If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number. To find a crisis line in your country, visit findahelpline.com.
What Sage is, and what it is not
Sage is the AI guide inside the Stillmonk app: a computer program, not a person. It is not a therapist, a doctor, a crisis line or an emergency service. It talks with you about urges, triggers, reasons and choices on your climb, and other topics get one fixed reply. Sage keeps no memory of you: each reply is written from the recent messages in your Sage chat only, not from your day count, check-ins or reasons.
Sage is part of a Stillmonk membership. The crisis line and the people you added are free for everyone: on the free plan, the Sage tab still shows "Get help now" and the urge tools that stay free.
Before your first message is saved or sent, the app asks whether you want to talk with Sage, and says what is sent, who gets it and how long it is kept. "Not now" sends nothing, and everything else in Stillmonk works without Sage. Each time you open Sage, the chat starts with a line saying that Sage is an AI guide, not a person and not a therapist.
When crisis words appear
Your phone checks every message you send to Sage for words about suicide or self-harm, such as "kill myself", "want to die" or "end my life". The check runs on your phone, uses no AI, and works the same way every time. When it finds them:
- Sage does not ask the AI. It gives the same fixed reply every time: that you deserve a real person beside you right now, to contact your local emergency services if you might be in danger, and that "Get help now" at the top of the chat reaches a trained person.
- The crisis line for your phone's region appears in Sage and stays while the app is open, even if you then write "ignore that". One tap calls it, or texts it where it only answers texts.
- Your phone picks the line from its time zone and language; Stillmonk does not store your region. Where we have no verified line, the app shows your local emergency number when it is known, and findahelpline.com.
You do not need crisis words to reach help. "Get help now" sits at the top of every Sage chat and opens the crisis line for your region and the people you added in Reach out.
What the check can miss
People do not always say it directly. Sage's instructions tell the AI that a question about heights, bridges, medicines or methods after bad news, giving things away, or a goodbye could be a sign of danger, and that it must never give that information, must ask how you are, and must point you to "Get help now". Before we change the AI model or its instructions, we run a fixed set of test messages through Sage, including signs like these, and read every answer. No check is perfect, and an AI can still get it wrong.
Nobody at Stillmonk watches Sage chats as they happen, and Sage cannot contact anyone for you, including emergency services. If you might be in danger, call your local emergency number or a crisis line, or ask someone near you to.
If Sage cannot answer because of a problem on our side, the app says Sage is resting and shows Breathe, Reach out and the crisis line where you would type. Your conversation stays on screen. None of these use AI. Sage tries again the next time you open it or come back to the app.
Where your messages go
Once you have agreed to talk with Sage, the messages you send to Sage and its replies are saved in your Stillmonk account, stored by our backend provider, Supabase. To write a reply, our server sends your newest message and the ones before it in your Sage chat, up to 16 including Sage's replies, through OpenRouter to the company whose AI model writes the reply. The model is set on our server and can change without an app update; the default in our code is OpenAI's GPT-5 nano. The request does not deliberately include your email, profile or trusted contacts, but anything you write in the chat may be included.
Once you have agreed to talk with Sage, a message that trips the crisis check is saved with the fixed reply like any other, so it can be among the recent messages sent with a later reply. Before you agree, a crisis message gets the same fixed reply on your phone only, and nothing is saved or sent. The same happens if the message cannot be saved, or if you send it while Sage is still answering. The fixed reply names no number, line or region.
How long it is kept, and how to delete it
Your Sage messages stay in your account until you delete your account (Settings, then Delete account), which removes your Sage history from our active database. To delete only your Sage history, write to support@stillmonk.io. OpenRouter and the AI model provider handle what they receive under their own terms and may keep it for a time; deleting your account does not erase their copies. The privacy policy has the details.
Stillmonk is a wellbeing companion, not a medical service, and nothing here is medical advice. See the terms of service.