How to Develop a Mental Health App: Features, Cost, and Design Ideas

Highlights:

• Mental health apps offer privacy, flexibility, and affordability, making them increasingly popular among users.
• With mental issues becoming more common and traditional therapy often being stigmatized or inaccessible, mental health apps serve as an accessible solution to a wide range of users.
• The mental health app market is expected to reach $3.7 billion by 2027, presenting a huge opportunity for businesses to create impactful solutions with mental health app development.

Today, mental health issues have become increasingly prominent, yet many people are struggling to access effective support due to stigma around mental health, limited access to therapists, and pretty high cost of therapy overall. Mental health apps come as a lifeboat that helps overcome these and many more challenges.

At Mind Studios, we have experience of creating mental health apps aimed at providing effective mental support to users. One of them is Envol, a holistic healing assistance solution created to help users heal from chronic illnesses and injuries, as well as open a world to mindfulness.

So, if you are looking for a trustworthy development company to create a mental health app tailored to your requirements, we are just a click away.

Why are mental health apps so popular today?

While recognition of the importance of mental health is growing, many people are still reluctant to visit a therapist. Reasons can vary.

Recent statistics indicate a growing preference for online mental health apps over traditional therapy. A study by Acumen Research and Consulting forecasts the mental health app market to reach a value of $3.7 billion by 2027. Such apps are designed to cater to various needs and can manage common health disorders like anxiety, PTSD, depression, or bipolar disorder. What’s more, for the early stages of these disorders, apps can be particularly effective without the need for a therapist/doctor.

Types of mental health apps

Mental health is a broad category, and no app can claim it covers all things related to mental health. Instead, it’s more convenient for users and developers alike to build mental health apps within various categories. Categorization helps customers find fitting solutions faster.

We can separate mental health apps into the following categories:

Educational resources	Self-assessment apps; online libraries with mental health-related publications
Mental health trackers	Apps that monitor users’ moods, sleep, habits, and symptoms
General purpose self-help apps	Apps to deal with stress and mild anxiety; meditation and mindfulness apps
Mental disorder self-help apps	Apps focused on alleviating symptoms of one or more common mental disorders
Teletherapy apps	Apps that bring offline therapy sessions to online spaces
Therapy supplement apps	Trackers and self-help apps targeted at treating disorders when a therapist is involved (may give therapists access to a user’s data)
Apps connecting patients	Apps resembling social networks or forums where people with mental health concerns can share their experiences and find peers

We recommend — and even encourage — to combine categories. Many popular self-help apps combine features from two or more categories. For instance, Envol is a blend of a meditation app and wellness app with performance, mood, and habit trackers.

Mind Studios’ insight: Everything is best in moderation. When planning to make a mental health mobile app, we usually keep it user-friendly and don’t overload users with unnecessary data and functionality. Take, for example, Envol, with its intuitive UI and ability to tailor its functionality to the user’s needs.

At Mind Studios, we always ensure we craft a solution fully tailored to your vision. If you have an idea for a mental health app but do not know how to implement it, contact us, and our expert team will help you turn your idea into a reality.

How to make a mental health app

Throughout our years of work, we’ve formed a proven way to make a mental health mobile app.

Here are the main steps from an idea to a successful launch of the custom mental health app, as well as some caveats pertaining to the healthcare industry that you’ll need to be aware of.

Step 1. Form a clear vision of your mental health app idea

When creating a mental health app, it’s important to have a clear idea of what kind of app you’re planning to build. You can begin by answering several simple questions:

• Is mental health the primary problem the app solves, or is it a secondary problem?
• Will your app be for a specific category of users?
• Will your app tackle a certain mental health issue, or will it be a general-purpose app to keep one’s healthy mind in shape?
• Will you create a standalone app, or will it complement in-person therapy?

Step 2. Conduct competitor and market research

There are about 20,000 mental health apps across app stores. It’s not the biggest segment of the mobile app market, but nonetheless, there’s tight competition. To learn how to make an app for mental health, one of the essential steps is to look at how others have succeeded or failed.

