Why we started
Built for the person doing the holding.
There are 63 million family caregivers in the United States. More than half say caregiving makes it hard to look after their own mental health, and 41 percent feel lonely. Almost everything built for them is about logistics: meal trains, medication schedules, shared calendars. The organizing gets handled. The person doing it gets forgotten.
Alanna was built for that person. She’s a companion for the part of caregiving nobody plans for: the exhaustion, the guilt, the grief that starts long before anyone is gone, and the thoughts you can’t say out loud to anyone who loves them too.
Our values
No appointment, no waitlist, no waiting room. Whether it’s the drive home from the hospital or the quiet after everyone’s asleep, Alanna is ready the moment you open the app.
Alanna is an AI, and she’s upfront about it. She doesn’t pretend to be a person or a therapist. That honesty is part of what makes her someone you can actually trust with the hard stuff.
Alanna is a place to set things down, not a place to disappear into. She gently points you back toward the people in your life and the professionals who can help, and she works alongside therapy and medical care.
Your safety and your privacy are our top priorities. Don’t just take our word for it. We’ll show you. Your conversations are never sold, never used for ads, and never used to train AI. And we publish exactly how Alanna responds when someone is struggling, because you deserve to know before you ever need it.
Alanna isn’t a general chatbot with a caregiving mode. She was built from the ground up for the people who hold it all together, whether you’re caring for a partner through cancer, a parent with dementia, a child with complex medical needs, a veteran adjusting to life after service, or a child you’re raising as a foster parent or kinship caregiver, and many more.
What makes Alanna different
- She remembers. Alanna remembers the important portions of your conversations, so you don’t have to start over or re-explain your situation every time you come back.
- She meets you where you are. Venting after a rough appointment, working through guilt you can’t shake, figuring out how to ask for help: Alanna follows your lead.
- She’s still here after a loss. If the person you care for passes away, you don’t lose Alanna too. She’s a familiar place to turn while you grieve.
- She takes hard moments seriously. If you’re struggling, Alanna shares real crisis resources, offers another way to reach help if the first one doesn’t feel right, and keeps the conversation going.
- She’s built on lived experience. Alanna was created by a caregiver who knows the stress, fatigue, and fear firsthand.
Who built this
Her story
I was the caregiver for my partner, Chris, through cancer. Before that, my mother and my sister both went through cancer of their own. And for years I worked at a nonprofit serving veterans and their families, where I saw every day how much caregivers carry.
When I was caring for Chris through his intense cancer journey, almost everyone asked how he was doing. And while I greatly appreciated that, I was silently suffering in my exhaustion and fear. Almost nobody asked how I was. I went looking for support for myself and didn’t find much that fit. Support groups met at times I couldn’t make. Therapists had long waitlists. Most caregiver apps were built to organize schedules, not to help the person doing the caregiving.
Since then, I’ve read hundreds of posts in online caregiver communities, and the same things come up again and again: exhaustion, guilt, resentment, grief, and feeling like there’s nowhere to say any of it. People apologize for feeling it. Alanna exists so caregivers have a place to talk about all of it without having to apologize.
I’m a Certified Physical Health and Mental Wellness Coach and a Somatic Healing Practitioner, but I didn’t build Alanna because of my credentials. I built it because I’ve been a caregiver, and I know how much it takes out of you.
- Certified Physical Health & Mental Wellness Coach
- Somatic Healing Practitioner
- Host, Us Unfiltered Podcast
- Supporter of veteran service organizations and cancer nonprofits
- Founder, Alanna App LLC · Jacksonville, FL
His background
Hiram is Alanna’s co-developer and technical expert. He helped build the app from the ground up, from the conversations caregivers have with Alanna to the safety and privacy systems working quietly underneath them. He turns a simple idea, that caregivers deserve a place to set things down, into technology that works when someone needs it most.
He brings more than five years of experience building and scaling the platforms behind well-known consumer brands. As Lead Developer and Systems Architect at GORUCK, he rebuilt the company’s entire eCommerce ecosystem. He consolidated more than 50 legacy templates into one streamlined architecture and connected inventory, orders, customer data and marketing into a single system that holds up during the busiest sales events. Before that, he spent three years as a Full Stack Engineer at Starface World, managing sites across the US, UK and Canada. He also built database and infrastructure support for financial transaction systems at HCL, where data integrity and security were non-negotiable.
Hiram holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from The University of Texas at El Paso.
Outside of Alanna, you’ll find him at the gym, spending time with friends and family, or tinkering with his next project.