Submitted by Anonymous
From March 2025 until the end of September, I was a contractor for the online website www.online-therapy.com. This website was not a great experience in any way. If you are a therapist looking for more contractor work, I sincerely hope that you reconsider and don’t waste your time on a business model that I cannot explain other than the word exploitative.
False promises for potential pay-outs are presented in the beginning, but in order to meet their targets to get 200+ hours two months in a row, you’re looking at dedicating most of your life and all hours of your week to the platform.
The pay structure of online-therapy is tiered, and you are paid more based on how many ‘hours’ you work, but one problem with this comes in the form of live hours—these live sessions can be done in chat, live video, or voice, and the format is chosen by the client. $30 (USD) per hour is already very low for a therapist that is licensed to practice. Even more disappointing is when you realize that these sessions are only 45 minutes long—with your exact seconds in the call or chat monitored closely. If your client no-shows, which is quite common, you will then only be paid for 30 minutes of your time; cutting this no-show even further.
I also found issue with the way clients were assigned—the therapist has no choice who their clients are. There is no way to accept or decline clients so you will be forced into a non-screened relationship regardless of clinical fit. This would happen constantly. Somehow, too, US clients kept being assigned to me when I was Canada-only. Whether this was a common issue with the platform I cannot say, but I did find it frustrating that there wasn’t better screening for this.
If you do not have enough calendar hours available (whatever number they deem reasonable, I’m not so sure) you will be harassed with red messages claiming that you’re not doing enough. You will also be accosted if you are not writing long enough replies to clients, even ones who write long messages that are pages long several times a day. Online therapy has a plan that only has worksheets and messages—but these are also available to members with live sessions enabled. A problem arose her when technically you would be paid for every word—so long as you don’t copy and paste as keystrokes are recorded—you can only be paid for 1 hour a week per client for these messages. While this sounds reasonable on the surface—Online-therapy would accost me if I wouldn’t be able to respond within 24 hours to every message, and when clients would write far more there was pressure (in the form of web headers with warning messages) to write more, regardless of a lack of more payment. Most of the time on the platform was spend answering worksheets and messages for a pittance that did not reflect the hours spent whatsoever.
Payment was always sent on time, however, and this was probably the thing I had the least trouble with. One day when I tried to have a voice session, the platform simply went down entirely. I am also not clinically sure how much the clients who only had worksheets and messaging were getting out of the program—and in many ways I felt like the work being done was ineffective and shallow. I am personally an advocate for chat therapy, and do not mind that aspect, but what I am talking about are pre-made worksheets and then messages in reply sporadically rather than the live sessions which also existed.
I will say that I felt exploited, underpaid, and frustrated with Online-Therapy. I found the quality of service to be dismal, and I wouldn’t recommend this platform to clinicians or clients.
