An AAC app you can recommend to every family on your caseload

Every speech and language therapist knows the quiet calculation that happens at the end of an assessment. You have a sense of what would suit this child. Then you factor in what device the family actually owns, what they can afford, what the school can run, and whether the funding will cover a subscription. By the time all of that is accounted for, the app you recommend is often not the one you would choose in an ideal world. It is the one that survives the constraints.

That compromise is exhausting, and it is not good for the children on your caseload. The point of this article is to describe an AAC app built specifically to remove it, so that a single recommendation can work for the family on an iPad, the family on an Android phone, the family who cannot pay £250 up front, and the family who has already been burned by a subscription once before.

AAC, for the families reading along, stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication: tools and strategies that give a voice to people who cannot rely on speech alone.

The recommendation problem, named plainly

The friction in recommending AAC tends to come from four places.

Platform. Several of the most clinically respected apps are iOS-only. The moment a family does not own an iPad or iPhone, those options are off the table, and you are choosing from a much shorter and often less consistent list.

Cost. The premium apps cluster around the £250 to £300 mark for a one-off purchase, and Grid 3 sits higher still. For families already managing therapy and medical costs, that figure is a genuine barrier, not a minor line item.

Subscriptions. Some major apps have moved to subscription models, and that creates real problems for families who rely on grant or charity funding that will not accept recurring payments, and for managed school devices where subscriptions are awkward or impossible to run.

Lock-in. When a family has invested hours building vocabulary in one app, moving anywhere else can mean rebuilding it from scratch. That switching cost keeps families stuck, and makes you cautious about the first recommendation because it is so hard to undo.

Sayella is designed around removing all four. Here is how.

One app for whatever device the family has

Sayella runs on iPhone, iPad, Android and the web, from a single account. Programme a board on a laptop and it appears on the child's device. That cross-platform reach means you no longer have to ask "what device do they own?" before you can decide what is clinically right. The same recommendation fits the Android family and the iPad family equally.

For your caseload, that is a practical gift. You can build genuine familiarity with one system and apply it across every family, rather than juggling a different app for every platform a family happens to own.

A price that does not screen families out

Sayella has a free tier that never expires, including the full fixed-position core engine, modelling tools and offline speech on one device, with no card required. For many families that is enough to begin meaningful AAC straight away.

Beyond that, paid options are deliberately well below the incumbent wall: a monthly tier, a yearly tier, and a one-off lifetime purchase. There is always a non-subscription way to own the app outright, which keeps it eligible for the grant and charity funding routes that reject subscriptions. VAT relief is available at checkout for eligible UK disabled individuals and charities.

The headline for your recommendations is simple. Cost is far less likely to be the reason a family cannot follow your advice.

Never switched off

This is worth stating directly because it answers a fear many of your families carry. If an optional subscription lapses, Sayella degrades to local-only. It never switches off a voice the user already had. A child does not lose their speech because a payment failed. That is a hard line in how the app is built, and it directly addresses the most painful stories circulating in the AAC community in recent years.

Evidence-based by design

The clinical bones of Sayella will be familiar to you.

Core vocabulary at the centre. The app is built around a research-based core vocabulary. The evidence here is long-standing: work by Vanderheiden and Kelso (1987) and Baker and Hill (2000) established that a relatively small set of core words, on the order of 200 to 400, accounts for around 80 per cent of everyday communication across age, setting and ability. Core words sit front and centre rather than being buried under topic pages.

Consistent motor planning. Motor planning is the way a person builds automatic, almost unconscious movements to reach a word through repetition, the same way a touch typist stops looking at the keyboard. Sayella protects this through an approach called Progressive Language: new vocabulary is revealed inside a grid that stays put. The layout does not reflow, and a learned button never moves. New words fade in around the words a child already knows, so the motor patterns they build are never reset.

A clear path through the stages. The same app and account carry a communicator from emergent through developing core, robust core plus fringe, and on to literate and text-based communication. One system, the four stages you would map out for any AAC user, no forced migration between products as a child progresses.

A modified Fitzgerald key. Buttons are colour-coded by part of speech, with red reserved for stop, no and help. Colour is never the only signal: every button pairs a symbol with text, so the system works for children who do not yet rely on colour and meets accessibility needs.

Access from the start. Switch access, scanning and auditory scanning are first-class features from launch, not later add-ons, so the app suits a wide range of physical access profiles out of the box.

Free supervisor accounts for the people who do the work

You should not have to pay to support your own caseload. Sayella offers free supervisor and therapist accounts, with a partner modelling mode so you can model language alongside a child and shape their boards remotely. Because programming syncs across devices, you can prepare and adjust a child's vocabulary without needing their device in your hands during every session.

That collaboration model, free for the professionals doing the supporting, is built in rather than bolted on.

Data portability, so a recommendation is never a trap

Sayella supports Open Board Format, an open standard that lets AAC boards be exported and imported between systems. Open Board Format, often shortened to OBF, means a family's vocabulary is not locked inside one company's app.

For you, this changes the stakes of a recommendation in two ways. First, families coming from another app can often bring their existing boards across rather than rebuild them, which lowers the cost of trying Sayella at all. Second, and just as important, if Sayella is ever not the right fit for a particular child, their hard work can leave with them. A recommendation that the family can reverse is a recommendation you can make with confidence.

Accessibility you can point to

Sayella publishes a WCAG accessibility statement. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the international standard for making digital products usable by people with disabilities. Publishing a statement against it is a transparency signal, and a useful thing to be able to show families, schools and procurement teams who ask how seriously accessibility is taken.

Where Sayella is today

In the spirit of honesty your caseload deserves, here is the current status. Sayella builds and runs on native iOS and the web. Cloud sync and AI symbol features are built but not yet live in production. We are in a pre-launch, early-access phase, building towards a public launch around AAC Awareness Month in October, and we are forming an SLT advisory pipeline now. Nothing here is a finished claim dressed up as a promise. It is where the work genuinely stands.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to pay for a therapist account?

No. Supervisor and therapist accounts are free, including partner modelling mode, so you can support families across your caseload without a personal cost.

Can families coming from Proloquo or TD Snap keep their vocabulary?

Often, yes. Through Open Board Format import, existing boards can frequently be brought across rather than rebuilt. The degree of fit depends on how the original was structured, so it is worth testing a board early in any transition.

Is Sayella a medical device?

No. Sayella is a communication and education tool, and makes no diagnostic or treatment claims. It is designed to support communication, not to diagnose or treat any condition.

What happens if a family stops paying?

The app degrades to local-only and never switches off a voice the user already had. There is always a one-off lifetime route to full ownership for families who want to avoid recurring payments entirely.

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Sayella is in pre-launch and we are opening free supervisor accounts to speech and language therapists now. If you would like trial accounts to explore across your caseload, you can request free SLT supervisor accounts and help shape an app built to be the one you can recommend to every family.