Still Here

Built for Ben, one friend at a time

For the friend who
lives far away.

Still Here sends Ben one small message every morning on Telegram. Ben replies with anything (a word, an emoji, a photo) and gets on with the day. If Ben goes quiet for too long, it quietly asks you to call.

See Ben's dashboard Deploy your own on Render

Open source · Gemma 4 open weights · one Render Blueprint · no app to install

One beat a day

A heartbeat on Render, a friend on the other end.

Every 10 minutes a heartbeat wakes the Render service, checks Ben's local clock, and decides if anything needs to happen. Every beat is idempotent, so a missed run never means a missed friend.

  1. 09:30

    Morning check-in

    Gemma writes one short message that remembers Ben's life: the interview, the football game, the dentist.

  2. any time

    Ben replies

    Anything counts. Gemma answers like a friend and writes one kind, shareable line, never the message itself.

  3. +4h

    A gentle nudge

    Still quiet? One tiny follow-up: “a 👍 is plenty.” Never during Ben's night.

  4. +10h

    You get a heads-up

    “Haven't heard from Ben since yesterday. Maybe call?” When Ben replies, you're told right away.

What buddies see

A pulse, not a transcript.

  • A 1–5 mood score and one word per day
  • One short line Gemma writes to be shareable
  • An alert if Ben is quiet for too long
  • A short Sunday note about the week

What stays with Ben

Ben is always in control.

  • Every message Ben sends, always
  • /pause for a few days, no questions asked
  • /forget wipes everything it remembers
  • A private page showing exactly what's shared, and a button to remove any buddy

Why open

A safety net you can own.

Open weights

Ben's words go to Gemma 4, an open-weight model. Today it's served by Google AI Studio; tomorrow it can run on a GPU box you control, with one line changed. No vendor gets to keep a log of someone's loneliness.

One instance per friend

No company, no accounts, no shared database of feelings. Each person you care about gets their own tiny deployment from one render.yaml.

Change how it behaves

The prompts, the nudge timings and the safety net are plain Python. Ben's friends can read every rule that decides when they get an alert.