Questions & answers
What Refuge is, how your privacy is protected, what it costs — and what happens when you begin.
Where most people start.
Refuge is a private, faith-integrated Christian guidance app built by a licensed counselor with 23 years of clinical experience.
It brings together biblical wisdom, clinical insight, and conversational depth to help you think clearly about the questions, decisions, struggles, and relationships you're carrying. Refuge is not therapy, and it isn't a replacement for your pastor, counselor, or community.
It's a place to bring what you're carrying when life doesn't keep office hours.
Refuge was created by Dr. Jon Thompson, LPC-S — a licensed professional counselor supervisor with more than 23 years of clinical experience and a Doctor of Counseling degree.
The conversations inside Refuge are shaped by thousands of hours spent helping people navigate marriage struggles, anxiety, grief, shame, faith questions, and life transitions. How Refuge listens and responds is informed by that clinical experience — not a language model left to its own devices.
No. General AI models are exactly that — general. They're a broadsword, not a scalpel. Refuge was built from the ground up around a different purpose: not to generate answers, but to guide conversations. What makes it different:
It remembers you. Your Soul Profile tracks your themes, struggles, relationships, and growth across every conversation. It doesn't make you start over.
It challenges you. General AI is built to be agreeable. Refuge was explicitly built to resist sycophancy — to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, the way a good counselor does.
It was clinically designed. Refuge was shaped by a licensed counselor with 23 years of experience and tested against a 20-scenario clinical safety evaluation, with a crisis protocol that surfaces the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline when someone is in danger.
It knows when to stop. A scope-of-care protocol recognizes when a conversation has moved beyond what a guidance app should handle, and points you to a real person.
Scripture is its foundation, not a filter. Refuge weaves Scripture into conversation the way a pastor or counselor would — as comfort, challenge, and truth at the right moment.
What Refuge believes — and what it won't claim.
Genuinely Christian. Scripture sits at the center of Refuge's design — not as an afterthought, but as the foundational lens for understanding relationships, suffering, forgiveness, identity, and growth.
It takes both truth and grace seriously. It won't reduce faith to inspirational quotes, and it won't use theology as a weapon. The goal isn't to win arguments or hand out easy answers — it's to help you think honestly, pray honestly, and walk faithfully through hard things.
Refuge is grounded in historic, orthodox Christianity — the faith expressed in the Apostles' Creed and affirmed across centuries of the church. It holds Scripture as authoritative, Christ as Lord, and the gospel at the center.
It isn't aligned with a single denomination. It engages Reformed, Catholic, Wesleyan, and Eastern Orthodox traditions with respect and intellectual honesty. It isn't interested in tribal loyalty — it's interested in truth, and it trusts you to wrestle with that truth and arrive at your own convictions.
No. Refuge doesn't claim special revelation. It won't tell you that God spoke a specific instruction to you.
Instead, it helps you think carefully, honestly, and biblically about the situation in front of you — so you can discern wisely.
No. Refuge was never meant to replace prayer. Many people find it helps them pray more honestly, because it helps them put words to what they're actually carrying.
Where Refuge fits — and where it doesn't.
No. Refuge isn't therapy, counseling, or medical care, and it isn't a substitute for professional mental health treatment. It's a guidance app that helps you process thoughts, emotions, and decisions through a biblical and clinically informed lens.
Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it helps someone realize it's time to reach out for deeper support. When a situation belongs with a counselor, pastor, doctor, or crisis professional, Refuge will tell you plainly.
No. Refuge does not diagnose mental health conditions and does not provide medical treatment.
No. It was never designed to replace counseling. Many people find Refuge helps them get more out of counseling, because it gives them a place to process between sessions.
Yes. Many people use Refuge to organize their thoughts, notice patterns, prepare for a difficult conversation, or clarify what they want to bring to their counselor.
The things people can't say out loud deserve real protection.
No one reads your conversations. Refuge isn't social — there are no followers, feeds, profiles, or comments, and no one in your life is ever notified that you're using it. Here is exactly how your privacy is protected:
Encryption. All conversations are encrypted at rest using AES-256 — the same standard used by banks — and in transit via TLS. Your messages are unreadable both while they're stored and while they travel between your device and our servers.
Our database. Conversations are stored in a secure, isolated database. Dr. Jon Thompson, the founder, has administrative access as a technical necessity, but he does not monitor, review, or read individual conversations. There are no moderators and no content reviewers.
The AI engine. When you send a message, it is processed by our AI provider solely to generate your response. We never use your conversations to train AI models.
What we don't do. We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not let anyone read it — including ourselves.
What you control. You can delete any conversation at any time, or delete your entire account and all associated data from the Account menu. When you delete something, it's gone — permanently and irreversibly. We keep no copies.
We built Refuge for the things people can't say out loud — and we treat that trust accordingly.
Refuge is a Christian guidance app, not a healthcare provider, so it isn't a HIPAA-covered entity and HIPAA doesn't apply to it. The more useful question is how your information is actually protected — and the answer is strong encryption (AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit), no human review of your conversations, no selling or sharing of your data, and full control to delete anything you've written. See “Who can read my conversations?” above for the details.
Refuge is not a crisis service. If you're in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, please contact emergency services or a crisis line right away — in the U.S., call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. If a conversation suggests you may be in danger, Refuge will point you toward this kind of help rather than try to handle it alone.
