How to Stop Depending on Alma, Headway, and Grow Therapy in 2026

A lot of therapists started their practice using one of the major tech companies like Grow, Alma, or Headway. They made it super easy to get started. One platform, everything you need. This sounds great until they make a change and your whole practice ebbs and flows with the platform. This is not good.

We don’t want our practices to depend on any one platform. We need to break the dependence and create some freedom.

What "Freedom" Actually Means Here

I want to be precise about this, because the word gets thrown around loosely. Freedom is not quitting the platforms and getting off insurance panels completely. I'm not arguing for that — if a platform genuinely serves your business, if there's an element of it that helps your practice grow, or if billing through them pays well, then staying on it is fine.

Freedom is simply not being dependent on a single platform. In other words, can your practice run without it? If Alma collapsed tomorrow, or an insurance panel dropped you tomorrow, your practice should not die with it.

Some of this is idealistic. No setup is perfect. But you can absolutely run a practice that doesn't depend on any one outside source, and that's a different thing from running no risk at all.

The One Question That Tells You Where You Stand

Ask yourself this:

If this platform disappeared tomorrow, would I still see clients Monday?

If the answer is no, you have a dependency problem. Let’s fix that!

Here's where I land personally. If Alma folded tomorrow, my practice would be okay. I'm credentialed outside of Alma. I can submit claims from inside my own EHR. Every client record, all my documentation, my notes, even the telehealth platform where I actually see clients — all of it lives in a dedicated EHR I control.

Step 1: Own a Real Home Base

This is the piece you can start this week.

When I say home base, I mean a dedicated EHR — a platform that was intentionally built as a medical record system. Not a do-everything startup that also happens to store your notes.

Inside your home base:

• Client records and client info

• Documentation and notes

• Communication and client portals

• Telehealth, if the system supports it

• Billing and claims submission capabilities

How to pick one: research the company. Look at where they've been and where they're headed — you're essentially choosing a new home for your clinical records, so their direction matters. Make sure it has the features you need now and the ones you'll need later. If you're solo today but might build a group practice, confirm it can grow into that.

You don’t have to leave all platforms

Choosing a home base doesn't mean deleting your Alma or Grow Therapy account.

You do have to read the fine print because these companies change terms regularly. But if you can bill through Alma or Headway and it pays, bill through Alma or Headway. Use the platforms to benefit your business.

What goes wrong is the reverse. People adopt a platform and then bend their practice to fit whatever that platform does. That's backwards.

Decide how you want your practice to run. Then use the elements of these companies that serve that decision.

Just make sure your entire practice doesn't fall over if one of them does.

Move Two: Generate Your Own Referrals

This is the one that frees you from insurance panels, not just from platforms. It's also the harder of the two.

Most therapists hear "marketing" and assume it isn't possible for them. It is.

You won't get precise control — you can't decide you want five referrals this week and produce five. But when you make marketing a consistent part of the business, when you give it real hours every week or every month and you get better at it over time, you will notice you have meaningfully more control over how many people reach out to you.

The core principle: never rely on one channel.

• Paid ads. I'm a strong proponent. A lot of people dislike them. They work.

• Directories. Psychology Today, Zencare, and similar. This is the standard — most therapists are already listed, and you should be. Just don't mistake it for the end-all-be-all of referrals. It's one source.

• Word of mouth. A neglected one. Networking is a skill you can get better at, especially networking to the right people. A real share of my referrals still comes this way, and I spend time on it every week deliberately. It isn't passive.

• Website and SEO.

• Social media.

Test channels continuously. That's how any good business runs.

The Entire Marketing Strategy, In Two Steps

Strip away the tactics and every marketing approach reduces to two jobs.

One: get in front of as many of the right people as possible.

The right people is the operative part. If you work with adults, don't spend your time marketing to schools. You want as many people as possible who could plausibly refer to you — or become a client — to know your practice exists.

This is the easy half. Paid ads, flyers, a sticker on your car, social media, directories. Getting your name out there is not hard. Doing it well is a different question, but visibility itself is achievable.

Two: convince them you're worth a free consult.

This is the hard half. Once someone encounters you — the ad, the post, the flyer, whatever the medium — they have to look at it and think I want to book a call with this therapist.

The way you do that is by providing real value up front, which builds trust.

A concrete example: instead of running a paid ad to a plain landing page, run it to a genuinely useful free resource that helps with the specific problem your ideal client has. They get something real before they've given you anything. That's what earns the call.

That's it. Get in front of the right people, then be worth their time.

Before You Change Anything: Build the Net First

I want to end on the warning, because it's the part most likely to get skipped.

Do not make big moves without safety nets in place.

Don't finish this article and write a panel-termination letter today. If you want off a panel, sequence it: get referrals coming in more consistently first, or get another panel running first, or get the EHR fully operational first.

Credentialing does not follow you out the door — leaving means starting that process again, and it isn't fast. You may have continuity-of-care obligations to clients currently in your care. And in some states with some payers, the platform's negotiated rate is genuinely better than what you'd get alone.

Build the alternative underneath you while the current arrangement is still paying you. This is a slow rebuild, not a weekend project.

Where to Start

If the marketing half is the part that feels impossible, that's the part I teach.

I run a free community for private practice owners. I'm in there answering questions myself, and the entire point is teaching the marketing fundamentals that give therapists their options back — so your practice isn't dependent on a tech platform's roadmap.

It's genuinely free. Come in and ask me something.

I also offer done-for-you marketing services if you'd rather someone handled it.

The goal was never to be off the platforms. It's to be able to be.