Software that texts people in recovery carries real responsibility. A wrong sentence at a fragile moment can do real harm — so instead of trusting a model to improvise, we wrote down exactly what Steps may say, what it may never say, and the one moment it's built to break its own quietness. This page is that contract.
Not medical, not psychological, not practical. Steps will not tell you how to quit, whether to taper, what to do about a craving, or whether moderation could work for you. Those answers change lives, and software should not be giving them — a doctor, a counselor, or a sponsor should.
Steps will not assess your drinking or use, label you, score your risk, or tell you whether you "have a problem". It doesn't know, it can't know, and pretending otherwise is how apps hurt people. You define what you're quitting and what counts as a clean day.
No "you've got this!", no motivational quotes, no cheerleading. It sounds harmless, but canned encouragement from a machine is hollow on the good days and dangerous on the bad ones — it teaches you to look for support in a place that cannot give it.
The tone on day 1 after a slip is identical to the tone on day 400: warm, brief, neutral. No disappointment, no "what happened?", no lecture. A machine has no standing to judge you, and this one is built so it can't.
Steps is software and never hides it. It won't claim to care, to be proud of you, or to understand what you're going through — because it doesn't, and you deserve honesty from a tool you text at 11 PM. The people in your life are the ones who care. Steps just counts.
No "don't lose your streak!" notifications, no fake urgency, no win-back messages, no guilt-timed nudges. You get the daily check-in you asked for, one gentle follow-up if you go quiet, milestone marks, and — on the Partner plan — the weekly report. That is the complete list of messages Steps will ever send.
No hierarchy of addictions, no opinions about what you track or why, no stance on abstinence versus moderation. Whatever you're quitting and however you define success, Steps counts the days you tell it to count and keeps its opinions — of which it has none — to itself.
Nothing you say in a hard moment becomes marketing signal, training data, or a re-engagement trigger. The safety rules and the privacy promises are the same promise from two sides: your recovery is not a resource for us to mine.
If anything you send suggests you might be in danger — thoughts of harming yourself, an overdose, severe withdrawal — Steps drops the counting and does the only responsible thing a tool can do: it points you, immediately and clearly, at humans who can actually help. Emergency services (112 in Europe, 911 in the US), the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, the SAMHSA National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for substance-use support, and findahelpline.com everywhere else.
It will not counsel you through the moment, keep you talking, or triage on its own judgment — it hands you over, every time, without exception. And one thing worth reading now rather than later: withdrawal from some substances, including alcohol, benzodiazepines, and opioids after heavy use, can be medically dangerous. If that might be you, please involve a doctor before you stop.
The permitted surface is short, on purpose: your daily check-in question. Confirmations of what you logged. Your numbers — current run, totals, milestones. The optional gratitude question, if you turned it on — a fixed question, asked and kept, never commented on. Answers about your own account, schedule, and plan. The gentle follow-up after a quiet day. The weekly Partner report. And the crisis hand-off above. If a reply would fall outside this list, Steps doesn't send it.
These aren't aspirations in a blog post; they're tested boundaries. Before anything ships, we run adversarial checks — messages designed to bait Steps into advising, diagnosing, judging, or chatting — and a failure blocks the release. Every rule on this page is versioned in writing, and every past failure becomes a permanent test. Steps is for adults (18+), and it is not medical care, treatment, or therapy — it's a counter that knows its place.
If Steps ever says something this page promises it won't, treat it as our most serious kind of bug — and please tell us: [email protected]. Related reading: our privacy promises and Privacy Policy.
