HoldSpace is practice management for holistic practitioners — voice-first session notes, online booking, and client history in one place, built for people who hold space, not for hospitals. No insurance billing, no charts built for a hospital, no clinical note templates. None of that is missing by accident. What follows is the product screen by screen, so you can see the thing before you sign up for it.
Why does HoldSpace exist, and why is it not another EHR?
Because a client's history was scattered across a booking tool, a drive, some folders, a USB stick and paper, and nothing pulled it back together in time for the next session. An EHR, the electronic health record software built for clinics, solves a different problem.
We built this out of a mess we knew well. Among massage therapists, bodyworkers and somatic practitioners, what you know about a person tends to live in several places at once: part of it in whatever tool books the slots, part on Google Drive, part in folders, part on a USB stick, part on paper written mid-conversation. Getting ready for a returning client meant assembling all of it, which took so much effort that the search got abandoned halfway. The session then ran on memory, with the important parts missing.
Voice moved to the middle of the product the moment speech recognition became accurate enough to trust. In our own use, speaking a note instead of typing one skips the part of the mind that formulates written sentences, and more detail survives the trip. It also lets you say the things that never reach a typed note: a hunch about what to try next time, what did not work, what to change.
And we say client. The other word — the one hospital software uses — carries treatment and medical responsibility with it, and that is not the relationship. A practitioner who holds space works with a person, not with a condition. Every screen says session, practitioner, client, notes, and that is a position rather than a style choice.
What does it look like day to day?
Bookings arrive without you, notes get spoken instead of typed, and everything about one person lands in one list you can read before the door opens.
A booking comes in
A client books themselves, without an account, and the first you hear of it is a confirmation.
Every practitioner gets a public page at holdspace.pro/your-name, once you switch it on. The client picks a session type, then a date, then a time shown in their own timezone, answers whatever questions you added to the booking form, and the slot is theirs. No sign-up needed.
You decide what the session types are: anything from 15 minutes to 8 hours, with a break after it if you want one, an optional price, and a format — in person, online or phone. You start with two, a 45-minute consultation and a 90-minute session. If the type is online, the video link is created with the session and goes to the client.
Confirmation is immediate. A reminder follows 24 hours before, and online sessions get a second one 15 minutes ahead. Two people cannot take the same slot.
On your side, the new booking sits on the dashboard next to upcoming sessions, forms waiting for attention, and the clients you saw most recently.
After the session: say it, don't type it
You talk, you stop, and the text is there.
Speak the note, end it, read what came back. One dictation runs up to 30 minutes. Transcription is done by Deepgram, on servers in the EU, under an agreement that your voice is not used to train their models.
Audio is never stored — not by us, and not by them beyond the moment it takes to transcribe it. It is turned into text, and the text is what gets saved. That is why the feature is called dictation, not recording.
Then, if you ask for it, structuring. The note goes to Google Gemini and comes back organised, with a short summary at the top; Google is contractually prohibited from retaining that data or training on it. It happens when you press the button, not quietly in the background.
Notes keep their history. Every dictation and every structuring adds a version, the earlier ones stay, and you can go back to any of them without losing the rest.
What belongs in a note like that — and what a state board does and does not require — is a separate piece: session notes without the clinic.
Before the next session: the whole history on one screen
Client Journey is a feature that writes a short history of one client for you, from your own notes and their form answers, and it is ready before you open the door. It is written by the same model that structures your notes, and it is yours to read over before you lean on it.
It appears on its own once there are a couple of notes and keeps itself up to date, so it is never a queue you have to work through. Only you see it.
This is where the hunches from a dictated note come back to you. What to try, what did not work, what to change — spoken while the session was still fresh, read again before the next one. That loop is the reason voice sits at the centre rather than at the edge.
When a summary is not enough, there is an in-depth history review: a pass over the full text of every note, run when you press the button.
Before the first session: the intake form
You send a form as a link, and the client fills it in (without signing up).
A template is sections and fields — short and long text, yes/no, single and multiple choice, a rating scale. What the client receives is a copy of the template as it stood the day you sent it, so editing the template later never changes answers already given.
Answers land in the client's timeline and feed the Client Journey summary alongside your notes, so what someone told you before the first session is still in front of you months later. A completed form waits on your dashboard until you have looked at it. The same builder works after a session as well as before one.
The client's timeline
Sessions, notes and form answers read as one list, newest first.
Filter it by type, or search it: search covers titles, note bodies and form answers together, and from anywhere in the app it reaches clients, sessions and notes at once. Search runs inside our own database — there is no separate search service holding a second copy of your text.