Refuge is not a substitute for emergency support. If your safety or your children's safety is at risk, please reach out to qualified local resources immediately. In the U.S., the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233 (or text START to 88788). If you're in immediate danger, call 911.
What it's like to actually use it.
If it's something you're carrying, it's something you can bring. People come to Refuge with marriage struggles, parenting challenges, anxiety, grief, faith questions, career decisions, conflict, forgiveness, boundaries, loneliness, and life transitions — among many other things.
There's no wrong place to start.
Yes. Every conversation is saved to your account, and Refuge builds on what you've shared. If you told it about your marriage on Monday, it remembers on Thursday. If you started a Guided Journey on anxiety, it carries that thread through every day of the journey.
This is one of the most important differences between Refuge and a generic AI. Growth doesn't happen in isolated conversations — it happens when something knows your story and can speak into it with increasing depth.
Guided Journeys are structured, multi-day conversation paths designed for specific struggles and seasons. Each day builds on the one before — a focused theme, an opening prompt that goes straight to the heart of the issue, and a conversation that deepens as the week progresses.
There are 28 journeys across six categories: foundational topics like anxiety, grief, and forgiveness; life struggles like marriage, anger, and addiction; identity and formation; relationships and calling; deeper theology for the hardest questions of faith; and seasonal journeys for Advent, Lent, and Holy Week. They aren't devotionals — they're guided encounters designed to produce real change.
No. One of Refuge's core design principles is truth over validation. It may challenge your assumptions, name a blind spot, or invite you to consider a perspective you hadn't seen. It does this with respect — never to shame you, always to help you see more clearly.
Because the quality of an answer depends on understanding the situation first. Most people don't need faster answers — they need deeper clarity. The questions are how Refuge helps you find it.
A separate workspace for those who carry others.
The Professional Portal is a separate workspace inside Refuge — an app within the app — built for licensed counselors, pastors, and ministry leaders. It has its own conversation history, its own voice, and its own purpose.
When you enter the Portal, the experience shifts. Refuge stops speaking as a guide for personal reflection and starts speaking as a senior clinician — a peer consultant who assumes you know what you're doing and meets you at that level. Its default posture is “second opinion”: it thinks against your position, surfaces blind spots, and asks the questions you might be too close to see.
Pastors, counselors, ministry leaders, coaches, and other helping professionals. It's available on the Professional plan ($39/month or $349/year) and the Ministry Leader plan ($199/year for pastors).
It works less like the everyday Refuge experience and more like a seasoned consultant. It's designed to challenge assumptions, surface blind spots, explore multiple perspectives side by side, sharpen decision-making, and support complex cases and leadership situations.
Yes. Many counselors use the Portal as a private consultation environment to examine clinical dynamics, therapeutic approaches, ethical considerations, and countertransference reactions — with multi-lens analysis across CBT, psychodynamic, existential, and theological frameworks.
Yes. Users regularly create teaching series, discipleship programs, workshops, discussion guides, sermon outlines, and ministry resources. One user built a complete 12-week discipleship program inside the Portal.
Start free. Choose what fits your season.
Yes. Every new account starts with 25 free messages — no credit card required. It's enough to bring something real and see whether Refuge is the kind of space you've been looking for.
After that, a small number of free messages each week stays available, or you can subscribe for more. There's no countdown timer and no card on file, so you're never charged by surprise.
You can start free, then choose the plan that fits your season:
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $19.99/mo | 100 messages per month, 23 Guided Journeys, your full Soul Profile, Journal, and PDF sharing. |
| Yearly | $149/yr | Unlimited messages, all 28 Guided Journeys, Therapy Support Mode — plus everything in Monthly. Save 37%. |
| Professional Monthly | $39/mo | Everything in Yearly, plus the Professional Portal for case consultation and ministry work. |
| Professional Yearly | $349/yr | Full Professional access at a yearly savings. |
| Church Membership | $99/yr | For churches offering Refuge to their people. |
| Ministry Leader | $199/yr | For pastors; includes the Professional Portal. Available by request. |
Church and ministry pricing is also available. See church & ministry plans → · View all plans →
Yes. No contracts, no cancellation fees. You can cancel from your account settings at any time and keep access through the end of your current billing period. If Refuge isn't serving you well, we'd rather you leave honestly than stay out of obligation.
Yes. There's a Church Membership ($99/year) for churches that want to offer Refuge to their people, and a Ministry Leader plan ($199/year) for pastors that includes the Professional Portal. See church & ministry plans →
Most people start with the Monthly or Yearly plan — Yearly if you want unlimited conversations and every Guided Journey. If you're a counselor, pastor, or ministry leader who wants case consultation and the Professional Portal, choose Professional or the Ministry Leader plan. Not sure? Start free and decide once you've used it.
The quiet ones, answered anyway.
Many people start with something they've never said out loud before. You don't need perfect words. You just need a place to begin — and Refuge is private, unhurried, and impossible to shock.
Start with the thing you can't stop thinking about. That's almost always the right door.
Many people arrive at Refuge after talking to friends, reading books, listening to podcasts, or replaying the same questions in their heads for months. You don't need to know in advance whether Refuge can help. Just start with one honest conversation and see where it leads.
Still have questions?
Start with the thing you've been carrying. One honest sentence is enough.
Try Refuge FreeFree to start. Private from the first word.