Distant
An AI relationship coach, built end to end.
Built for anyone who replays an argument alone and wants a calmer way to say the hard thing. You talk to a coach that remembers your story, answers in real time, and knows when to stop coaching and point you to real help. We built the whole thing: the app, the backend and the AI engine.
- iOS + Android
- one codebase, both stores
- A coach with memory
- remembers your story between sessions
- Real-time chat
- replies generated in the background, in seconds
- Safety built in
- crisis support surfaced the moment it matters
The brief
People who fight badly with the person they love are rarely short of feeling. They are short of a calm place to work out what to say. Distant had to give one person a private coach that understood their history, responded in real time, and knew when to stop coaching and hand them to real help. That meant an app, a backend, an AI pipeline and a way to charge for it, all built to ship.
What we built
A coach that knows your story
You talk to a coach that remembers your story between sessions, so advice fits your relationship rather than a generic script. Onboarding questions shape the coach from the first message, and a daily insight keeps the thread going between conversations.
Real-time chat with an AI in the loop
Messages run over a production chat service. A webhook hands each new message to a background job, the reply is generated with your history in context, and it lands back in the chat in seconds, with a typing indicator while the coach thinks.
Consent and safety, enforced server-side
The app asks for explicit consent before any message reaches the AI, and the server refuses to generate a reply unless that consent is on record. Crisis wording surfaces a card with the right helplines, a tap away.
Free tier, quotas and upgrade
A message allowance that renews on a schedule, a dashboard showing what is left, and a clear path to unlimited messages.
The unglamorous parts
Sign in with Apple and Google, deep links from email, a guided tour, in-app account deletion, and a companion website.
The hard parts
- 1
An AI that talks to people about their relationships has to know when to stop. Crisis detection and a safety card with real helplines are built into the conversation itself, and they appear before anything else.
- 2
Memory has to be private and precise. Every reply is built from that person’s own history and nothing else, isolated all the way down, so advice stays specific and stays theirs.
- 3
Replies had to feel instant without ever blocking the app. The chat service, the background jobs and the memory service each fail in their own way, so every step retries and nobody sees a stuck conversation.
For the technically curious: React Native with Expo and Expo Router, Stream Chat, a Next.js backend on Vercel with Postgres, Inngest background jobs, OpenAI with a long-term memory service, Sign in with Apple and Google.
Have an app that needs building properly?
About three months, through review, everything agreed up front. Book a free 30-minute chat and we'll give you a straight answer.