Sessions are never closed by a timer. Past ones you have not marked surface on the dashboard under "Did it happen?", and you answer that yourself. Nothing about a client's history should be written by the clock.
A client can cancel from the link in their email without logging in; it cancels the reminders and tells you. There is no reschedule link yet — moving a session from their side means cancelling and booking again.
Your data, in and out
All of it comes out in one file, whenever you want, without asking us for it.
Settings has an "Export data" button: clients, sessions, every version of every note, Client Journey summaries, forms and the logs, in one file.
Deletion runs the other way and leaves you a grace period. Deleting a client, a note or the whole account moves the record into an archive that can still be restored for 30 days — restored by us, not by a button you press — and after that window it is removed from the servers.
Where it sits: on Hetzner servers in Helsinki, Finland. Everything is encrypted in transit and on disk, with keys we hold rather than the hosting company, and backups carry a second layer of encryption of their own. This is the part we control. The full list is on /security.
Who is HoldSpace for?
Anyone who takes clients one at a time and sees many of them again.
The profession matters less than the shape of the work. If people book a session with you, come back, and you need to remember what happened last time — what they said, what you tried, what to try next — HoldSpace is built for you. It is also for anyone tired of being the booking desk: clients pick their own time from your page, confirm it, and get reminded, without you in the loop. Massage, bodywork, energy work, sound, astrology, tarot, coaching, counselling outside a licensing body — the tool does not care which. Three examples:
A massage therapist who doesn't bill insurance. The body remembers what the head does not: which side seized up in March, what she asked you never to touch. That goes into a dictated note in the minutes after the session, while your hands still remember it, and comes back on screen before the next one. Nothing here asks for an insurance code, because nothing here does insurance.
An astrologer with returning clients. A consultation this month refers back to one from last spring and forward to a transit due next year. Sessions, the notes from each, and the client's own answers about what brought them sit in one timeline that reaches as far back as the practice does. The intake form is yours to shape — birth data, questions, whatever the reading needs.
A Reiki or sound practitioner with a weekly rhythm. Notes here are short: a few lines about what shifted, what to hold next time. Short notes are exactly what voice is good at: a sentence or two on the way to the kettle, and the note is written. Client Journey, the running summary, is what makes a long run of small notes readable as one arc instead of a list.
Where it is merely adequate: one-off clients. The Client Journey summary is built for people who come back, and after a single visit there is nothing to summarise. Online booking, intake forms and post-session forms still earn their place for everyone. Counselors and coaches working under a licensing body, and anyone who bills insurance, should read the next section before anything else.
What HoldSpace is not (yet)
Not a hospital system, not a billing system, not a team account, and not certified for anything.
On HIPAA the Terms say it plainly: "HoldSpace is not currently HIPAA-certified. We do not offer Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) at this time." (HoldSpace Terms of Service §10). If HIPAA applies to your practice, HoldSpace is not the place for that data yet. If you are not sure whether it applies, ask a lawyer — we cannot answer it for you, and neither can a website.
Our own landing page puts it as "No billing modules. No insurance forms. Just what you actually need." Adding them would mean a wall of fields nobody here would fill in.
Accounts are for one practitioner. Shared clients, roles and permissions are written up as planned and have not shipped — not yet, rather than never.
And the product is young. This article gets edited as the product changes, with the date of the edit on it.
What does the free plan include?
The free plan is the same product at a small scale, not a hollowed-out version of it: booking, the timeline, note versions and export all work the same, and forms come with a small allowance of their own. What gets counted is the expensive part — 30 minutes of dictation and 10 structurings every 30 days, and up to 5 clients on file. Paid plans raise those limits, and the numbers live on the pricing page.
Start on the free plannothing you put in is locked in, and everything comes out in one file whenever you want.
FAQ
Is my audio stored?
No. Dictation is turned into text and the text is what gets saved; the audio itself is never kept on our servers (/security). Transcription runs at Deepgram, on EU servers, under an agreement that your voice is not used to train their models.
Where is my data hosted?
On Hetzner servers in Helsinki, Finland. Disks are encrypted with AES-256, with keys we manage rather than the hosting company, and database backups carry a second layer of encryption whose keys are kept offline (/security).
Do I need to bill insurance to use it?
No, and you could not if you wanted to: there is no billing module and no insurance form anywhere in the product.
Can I export everything if I leave?
Yes. Settings offers "Download all your data as a JSON file" — profile, clients, sessions, notes with every version, Client Journey summaries, forms, settings, consent log and audit log — and deleting your account leaves a 30-day archive before the data is removed from the servers.