Mind Studios’ insight: It’s not necessary to study all 20,000 competitors, of course. Usually, it’s recommended to research the most successful apps in your niche, though it might be useful to check out several apps that failed, as they might offer valuable lessons.

Competitor analysis will allow you to define best and worst practices in your niche.

Besides competitor research, market research will help you define and better understand your target audience, find your unique value proposition, choose a monetization model, and prioritize feature development.

Step 3. Develop a mental health app business plan

A business plan is a summary of the research you’ve conducted to make a mental health app. Writing a proper business plan will help you get a clear picture in your head of what you want to build and how you want it to perform.

Mind Studios insight: You'll probably introduce changes to your business plan as you go about building your mental health app, but it's important to have as full a picture as possible before you start. This will reduce the number of trial-and-error mistakes, shorten the time to market, and lower the cost of developing your mental health app.

Step 4. Find mental health app developers

If you’re building a mental health app from scratch, you’ll need to find a reliable development team.

You can find separate freelancers, or you can hire a full-stack team from a mobile app development company like Mind Studios that will take care of everything: from idea validation to final delivery of the app.

Mind Studios’ insight: Keep in mind that medical apps are tricky in ways that involve more than just technical expertise. There are legal pitfalls unique to mobile apps in the healthcare sector, as well as recommendations from health specialists and requirements from health authorities regarding app functionality. This is why we recommend hiring specialists with experience in health app development.

Step 5. Build an MVP for a mental health app

Launching a minimum viable product (MVP) for a mental health application allows you to pursue the following objectives:

• Save costs
• Acquire your first users
• Test the application on users who aren’t developers
• Earn early revenue
• Enhance brand recognition before the full launch

Being an abridged version of an application, an MVP is cheaper and faster to build, and launching your app with a promise to expand and upgrade it can help you generate some revenue and build brand recognition online. This revenue can go into further development, and online recognition can translate to offline clients if you have your own practice.

Mind Studios’ insight: The biggest benefit an MVP brings is the opportunity to get honest feedback from users interested in the app. Feedback is even more important when developing a mental health app to help those with mental illnesses. For people who come to your app to feel calmer, a disruptive UX or laggy performance will be even more of an issue than it might be for the average user in other types of apps.

Step 6. Monitor and analyze the performance of your MVP

Whether you decide to release an MVP or a full product, the launch is just the beginning of your app’s journey, and there’s a lot of work ahead.

Constant updates and improvements are a must for a mobile app to stay relevant. And to create updates that work well for your audience, you’ll need to know what it is that keeps users returning or pushes them away.

Step 7. Launch your marketing campaign(s)

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of marketing for app performance. Even if your mental health app project is one of a kind — maybe it uses an innovative approach or offers a unique combination of features to attract users — you’ll need to market it wisely.

Step 8. See that your mental health app is profitable

It’s a great idea to build a mental illness app to help people in need. However, unless we’re talking about nonprofit-owned social apps financially backed by governments, to keep afloat, an app needs a return on investment.

How to develop a mental health app that’s profitable? One way is to use unit economics to drive profit-aimed changes.

Unit economics is a tool that helps you calculate the value that a single “unit” — any quantifiable item — has for a business. In terms of mobile apps, a single user/customer is considered a unit. This unit’s value can be found by dividing your customer’s lifetime value (LTV) by the customer acquisition cost (CAC).

E = LTV / CAC

Where

CAC = Cost of acquisition campaign / Number of customers acquired from the campaign

LTV = Average cost of conversion * Average number of conversions * Average customer lifetime with the app

If your app’s CAC is less than its LTV, it means you’re doing well. If CAC is above LTV, it means you need to change something. With the help of unit economics, you can, at the early stages:

• assess your mental health app’s potential sustainability
• forecast your app’s profits
• optimize the prices of paid in-app content
• determine optimal promotional strategies for the best profits

For Mind Studios, implementing unit economics is a mandatory stage in any app development, which significantly increases the chances of success for your app. Contact us to discuss the details and find out how we can help you.

