Is 7 Cups Online Therapy Legit? No.

I Tried Online Therapy Through 7 Cups

With the intention of bolstering my review with first-hand experience of all 7 Cups has to offer (and, frankly, being wary of the scope of what it says it offers), I signed up for its online therapy subscription to try it for myself.

I clicked the “Get Started” button on the home page and filled out a short quiz related to my current status and mental health symptoms. Questions ranged from gender and what country I live in, to spirituality, what brought me to therapy, and what resources I was interested in getting from 7 Cups. I checked the box saying I was interested in professional therapy.

Then I filled out a few more questions about my mental health symptoms, including the main issue I’d like to address (I checked depression), how long I’d been struggling, and if any recent life changes had triggered it. After a couple more questions, this page popped up asking if I was interested in talking to a licensed therapist, and I clicked, “I’m Interested.” Note that this page specifically states the words “therapists” and “expert help.”

7 Cups Matched Me With Therapists Not Licensed in My State

After a few more questions and a slide with some highlights from my treatment plan, I was matched with a provider. I was not provided with the 7 Cups profile for the therapist I was matched with prior to entering my credit card information, so I had to do a Google search to find it. I couldn’t find her licensing information anywhere on her 7 Cups profile, so it was unclear whether she was licensed in my state. However, the search I conducted pulled up information regarding being licensed in the state of Pennsylvania.

With her name and title, I worked with our Editor in Chief, Dr. Melissa Boudin, PsyD, to verify her license. We went to the PA state licensing board verification site, and were able to use the therapist’s name to verify that she was licensed in her state of Pennsylvania. However, when we searched the verification database for my state (I live in Ohio), no records were found for her. This meant that the therapist being offered to me as an option for text-based therapy was not licensed to provide this service to me.

In almost all instances, a therapist must be licensed in the state in which you reside in order to provide you with therapy. In addition to going against state regulations, having therapy with someone not licensed in your state can mean that you receive less protection, lower-quality care, issues trying to use insurance, and no clear way to report problems with your therapist.

Additionally, 7 Cups made it seem like I’d get chat sessions, phone sessions, video sessions, and messaging any time provided by a licensed therapist for only $39.75 per week, an incredibly great deal if it includes a weekly online therapy session from a licensed provider.

However, then I noticed that this subscription plan, at $39.75 weekly (charged monthly), only covers text-based therapy, not the weekly video or phone sessions. So I clicked the “Add video sessions” button, which brought my total to $299 monthly (advertised as $74.75 per week, still quite low for weekly online therapy but not completely unheard-of). However, this changed the name of my therapist, as my original match doesn’t offer video therapy on the platform.

I worked with Dr. Boudin again to verify the license of the second therapist I was matched with, for video-based therapy. Similarly, this therapist’s license information was not available on her 7 Cups profile page and we had to look her up elsewhere to find that information. We were able to verify that the therapist was a Licensed Independent Social Worker in the state of Texas, but she had no Ohio licensure. Again, I was matched with a therapist not licensed to provide therapy in the state I reside in.

To finish signing up, I had to click that I agree to the 7 Cups Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Online Therapy & Coaching Informed Consent. When I clicked on the informed consent link, it included text saying, “I agree that I reside in the jurisdiction where my therapist is licensed, if applicable per licensure regulations. I agree that my therapist is under the licensing rules and laws of the state my therapist is licensed in.”

However, 7 Cups withholds the information needed to verify a therapist’s state licensure, putting that burden on the consumer—something that no other online therapy platform we’ve reviewed has ever put onto the user to figure out. Plus, we know most consumers do not read through this fine print. Regardless, it’s the mental health professional’s job to ensure above-board care, including appropriate state licensure. And therapy platforms should support therapists in this by prescreening the clients referred to them.

I Had a “Legitimate Therapy Session” With a Provider Not Licensed in My State

Curious to see what would happen, I went ahead and paid the $299 for a month’s worth of video therapy. After this, I was asked to input my contact details, including my address, then I selected the best time for my weekly therapy appointment with my provider.

After that, I was told my subscription was active and was directed to the online chat platform where I could message my therapist right away. I got a pretty standard message “from my therapist” with some initial information and instructions, as well as a couple of prompts for them to get to know me. I added some basic information about myself and why I was coming to therapy.

When I logged on to my video therapy appointment, the therapist was genial and attentive, and willing to answer my questions. I kept the session short but said I wanted to get on a call to meet her and make sure it’s legit. She told me she understood my skepticism and that she is a real, legitimate, licensed therapist, and that she gets paid most of my monthly fee and 7 Cups takes a cut off the top (which I confirmed from 7 Cups’ Terms of Service).

