BetterHelp: Therapy Platform Offers Remote Work for Pros

What is BetterHelp?

BetterHelp is an online psychological counseling service that enlists freelance counselors to provide the service. However, counselors give up pricing control with clients who come through the platform.

How it works

To sign up here, you need to be a licensed therapist, social worker, mental health counselor, professional counselor or psychologist and have a National Provider Identifier number (for billing), and three years of experience in the field.

If you meet those qualifications,  you’ll fill out an application and tell them how many hours you’re available in any given week. The site will then start matching you with clients.

BetterHelp review (for therapists)

BetterHelp proposes to help licensed counselors and therapists find clients and manage an online mental health practice. But therapists give pricing control to the platform. And the site’s pay formula is confusing at best. At worst, it could cause therapists to be considerably underpaid.

That said, if personal issues — like having a baby, an ailing family member or moving a lot as a military spouse — makes money less important, this may be a good way to keep your skills current while you address these relative temporary demands.

BetterHelp has a steady stream of clients who pay for therapy on a weekly basis. It also offers therapy via chat, email, video and phone, which gives you great flexibility in how to ply your craft.

The site also offers some benefits, such as access to continuing education courses, bonuses, and stipends for health insurance, as long as you work a set number of hours. And it manages a lot of the client paperwork, which can reduce your overall workload.

But it may not be the best answer for someone who wants to maintain a full-time practice. That’s simply because your hourly pay here is likely to be a fraction of what it would be in private practice.

Pay formula

But, let’s address the biggest complaint counselors have about the platform: Pay. Where independent therapists typically charge between $100 and $200 per hour, at BetterHelp you’ll earn a fraction of that. How large a fraction depends on how many hours you work each week.

If you work just 5 hours a week, you get just $30 an hour. For every additional five hours per week you work, you get an additional $5 per hour. You have to work full-time — 35-40 hours weekly — to earn $70 an hour. Notably the pay scale is set each week. So, if you take time off one week, you drop into the lower pay scale until you have a full week with more hours.

The way the site calculates your time doesn’t always conform to hours on the clock, either. Live video and phone sessions are based on actual time. So you may be paid for less than an hour, if the session goes just 45 minutes, for instance.

But some counseling is done via text message here. And those sessions are billed based on the number of words texted to you — and that you text back.

The site also limits the amount it pays for text communication to just one-hour per week. However, BetterHelp encourages clients to get help via text, so you might end up spending considerably more than an hour responding to texts in any given week.

Therapists are paid once a week via direct deposit.

No-shows

If a client doesn’t show up, you don’t get paid for the session. But you do get credit for 15 minutes, according to ChoosingTherapy.com. 

Bonuses and perks

However, you also may be able to earn bonuses for specific actions, like taking your first client or working more than a set number of hours per week. The site also pays therapists who work near full-time a stipend for health insurance.

Working conditions

Outside of the pay, reviews of the platform are decidedly mixed. Some therapists love the platform’s flexibility and the ability to work from home. Others complain that the way BetterHelp assigns work is based on an obtuse rating structure that favors therapists who work more hours, respond rapidly to client text messages — even if they’re not being paid for these; and those who are highly rated by their clients. This can discourage them from taking advantage of the scheduling flexibility.

Recommendations

While BetterHelp’s pay is nothing to brag about, the platform is easy to use and can help you launch an online practice. You can sign up with BetterHelp here.

That said, because the platform restricts your ability to charge for your extensive education and experience, we see BetterHelp as a temporary solution to fill open hours during slow stretches and when you need extra flexibility. Seasoned therapists, particularly in high-priced urban areas, can earn considerably more on their own.

What their users say (from Indeed)

I started with BetterHelp last year when I needed to switch to a remote-only position. The work/life balance has worked out very well for me, and I greatly appreciate the ability to control my schedule. Good part-time therapy jobs are often difficult to find, and this allows me to keep doing what I love, without all the paperwork and billing-related hassles of other settings.

The best part about working here is the flexibility of making your own hours and schedule. You have the ability to conduct sessions via phone, video, or chat. They are also very cute about sending you a birthday gift of your choice. The platform is pretty user friendly and offers a good selection of worksheets to send to clients. But the biggest complaint that I have was the false representation of the ease of making a livable salary with their use of dynamic pay scales. Everything is calculated down to the minute and the clock resets every week. This makes it difficult to earn the higher pay rate and maintain the productivity for 3 consecutive months to earn money towards insurance.

Can’t imagine how anyone could ever have the stamina to work enough hours to make a great living there. Limit all session to 45 minutes, so have to have 4 sessions to bill 3 hours. And hourly rate sucks. But, there are some nice perks, like referral bonuses, sign on bonuses, adding a license bonuses, free therapy for therapists, and free CEU library.

Good platform, bad pay

As the therapist you will make $30 and hour pretax. So once you are taxed it’s around $17-19 and hour depending on your state. THAT IS TERRIBLE. $17 an hour as a LPC you tell me if it’s worth it? They tell you they offer health insurance but it’s only if you work a certain amount of hours a month and you get a $600 stipend, but if you ever fall below the hours required it resets. Anyway the platform they use if very easy to use and I like that, but not worth the measly pay. I could go to PP and make close to 100 and hour after taxes.

The recruiters really make this job sound perfect, and it seems like it the first month….but it’s not true. The compensation is not anything like they make it seem. You have to have a very large caseload to reach the high pay. You are really averaging $33 an hour since you only get $5 increases for every +5 min. If clients don’t show you don’t get paid. Betterhelp gets to keep all the money but we do not get any kind of cancelation or no show fee.

(from Glassdoor):

“Literally the only thing I don’t like about BH is the pay. For me right now, the flexibility and work-from-home aspects are so important and so positive that they make the job worth it despite the low compensation. But as an LP, I could make far more in a different setting. On the other hand, I’d be paying for overhead—office rent, marketing costs, the time and expense of filing insurance claims, etc.—if I worked at my own “in real life” private practice. So, there’s a trade-off.”

“Great clients! Easy scheduling, and no overhead. But the low pay can feel discouraging considering I spent several years and a lot of $ to obtain my degrees.”

“Lots of support which is great for a first online company or a side hustle! But the pay is very minimal.”

How the pay works

“The pay comes to about 20 dollars an hour. They pay you by the word, which is weird. You have to check in and answer your clients everyday even if they haven’t said anything. For example: Therapist “Great! Booked” Next day client, “Great!”. If you don’t than answer back, “Looking forward!” you can’t get more clients.”

“Once you build up clientele, there are monthly bonuses that you receive, ranging from 200 to 2500 per month. For a 200 dollar bonus, all you need is five clients. For the $2,500 dollar bonus, you will need 50 clients. It may sound like a lot, but within 6 weeks I am already up to 36! (with 30 client’s the bonus is 1000 per month). But you do have to hold the clients for at least 3 months… You have to actually engage with the client on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, you probably will lose them…So for instance, writing a message to each client at least every three days…You are also compensated by how many words are written to you, by the client, AND, how many words you write to the client. Overall, when you figure in the bonuses, and the other ways in which you are paid, you realistically getting paid about 35-45 dollars an hour.”