps does not fit it.
What this is not
Not therapy, not counselling, not a crisis service, and not a replacement for professional care. Some of the products in this category are built with clinicians and some are not; either way, OnBetterTerms is a workspace, and where a situation needs a trained human it will say so rather than try to be one.