Then I asked her about how it works since we live in different states, giving the example of my therapist in Kentucky not being able to continue seeing me after I moved to Ohio. Her response was, “7 Cups takes care of that for us.” I’m unsure if she actually believes that 7 Cups has some loophole that makes this process above-board somehow, or if she simply intentionally glossed over the question.

My Colleagues Also Matched With Therapists Unlicensed in Their States

Concerned about being matched with multiple out-of-state providers, I asked a couple of my colleagues to go through the same sign-up process and see if they were matched with providers not licensed in their respective states of California and Minnesota.

My California-based colleague was matched initially for text-based therapy to someone listed as a Psychoanalyst in Mexico City. We could not verify this person as having any type of license, as there was no licensure information on her profile, and no record of her elsewhere online.

Another colleague was matched initially to an LPC in Missouri, despite living in Minnesota. When we looked into that therapist’s license, we found that they were licensed in MO, but not MN. Then, when switching to request video therapy, both colleagues were matched with the same therapist as I had been in Texas. That therapist was not licensed in CA or MN. In not one instance were we matched to a therapist licensed in our states.

Why Does This Matter for Consumers?

One of the first things people seeking therapy should do is verify the license and standing of the therapist they plan to work with. 7 Cups puts a hurdle in the way of therapy seekers looking to accomplish this.

Why is it important that therapy-seekers find providers licensed in their state?

• If the therapist isn’t licensed in your state, it may mean they haven’t met your state’s requirements for education, training, or ethics. This means you might not be getting the high standard of care that licensed professionals must provide.
• A therapist working without a valid license in your state may be breaking the law, as they are not following the professional rules that are established to keep clients safe in your state.
• If you feel harmed or unsafe while working with your therapist, you won’t have an easy way to file a complaint or get support from your state’s licensing board. There may be no clear way to get help if things go wrong.
• Most insurance companies won’t cover therapy from someone who isn’t licensed in your state. Any claims can be denied if your therapist isn’t approved.

Why a Lack of License Information Is Dangerous

While looking into the licenses of the therapists my colleagues and I were matched with, one hurdle we met was not being provided with their license numbers anywhere on 7 Cups’ website, including the therapist’s profiles. Initially, the only information we received was the therapists’ name and the type of license they had (e.g., LISW, LMFT). As a therapy seeker, it was concerning to me not to be able to find this information through the platform I was using to find mental healthcare.

Dr. Boudin confirmed to me that a lack of licensing information on profiles is also a violation of most state licensing board regulations. For example, in California, any licensed therapist, counselor, social worker, or psychologist must include their license number in any advertisement. Not doing so opens the therapist up to potential disciplinary action from their licensing board. For that reason, every reputable therapist directory includes this information on their profiles.

Not listing licensing information on 7 Cups profiles impacts both therapy seekers as well as therapists listed on its directory. Therapy seekers are not provided with a clear indication that a therapist is in fact licensed, and if wanting to verify a license, are not given enough information to do so.

Thoughts From Dr. Boudin, Licensed Psychologist

I asked Dr. Boudin for her thoughts as a professional therapist on 7 Cups’ practices, and why they’re harmful for both consumers and therapists:

“7 Cups’ intentionally misleading marketing and business practices negatively impact consumers as well as therapists. With thousands of ghost profiles on the 7 Cups directory, therapy seekers who believe they have contacted a therapist through the site will very likely never have that message delivered to the therapist. The therapy seeker not only believes that the therapist did not respond, which negatively impacts the reputation of the therapist, but they are then led instead to the unreliable, subpar care 7 Cups provides to its users, all without the therapist’s knowledge. The therapists’ names and information are effectively used as a bait and switch.

In addition, for therapists, having a 7 Cups profile that lacks licensure information may put you in violation of your state’s licensure regulations. We recommend that all therapists check whether 7 Cups has listed them in its directory without their knowledge, and if you do have a profile, request that it be removed. We also recommend that any therapist listed on 7 Cups purposefully review their state regulations and request that their license information be added to their profile.

To the small number of therapists actually working for 7 Cups: You are very likely being matched with clients outside of the state(s) you are licensed in, which may be a violation of your state’s licensure regulations. I highly recommend that you double-check your state requirements, work only with clients that you can legally and ethically do so, and speak to 7 Cups about this unethical practice.”

How 7 Cups Manipulates Google to Acquire Users

Despite the serious issues raised by my experience, 7 Cups continues to rank prominently in Google search results for high-intent terms like ‘best online therapy.’ By ranking well for these terms, 7 Cups is seen by tens-of-thousands of users each month who are searching for online therapy services or therapists.

