Letter from our founders: The mission of delivering Perx for everyone

To all of our loyal Perx community members,

We wanted to write this letter to you all to explain the logic behind some of the upcoming changes to Perx programs and why we believe it’s required to deliver our mission to positively motivate anyone and everyone managing a chronic condition to build great health habits, stick to their treatment plan and achieve better health.

Over the last few years we’ve proudly offered Perx to our community in two forms.

The first is Commercial Programs where a partner (such as an insurers, healthcare system or patient organisation) sponsors its members to access Perx and all the great rewards, challenges and motivational features to improve their health. The other is Perx Free, which is where our company, Perx Health, sponsors anyone who isn’t eligible for a Commercial Program to access Perx. We do this because we want to support the millions of people who can benefit from Perx regardless of their condition, insurance or where they receive healthcare services. We also do it because it’s the right thing to do and we want our impact at Perx Health to be more than just running successful commercial programs and a great business - we want to positively impact as many lives as possible (even where it might not be the most economically rational decision!).

Since we launched the first version of Perx a couple of years ago, we’ve been honoured to become a part of the daily lives of almost 20,000 members in our Perx community and we look forward to many more joining our community and achieving better health. Over this time we’ve delivered tens of thousands of rewards and hundreds of thousands of dollars in rewards value to motivate better health habits and incentivise members on their journey to better health.

As our motivational community grows, so does the cost of sponsoring the Perx Free program. We’ve been happy to support this and it has enabled thousands more people living with chronic conditions to improve their health with Perx than otherwise would have been able to. However, the Perx Free program has now reached the scale where ironically our attempt to make Perx available to anyone, meant limiting how many people we could help or making the Perx experience much worse for everyone. Unfortunately rewards don’t grow on trees (if only) and as a result with a limited budget, every extra reward given to a Perx Free community member either reduced the number of total community members we could support or significantly reduce how regularly rewards were given to members This didn’t seem fair to existing members or potential new members joining the community and it definitely isn’t aligned with our mission.

So we needed to make a change to ensure we continued to execute on our mission, reach more members and continue to support the Perx Free program.

We considered a lot of options and the first thing we realised was that there were two things we definitely didn’t want to do - monetising user data or pushing advertisements. Too often these are the “easy-way-out” for technology companies when providing services for free to users. As we’ve made very clear in multiple articles Perx stands defiantly against the flagrant abuse of user privacy that has become too often the norm in other apps and other technology solutions. Our community trusts us with some of their most private health data, so the idea that we would support a free version of our product by monetising their data and/or pushing ads was simply out of the question.

So where to from here - how do we continue to provide premium services to as many people who need it without monetising data, running ads or limiting the experience? We’ve spent a lot of time talking to our community, testing ideas and exploring funding options over the last couple of months and we’ve landed on the following approach.

If none of the above options work for you, you can stick with the Perx Free program which we will continue to support but without rewards. You will still benefit from treatment plan management, gamified challenges, access to the Perx community and all your previously won rewards. You’ll also be notified if a new Commercial Program goes live that you might be eligible for!

We appreciate that some of our existing member base will be disappointed with some of these changes, however we hope you can appreciate the many rewards you’ve earned through Perx to date and the need to change the way we do things to support many more people who can benefit Perx. You also have the commitment of our team that we will be doing everything we can to continue to improve the Perx experience across all product tiers and programs.

We look forward to continuing to support all our members well into the future and welcoming many more members into the community!

As always, thanks for your support.

Scott & Hugo

(Founders of Perx Health)