Step 9. Test

Testing can’t be overlooked, especially when we’re talking about apps for issues as sensitive as mental health. Test the user experience, user interface, content — everything. Proper testing will result in fewer bugs and changes, will shorten the development time and cost, and will greatly improve your reputation as a service provider.

Step 10. Continue to improve your app

Without upgrades and updates — and without following innovations and trends — any app will sooner or later sink into oblivion. That’s why it’s important not to abandon your mental health app after launch, but to continuously monitor its performance, make data-based changes, and introduce updates to keep users engaged.

Best practices for designing a mental health app

Mental health specialists have recommendations for user interface and user experience design.

The main idea of mental health apps is usually to calm users. Mental health episodes can be activated by triggers and irritants; therefore, when you think about how to make a mental health tracker app, it’s of the utmost importance to consider users’ possibly fragile states.

Here are some tips on what to pay attention to when working on the UX/UI of your mental health app:

• The user experience needs to be smooth and intuitive, and your app must be easy to navigate. Although intuitiveness is important for any app, when dealing with mental health disorders like anxiety, for example, the value of intuitiveness is higher than ever.
• As for the user interface, while visual content can be just about anything from photos to drawings of people or plants or animals, if we look through popular mental health apps, we can see that most of them use soothing colors in their interfaces: shades of blue, muted greens and oranges. Mental health apps are never red or black and white.
• Mental health specialists also advise avoiding high-contrast interfaces, sudden pop-up messages, and loud notification signals in order not to agitate users.

Here is what Kseniia Ovsiienko, UX/UI designer at Mind Studios, has to add on this matter:

“In general, many modern mental health apps incorporate elements of nature such as wind, water, starry sky, sounds of nature, and sun rays. These features have a positive influence on users when integrated naturally into the app, giving them a sense of inner calm. Our Envol app also employs smart algorithms to help the app analyze user behavior and make adjustments accordingly, providing users with the most relevant information to address their mental health issues. Plus, in the future, the app will be integrated with artificial intelligence for even better outcomes”.

How do mental health apps make money?

Continuous development, maintenance, marketing, and support all cost money. There are several ways to make a revenue from your mental health app:

• Ads: Generally not recommended for mental health apps as they can disrupt the user experience and potentially agitate users.
• Subscriptions: Users pay a recurring fee, typically with a trial period of up to two weeks.
• In-app purchases: Users buy additional content or features within the app. However, this can be annoying if overused.
• Freemium: Basic features are free, with access to the full content requiring payment via subscription or a one-time purchase.
• Paid downloads: A valid option if your business is directly involved in providing mental health therapy and you already have a reputation as well as ways to gain app users from among your clients.

Key mental health app features

Now, let’s talk about the features that are crucial for mental health apps.

Depending on the type of mental health app you’re building, some features below might be more important than others.

Onboarding

It's important to walk your users through the app carefully and explain the functionality briefly but clearly. You might want to consider adding a bit of emotion and care through animated “assistants,” and you can hire a specialist to write your instructions in a way that takes into account your users’ specific needs.

For example, for Envol, we created a detailed onboarding journey where users can indicate their concerns and tailor the app so it better suits their needs.

User profile

A user profile is where shortcuts to important things like user data, user progress, most used features, and settings should be.

When working on Envol, we decided to create a handy user profile with achievements and goals, as well as a badge system for user engagement.

Settings

It’s vital for users of mental health apps to be able to tailor those apps for the best experience. For example, users should be able to adjust the volume and frequency of notifications, choose a theme (if you offer themes), and so on.

Notifications

Push notifications can remind users of planned tasks, or they can gently probe users to launch the app by asking how their day is going.

Meditation and affirmations

Meditation and mindfulness are practices often recommended for people with anxiety, PTSD, and panic attacks. Motivating quotes and affirmative statements can boost a person’s mood and help battle depression and anxiety.