7 Cups appears to achieve and sustain these rankings through three key tactics:

1. Targeting and emphasizing keywords associated with Online Therapy
2. Framing various awards, citations, and other off-page mentions as being for Online Therapy
3. Publishing unapproved, scraped, and AI manipulated therapist profiles at a massive scale

7 Cups seems to be making great efforts to convince users, reviewers, and search engines alike that it is primarily a very well regarded, very large provider of online therapy. It is not.

A better description of 7 Cups would be, as its FAQ page says, “an online emotional support service… connect(ing) those in need of emotional support with our network of Active Listeners, individuals from all walks of life who want to provide compassionate care.”

How 7 Cups Targets Online Therapy Keywords

Search engines like Google rely on signals from websites to understand and rank content. One of the strongest signals is the page title, which appears in search results and communicates to both users and search engines what a page offers. Titles are deliberately crafted by marketers and SEO professionals to target high-value keywords.

7 Cups’ homepage title is a clear example of this practice: “7 Cups | Free Online Therapist & Counseling”

This title prominently targets non-branded keywords like “free online therapist” and “counseling”—phrases that collectively generate more than 60,000 monthly searches according to SEO tool Ahrefs. Despite this positioning, 7 Cups does not actually offer free therapy or maintain a sufficient, verified network of licensed therapists to deliver these services at scale. Nonetheless, the company has deliberately chosen to frame its homepage around these terms, securing visibility for high-intent search queries.

This keyword targeting extends beyond the title. 7 Cups strategically places these online therapy keywords in multiple locations, including:

• The homepage title
• Headings (H1 and H2 tags)
• Body text
• Image alt text

On the homepage, the terms “Therapist,” “Therapy,” “Counselor,” and “Counseling” appear 42 times in visible text, compared to just 14 mentions of terms like “Peer,” “Listener,” or “Friend.” When examining the page’s full content, including non-visible elements like alt text on images, the therapy-related terms appear 83 times, while peer support terms appear only 21 times.

Some of these additional uses that bots can see but the typical user cannot is in the alt text of images. 7 Cups intentionally fills the image alt text with descriptions like, “Online therapy from a licensed professional therapists” and “Online therapy that fits your needs.”

This disproportionate use of therapy-related language suggests an effort to position the entire 7 Cups site (and by extension, the 7 Cups brand) as a leading online therapy provider, despite the company’s actual focus being peer support through unlicensed volunteer listeners.

How 7 Cups Frames Awards & Reviews to Tout Its Online Therapy Service

7 Cups prominently displays numerous awards and review site mentions on its homepage and throughout the online therapy onboarding process. However, these awards are presented without links to source material and are often framed as endorsements of its online therapy services, when in reality, all of them recognize the free peer support offerings or general emotional support communities.

Below is a breakdown of the most prominently displayed awards and recognitions:

1. Medicine X Stanford
   • Site no longer up, but press release from 7 Cups focuses on emotional support.
     Award is from 2016
2. World Economic Forum
   • Focuses on free/low cost emotional support features.
   • Award from 2019
3. Verywell Mind – “The Best Online Group Therapy, Tried and Tested”
   • Awarded “Best for Messaging”
   • Last updated in 2024
4. Verywell Mind – “Best Online Therapy for Postpartum Depression”
   • Awarded “Best With Live Chat”
   • Published in a 2022 Article (since removed)
5. Verywell Mind – “7 Online Text Therapy Companies We Tested and Recommend”
   • Awarded “Best for Peer Counseling”
   • Last updated in 2024
6. Unable to Verify
   • No reviewer or website is listed.
7. PsychCentral – “The 9 Best Online Therapy and Mental Health Support Programs for Kids in 2022”
   • Awarded “Best for Free Chat Support
   • Last updated in 2022
8. App Store – 4.4 Rating based on 5.7k Reviews
   • As of 5/12/2025.
9. Healthline – “Looking for Online Therapy for Teens in 2025? Take a Peek at These Options”
   • Awarded “Best for Free Support”
   • Last updated in 2025
10. PsychCentral – “The 7 Best Online Bipolar Disorder Support Groups in 2022”
    • Awarded “Best for Chatting”
    • Last updated in 2022
11. Unable to Verify
    • Despite best efforts, all searches for “NHS” and “7 Cups” came back empty and 7 Cups provides no link.
12. TrustPilot – 3.3 Rating based on 665 Reviews
    • As of 5/12/2025

It appears that most reviewers have made the mistake of taking 7 Cups’ promise of online therapy at face-value and do not appear to have tried it themselves

7 Cups uses these reviewers’ oversight to their advantage, framing its inclusion in these lists in a way that appears designed to strengthen its positioning as a major online therapy provider in the eyes of both users and search engines, despite limited evidence supporting that role.

