Berries

AI clinical notes for mental health professionals — simple, HIPAA-compliant, indie.

4.2/ 5

A well-built, mental-health-specific AI scribe with strong compliance credentials and a useful free tier — held back by a $79/month Pro price that faces stiff competition from cheaper unlimited alternatives.

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Pros and cons

What Berries does well

A permanent free tier that is actually usable

Most AI scribes offer a free trial that expires in 7–14 days. Berries' free tier works differently: you get 20 sessions free at signup, then 10 sessions per month indefinitely with no time limit and no credit card required.

For a therapist with a small caseload — say, 8–10 clients seen weekly — the free tier covers a meaningful proportion of sessions. For a practitioner just starting out, or one who wants to run Berries alongside another tool before committing, the permanent 10-session monthly allowance is a genuine offer, not a truncated trial designed to force an upgrade.

This is materially more generous than the 7-day trial from AutoNotes, the 14-day trial from Mentalyc, or Blueprint's $0.99/session charge from session one.

Session prep surfaces prior context before you open the door

Berries' session prep feature generates a highlight summary of a client's prior session notes before the next session begins. The therapist sees relevant history, active treatment themes, and documented goals without re-reading the full prior note.

Most AI scribes are backward-looking tools — they generate the note after the session ends. Session prep makes Berries a forward-looking tool as well, reducing the mental load of switching between clients and ensuring clinical continuity is surfaced rather than remembered.

For therapists with caseloads of 20 or more clients, the cognitive overhead of re-loading each client's context between sessions is real. Session prep addresses this directly.

Compliance posture is thorough

Berries is HIPAA and PHIPA compliant with a signed BAA, SOC 2 certified, and explicitly states that PHI is excluded from AI model training and that session recordings are not retained after processing. This combination — HIPAA, PHIPA, SOC 2, no training on PHI, no recording retention — matches the strongest compliance profiles in the category.

The independent funding model is also worth noting: Berries is not venture-capital backed, which removes a common source of pressure to monetise user data or compromise privacy commitments in pursuit of growth targets.

Built exclusively for mental health — not a general clinical tool

Unlike Heidi Health (which serves all clinical specialties) or DeepCura (which targets any healthcare setting), Berries is built specifically for therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and psychiatric nurse practitioners. The feature set — ICD-10 suggestions for mental health diagnoses, psychiatric medication tracking, treatment plan generation, patient instruction letters, and session prep — reflects the specific administrative workflow of mental health practice rather than general clinical documentation.

For a therapist who has tried general clinical AI tools and found them poorly adapted to therapy-specific workflows, this focus is a meaningful differentiator.

What Berries doesn't do well

$79/month Pro plan faces stiff competition

At $79/month billed monthly, Berries' Pro plan is one of the more expensive solo-therapist options in the category. Direct comparisons are unfavourable:

• AutoNotes: $14/month annually, unlimited notes
• Mentalyc Pro: $59.99/month ($49.99 annually), 160 notes with Alliance Genie and EHR integration
• Blueprint: $0.99/session, full EHR included free

A solo therapist seeing 30 sessions per month pays $79 for Berries versus $42 for Blueprint (Plus tier), $14 for AutoNotes (annual), or $59.99 for Mentalyc Pro with richer features. Berries needs to justify the premium through feature quality or workflow fit — and for many therapists, the comparison will not favour it on price alone.

No annual billing discount is published in available documentation, which further limits the value proposition for therapists who are comfortable committing to a year upfront.

No native EHR integrations

Berries does not publish native integrations with SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Jane App, or other EHRs. Notes are generated within Berries and must be manually copied into the therapist's existing records system.

For therapists whose primary workflow pain is the time spent copy-pasting between tools, this is a genuine limitation. Mentalyc integrates natively with SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, and Jane App. Blueprint includes its own EHR. Berries does neither.

No confirmed annual billing option or discount

Berries' pricing page shows only monthly billing at $79/month for the Pro plan. An annual billing option is not confirmed in available public documentation. The absence of an annual discount means there is no financial incentive to commit long-term, which is unusual in a market where most competitors offer 20–40% annual discounts.

Pricing breakdown

The decision for most therapists evaluating Berries comes down to session volume. If your caseload stays near 10 sessions per month, the free tier is a genuinely functional option — you pay nothing and get access to all core features within the monthly allowance.

Once you exceed 10 sessions per month consistently, the $79/month Pro plan becomes the only option. At that point, a careful comparison with AutoNotes ($14–29/month), Mentalyc ($19.99–69.99/month), and Blueprint ($0.99/session) is worth doing before committing.

Students and trainees should contact Berries directly — the special pricing for early-career professionals may change the calculation significantly.

Who it's for

Berries is the right choice for therapists who:

• See 10 or fewer sessions per month and want a permanent free AI scribe with no trial expiry
• Value a tool built exclusively for mental health rather than a general clinical platform
• Are students, trainees, or early-career clinicians who qualify for special pricing
• Want session prep history summaries as a standard pre-session workflow

Who it's not for

High-volume therapists will find cheaper unlimited alternatives at the Pro pricing level. Practices that need native EHR integration should look at Mentalyc or Blueprint. Therapists evaluating on an annual billing basis will not find a published discount.

Alternatives

AutoNotes offers unlimited notes at $14/month annually — significantly cheaper than Berries' Pro plan for high-volume practitioners. It also has note-to-note continuity. See our review of AutoNotes for therapists.

Mentalyc has more note format variety, native EHR integrations, and Alliance Genie therapeutic alliance scoring at a comparable price point. See our review of Mentalyc for therapists.

Heidi Health offers unlimited free transcription with no session cap — the lowest-cost entry point if the free tier's standard formats meet your needs. See our review of Heidi Health for therapists.

For a full comparison of AI tools for therapists including compliance guidance and a buyer's guide, see our best AI tools for therapists page.

The verdict

Berries earns a 4.1 rating — a focused, well-built mental health AI scribe with a genuinely useful permanent free tier and strong compliance credentials. The session prep feature and mental-health-specific feature set reflect real understanding of therapy workflows.

The $79/month Pro price is the main friction point. In a market where AutoNotes offers unlimited notes at $14/month annually and Mentalyc offers a richer feature set at $59.99/month, Berries needs to compete on workflow quality rather than price. For therapists who find the mental health focus and session prep features align well with how they work, it is worth evaluating on the free tier before deciding.

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