Mood and sleep tracking

By tracking moods, users can gain some control over their disorders and possibly address mood-altering triggers. You can add a simple or advanced sleep tracker where users can log possible reasons for sleepiness or insomnia (e.g., medication or agitating activities).

Journaling

Journaling often goes hand in hand with mood tracking, and for some people, it can replace meditation as a calming exercise.

Medication reminders

If your app deals with mental health disorders that require medication, it will be beneficial to add customizable reminders for users to take their meds.

Trigger checkers

Writing down triggers that cause anxiety, panic attacks, or depressive episodes will help users in dealing with their disorders.

In-app human support

Many apps benefit from chatbots that resolve issues, but for people struggling with mental health, earnest, and professional human support is a better solution since the human psyche is too complex for bots to comprehend.

Community features

Peer support can be the greatest help a person encountering an episode or dealing with the aftermath of one can get. Knowing they’re not alone goes a long way in helping patients persevere.

Gamification

Simple games can help take users’ minds off problems, and switching attention away from triggers to an eye-pleasing game can calm users. However, we advise approaching gamification with caution: Competitive games or leaderboards can have detrimental effects on users’ moods.

Favorites

Allow users to favorite features or content they use often — having access to them from the profile or home screen will shorten the user journey and improve the user experience.

Matching patients and therapists

For teletherapy apps, you’ll need functionality to match users with therapists based on the issue a user faces and therapists’ qualifications, prices, and timetables.

Dashboard for therapists

For apps that connect therapists with patients, a therapist dashboard is a must. It will need a separate set of features, too. Or it can be a separate app connected to the patient app via the back end.

Sharing

Sharing moods and/or activities on social networks or messengers is similar to community features in that it creates a feeling of belonging and prompts people who care about a user to offer help.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Machine learning can make your mental health app more appealing to users since it can offer activities and content customized to users' habits and preferences.

Admin panel

To add or change content and moderate activities, you’ll need an admin panel. It’s usually in the form of a simple web page.

This is a more or less generalized list of features that might be useful for a mental health app, and your development team can create a tailored list for your app to serve your specific target audience.

What to pay extra attention to when building an app for mental health

Health-related apps — and mental health apps in particular — go through a strict verification process to be allowed in app stores.

Here are the things you’ll need to take into account for your mental health app to have a successful launch.

GDPR (or similar) compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of regulations pertaining to personal data security. These regulations set rules for personal data storage, processing, and transfer.

Any business that operates in the territory of the European Union or European Economic Area needs to comply with the GDPR — regardless of where the business is registered and physically located. If your app isn’t intended for use in the EU and EEA, you still need to check for similar regulations that may be in place in areas where you’re releasing your app. For example, the state of California has its own Consumer Privacy Act that’s similar to the GDPR.

HIPAA compliance

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is US-based legislation that protects the confidentiality of people’s digital health and financial data that is available to healthcare providers and intermediaries (data storage services, lawyers, etc.).

In the US, failure to comply with HIPAA will result in considerable fines and possibly lawsuits. This is one of the reasons why HIPAA compliance for software development plays an extremely important role.

Mind Studios’ insight: To comply with HIPAA (or similar legislation in other countries), choose software developers experienced in cybersecurity and knowledgeable in data protection technologies and innovation. For example, if you’re implementing video/audio calls or messaging in your teletherapy app, your developers should use encryption protocols. The United States Federal Trade Commission has an interactive tool to help app developers create apps that comply with this legislation.

Clinical basis

Only about 30 percent of existing mental health apps reportedly took input from therapists. However, most mental health apps on the market are meditation and mindfulness apps that don’t necessarily require strict medical data. If you’re making an app to treat severe mental health disorders, it’s recommended to make it evidence-based.

Health-related apps should be based on research and medical data so as to not cause harm to users’ health. Mental health apps aren’t exempt from this rule. If you’re not a mental health specialist or a therapy business provider yourself, we strongly recommend consulting with professional therapists as to what clinical approach to use for your mental health app, what content to offer, and so on.

