An honest 2026 look at using Freed AI for therapy notes — public pricing, what a general-medicine scribe does well, and where it falls short for behavioral health compared with a purpose-built tool like PsyFi Notes.
Freed AI works for therapists, but it's a general-medicine scribe wearing a behavioral-health hat. Freed's strength is flat-rate, unlimited scribing — Core is $79/mo for unlimited notes — which is genuinely compelling for high-volume clinicians. The trade-off is fit: Freed was built for primary care and broad medical use, so its default note structure leans medical and you'll do more editing to land a behavioral-health SOAP, DAP, or BIRP voice. If your decision is about uncapped volume at a predictable price, Freed is a reasonable answer. If it's about a scribe that already speaks behavioral health, PsyFi Notes is built for that — and at $49/mo for unlimited notes plus a clinical assistant, it's also the cheaper unlimited tier. Confirm a signed BAA before sending real PHI to either.
Freed is one of the best-known ambient scribes in healthcare, and it earned that reputation in general medicine — primary care, urgent care, specialties where a clinician sees a high volume of relatively structured encounters. Its pitch is simple and appealing: stop typing during visits, let the tool listen, get a draft note you review and sign. That pitch travels, and behavioral-health clinicians keep landing on Freed when they shop for a scribe.
The reasons are practical. Freed's unlimited-note Core plan is a flat $79/mo, which is attractive if you're a busy clinician tired of per-session math. It's a mature product with a large user base. And "an AI scribe is an AI scribe" feels true on the surface — the session is words, the output is a note, how different could behavioral health really be?
Different enough to matter. This guide lays out where Freed genuinely fits, and where a general-medicine scribe falls short for the specific demands of behavioral-health documentation — honestly, with public pricing, and without pretending any single tool wins on every axis.
A compliance note first: any scribe that handles session audio handles protected health information, so a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is non-negotiable. Freed offers one; PsyFi's stance is HIPAA-aligned, BAA available. Demand it in writing from whichever vendor you choose. For the full vetting checklist, see our guide to HIPAA-safe AI therapy notes.
Freed restructured to four tiers in 2026:
The headline is Core: unlimited notes at a flat $79/mo. For a clinician writing 80, 100, or 120 notes a month, that predictability is real money saved versus per-session pricing, and it's the single best reason to put Freed on your shortlist.
What you're buying is a capable, general-purpose medical scribe. Freed is fast, the transcription quality is solid, and the drafts are clean. It does the core job — capture the encounter, produce a structured draft — well across a wide range of medical contexts.
Best for: high-volume clinicians who want predictable, uncapped pricing and are comfortable adapting a tool that was built for general medicine rather than behavioral health specifically.
PsyFi Notes takes the narrower path on purpose: do behavioral-health documentation, and do it specifically for how therapists write.
PsyFi Notes is an ambient scribe for therapy sessions — in the room via the in-app recorder, or over telehealth via a browser extension that captures the meeting audio — that returns a speaker-attributed transcript and a structured draft — SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP, or narrative, your pick per session — in clinical language, ready for review and signature. It doesn't stop at the note. A completed session can be pulled straight into PsyFiGPT, the drafting and chat surface, for a summary, a treatment-plan update, or a referral letter, with saved prompts, a drafting panel, and encrypted memory across conversations. PsyFi is HIPAA-aligned with a BAA on every paid plan, de-identifies PHI before any model call, and never uses your data for training. Unlimited session notes plus the assistant are included in the Clinician plan at $49/mo (Psychologist at $99/mo adds assessment report drafting; group practices are $59/seat/mo on the Practice plan) — see pricing.
Best for: clinicians who want a scribe that already speaks behavioral health out of the box — note structure, language, and a drafting surface designed around therapy rather than general medicine — at a flat unlimited price.
This is the heart of the decision, so it's worth being specific. A general-medicine scribe like Freed is excellent at what it was built for, but behavioral-health documentation has demands that medical encounters don't.
Note structure. Medical notes lean toward the classic medical SOAP shape and problem-oriented charting. Behavioral health writes DAP, BIRP, and psychotherapy-specific SOAP variants, with a mental status exam, risk assessment language, and treatment-plan framing that a general scribe doesn't default to. You can coax a medical scribe toward these, but you're editing the structure on every note rather than starting from it.
Clinical language. "Patient presents with" reads differently than "client reports." The vocabulary of affect, presentation, therapeutic interventions, and progress toward treatment goals is its own dialect. A scribe trained on broad medical encounters will produce competent prose that still needs a behavioral-health pass to sound like a therapist wrote it.
Session shape. Therapy sessions are long, conversational, and frequently involve more than one client — couples and family work especially. A scribe tuned for the multi-speaker reality of behavioral health handles that more gracefully than one optimized for a clinician-and-patient medical visit.
The drafting surface. A note doesn't end at the transcript. Behavioral-health clinicians often want to reshape a draft, switch tone, reuse a template across a team, or pull prior context. PsyFi Notes pairs with PsyFiGPT for exactly that; a standalone medical scribe hands you a draft and stops there.
| Dimension | Freed | PsyFi Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Built specifically for behavioral health | General-medicine scribe used across specialties | Behavioral health only — therapy-language drafts with a modality tag on every session |
| Note format out of the box | Medical SOAP-oriented; adaptable with editing | SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP, or Narrative per recording; custom formats via PsyFiGPT |
| Multi-speaker capture | Supported | Speaker-attributed transcripts for solo, couples, and family sessions |
| Drafting + chat surface | Note generation | Dedicated PsyFiGPT surface — pull a transcript into chat, switch voice/tone, reuse saved prompts |
| Encrypted memory across sessions | — | Yes |
| Unlimited-notes price | $79/mo Core (Starter $39/mo for 40 notes) | $49/mo Clinician — unlimited notes + PsyFiGPT assistant |
| HIPAA posture | BAA available (confirm in writing); audio auto-deleted after the note is generated | HIPAA-aligned, BAA on every paid plan; PHI de-identified before model calls; never training data |
The honest summary: if your decision is about uncapped volume at a flat price, Freed's $79 Core is a strong, predictable answer. If your decision is about a scribe that produces behavioral-health-shaped notes without a heavy editing pass — and a drafting surface built for therapy — that's the gap PsyFi Notes is designed to close — and at $49/mo unlimited versus Freed's $79 Core, the price argument points the same way.
Say you're a clinician seeing 22 clients a week, including two couples, and Freed's unlimited Core plan caught your eye because per-session pricing was adding up. Here's the trial most clinicians in that spot should actually run before committing:
That discipline — name the problem, model real cost, measure edit time on consented sessions — works no matter which tool you land on.
For a row-by-row feature and pricing table, see PsyFi vs Freed. If you're weighing a broader set of tools, our Mentalyc alternatives guide covers Freed, Upheal, Blueprint, EHR-native AI, and PsyFi side by side.
Whichever you choose, the rules don't change: demand a signed BAA, test with consented real sessions before you trust the output, and treat every AI draft as a draft until a licensed clinician reviews and signs it.
This post compares publicly listed pricing as of August 2026; confirm current pricing and BAA terms directly with each vendor. Nothing here is legal advice — consult your compliance lead.
PsyFi Notes is HIPAA-aligned clinical documentation software backed by a Business Associate Agreement. For questions about switching from a medical scribe to a behavioral-health one, contact our onboarding team at [email protected].
