I've spent the last few months building a library of 85+ practical guides for the hardest life situations people face - widowhood, losing a home to foreclosure, military-to-civilian transition, navigating executorship, first apartment, making friends as an adult. The kind of stuff people are Googling at 2am with no one to call.
Each guide includes an integrated AI prompt. You fill in your situation, drop it into Claude or a model the person has access to, and it becomes a grounded companion that gets to know your particular circumstances - not a generic response, but one anchored to the specific guide you're working through. The goal is to give people a safe place to ask the questions they're too embarrassed or too isolated to ask another person (I've built-in safety sets and responses to ensure people don't give the AI sensitive information).
I have zero interest in monetizing this. I really just want to find a way to help the most people without them having to pay for the assist (they have enough on their plate if they're using one of the guides).
Here's where I'm stuck.
The guides work. The delivery doesn't. Right now everything lives as .docx files. That's not a real product. I want to move toward a proper web app, then mobile. Three problems I don't have good answers to:
Context loading. What's the cleanest approach to make sure the AI is reading the specific guide a user is looking at - not just running off a generic prompt? RAG? Direct document injection? Something else I'm not thinking of?
API costs. Companion prompts at any real scale get expensive fast, especially for a free-to-user app. Are there AI for Good grant programs or API credit programs - Anthropic, Google, OpenAI - that fit a project like this?
Architecture for handoff. As I'm building this to give it away, what stack gives a small non-profit with minimal technical capacity the best shot at maintaining it long-term?
Longer shot, but genuinely asking: does anyone know an organization or NGO that's actively looking for something like this? A fully built content library with AI companion infrastructure, no strings attached.
Happy to share the guides, the prompt structure, or demo how the companion system works. If you've solved any of these problems or know someone who has, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it.
I've been in some of these situations myself - moving a parent into a care facility, navigating a death in the family, watching someone try to rebuild after prison. There's a specific kind of alone that comes with those moments. You don't know what you don't know, and there's no one sitting next to you to ask. I want to change that.