Besides making your app safer for users, giving it a clinical basis will add to your app’s credibility and enhance users’ trust. Just take a look at Envol.

Envol's unique algorithm was developed by Julie, who successfully recovered from a chronic illness using these methods. Julie and her partner Tim then transformed these practices into Envol.

Numerous medical papers and literature support the app's effectiveness. These papers and literature discuss the benefits of natural light, healthy food, contact with nature, gratitude, love, balanced physical activity, and rest. This scientific backing gives users confidence in the app's ability to aid in their healing journey.

Mental health app development cost

We’ve lumped together multiple kinds of apps for improving mental health. Saying there’s a certain price that fits all of them would be lying. However, we can offer approximate development timeframes and the required specialists — the two factors that affect costs the most.

As for the timeframe, it will depend on the number and complexity of the features you choose.

Features	Estimated cost	Timeframe
Basic features (Onboarding, Profile, etc.)	$20,000+	2–5 months
Advanced features (AI, Human Support, etc.)	$80,000+	6–12 months

For a precise estimate, you can always contact Mind Studios’ experts, who will answer all your questions and help you build a successful mental health app.

Mind Studios’ tip: Be cautious about choosing developers with the lowest rates as it can negatively affect the app development process. If the team you selected do not know the nuances of developing mental health apps, the chances are high that you will waste your money and get zero outcome. We recommend choosing only reliable companies with relevant experience in developing such apps.

Mind Studios’ expertise in mental health app development

Mind Studios has ample experience creating applications to improve mental health, particularly through mindfulness practices, meditation, and yoga. We've built more than one such app for our clients, and all the apps we've built in this niche are unique.

One of the bright examples is Envol. In a nutshell, it is a holistic healing assistance designed to help people recover from chronic illnesses and injuries. It employs a unique algorithm created by its founder, Julie, who recovered from chronic illness, combining various holistic practices that have been proven to aid healing.

Our work on the Envol project consisted of several stages:

• Target group analysis. We conducted a target group analysis and found out that although Envol can benefit virtually anyone, its primary target audience consists of people with chronic illnesses and injuries.
• UX research. Then, we analyzed the previous app, conducted surveys among existing users, and created user personas, customer journey diagrams, and wireframes. This helped us design a user-friendly and effective UX, resulting in high user satisfaction and retention rates above 40%.
• UX/UI update. We modernized the UI with muted colors to create a relaxing and optimistic atmosphere. The mental health app design choices included sunny yellow for optimism, purple for steady progress, and light blue for calm and tranquility.
• Audio streaming fix. The original app's audio playback issues were resolved by implementing custom audio streaming using AWS hosting services. This ensured uninterrupted playback regardless of users' internet speeds.
• User migration. We successfully migrated all existing users from the old app to the new one without losing their data, subscription statuses, or tracking stats.
• Content integration. Julie and Tim provided all content, including professionally recorded sounds for meditations and 3D journeys, affirmations, and the adaptable algorithm for users with diverse health issues.
• Marketing support. We also assisted with the technical aspects of their marketing campaign, including the implementation of gift codes, which allow users to gift access to Envol to their loved ones.

Here is what Julie and Tim, creators of Envol, say about working with us:

"We had a successful relaunch of the iOS and Android app and have already over 3000 downloads after a few weeks after the launch. The feedback we are getting from users is amazing, and everybody loves the app's design and flow. Mind Studios delivered a state-of-the-art app."

Wrapping up

We live in a world with lots of mental challenges. Creating a mental health app offers immense benefits, both for individuals who struggle and need mental support and businesses that provide users with such a vital tool.

The market potential in this niche is huge, but one question remains: Will you be able to make the app that meets the highest standards of today’s users and market demands?

To build such an app requires more than just a good idea. It requires deep tech expertise, adherence to legal regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, as well as having a general understanding of the mental health landscape.

If you are ready to create a mental health app that really makes a difference, but you’re unsure where to start, Mind Studios is here to help. We specialize in creating tailored mental health solutions that meet your specific business needs. Drop us a line using a simple form for more details.

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