Distorted framing of its inclusion on review articles isn’t the only way 7 Cups tries to reinforce the false image that it is a major online therapy provider.

Another example is how 7 Cups categorizes itself on third-party sites. 7 Cups has claimed its Trustpilot profile (a process that involves verifying ownership of a company) and categorized itself as Mental Health Service, Psychologist, and Psychotherapist.

Categorizing itself in this way enables 7 Cups to appear in front of Trustpilot users who are looking for a therapist or psychologist. This categorization also places it on additional “Best Of” lists that Trustpilot publishes. These pages have titles like “Best in Psychotherapist” and “Best in Psychologist.”

Whether it’s the awards from review sites or the categorization on Trustpilot, the goal seems to be to have both users and search engines like Google understand 7 Cups primarily as an Online Therapy provider, not as a Peer Listening and emotional support service.

How 7 Cups Uses Scraped, Scaled, & Unauthorized Therapist Profiles

Recent reporting estimated that 7 Cups has published more than 130,000 unauthorized therapist profiles in order to populate a therapist directory and that fewer than 70 of those profiles are legitimate.

You can check this yourself. Visit 7 Cups page for US based therapists and do a count of “verified” profiles—we could only find 63: https://www.7cups.com/local/us/therapists/

I wrote an article about 7 Cups’ massive-but-empty directory after we found an unauthorized profile for ChoosingTherapy.com’s Editor in Chief, Dr. Melissa Boudin, PsyD. You can read that article here: 7 Cups’ “Ghost Network” of therapists.

In that article, I detail how it appears that 7 Cups is using its ghost directory to seem more like an online therapy provider than it actually is, and to seem more widely adopted/backed by therapists than in reality. This helps them to not only rank for keywords like “best online therapy” but they can also rank for the individual therapists names and capture traffic intended for the provider themself.

Even worse than competing with the therapist for traffic related to searches for their own name, if users go to 7 Cups and try to message a therapist through an unauthorized profile, the message may never make it to the therapist. All we can determine is that the user is redirected to use other 7 Cups products.

Google has specific policies in place to prevent websites from abusing SEO tactics in order to gain undeserved audiences, but it has yet to enforce them against 7 Cups.

If search engines like Google didn’t rank 7 Cups for terms related to online therapy or for the names of therapists who haven’t authorized a profile, who would be visiting 7 Cups? Only people seeking out 7 Cups directly, or people seeking out the Peer Listening service that it offers for free. But, as it is, search engines like Google are only helping enable the 7 Cups bait-and-switch.

7 Cups’ Model Is Keeping People From Getting Real Care

Online therapy should be an accessible, reliable service for people who can’t or don’t want to leave their homes for mental healthcare. That is in no way a revolutionary concept, and the best online therapy platforms out there streamline the intake process, work with insurance or provide out-of-network superbills, and make it easy to switch providers until you find the right fit. But sites like 7 Cups make it more difficult for users to ensure that they’re being seen by licensed, above-board clinicians, which can be absolutely debilitating if you’ve already had a difficult time finding the care you need.

Review sites like Verywell Mind, PsychCentral, Healthline, and others continue to give 7 Cups accolades, leading to more authority in the eyes of both Google and consumers wanting to find help. Instead of actually using the platform, sites like these pass it off as a decent option for finding free or low-cost support, potentially leading thousands of therapy-seekers to subpar mental healthcare.

For therapists, it can be incredibly frustrating to want to offer online care without having to go through the rigamarole of setting up your own billing and HIPAA-compliant video platform, let alone jumping through the hoops of credentialing, charting, etc. So, we get why someone would be tempted by a platform similar to 7 Cups. We just think there are plenty of better therapist directories to market yourself on and services that will not only enable you to offer online therapy but also get therapists credentialed and contracted with insurance companies. After all, building up your online therapy caseload shouldn’t cost you your integrity, or maybe even your license.

Questions We Have for 7 Cups

We’re left with several questions for the higher-ups at 7 Cups:

1. How many people in the US have paid for online therapy (video therapy or text-based therapy)?
2. Have clients from the US been matched with and done therapy sessions with therapists who are not licensed in the US?
3. Have clients from the US been matched with and done therapy sessions with therapists who are not licensed in the state the client is residing in?
4. Are therapists told that you will match them with leads from the states they are licensed to practice in?
5. Are therapists encouraged to offer coaching services instead of therapy? If so, why is the client onboarding flow and therapist profile page advertising therapy services?
6. Where do client/lead messages go when they are sent through therapist profiles on 7 Cups but the therapist has neither approved nor claimed the profile you published?
7. Are you continuing to add unauthorized therapist profiles to your site?
8. Do you plan to remove unauthorized therapist profiles from your site?