You already know the moment. The family is in the room, the plan has been explained, and someone asks you a version of: "and what do we do now, at home?"
You have the clinical answer. What you rarely have is something to hand them.
This page is a short list of free resources you can give a family today — including ours, and including the ones that are better than ours for certain things.
What families ask for most
From what caregivers search for and write about, the requests cluster into four:
- "How do I keep track of everything?" — medication times, appointments, who said what
- "What do I say?" — the conversations nobody taught them to have
- "What do we even do together?" — when the patient is awake but has little energy
- "Who is looking after me?" — the one they almost never say out loud
Alongside — what it covers
A free web app for the family caregiver. Tasks, medication, medical records, gentle activity suggestions adapted to the patient's energy, a private journal, and an exportable memory PDF.
- No account, no download, no email. A link is the whole onboarding.
- Nothing is stored on our servers. What they write stays in their own browser. For medical documents the app saves only a link to a folder the family already keeps in their own Drive or Dropbox — it never accesses that folder.
- Free, no ads, no paid version.
- English and Spanish.
It is deliberately not clinical: no advice, no symptom interpretation, no decision support. If you want the detail on privacy and why it needs no institutional approval, that is on the page for palliative care teams.
Guides you can send directly
These are written for families, not for professionals, and can be forwarded as they are:
- How to talk to a dying parent — for the family that doesn't know what to say, or is afraid of saying the wrong thing
- Caregiver burnout: 10 signs and how to cope — for the one who is clearly running on empty and hasn't noticed
- 15 meaningful activities in palliative care — for "we just sit there and I don't know what to do"
- How Alongside works — if they want to see what it is before opening it
What we don't do, and where to send them instead
Alongside is not a support group, not therapy, and not a crisis service. If a caregiver is in psychological crisis, expressing hopelessness, or showing signs that go beyond exhaustion, they need a person, not an app — your team, a mental health professional, or local crisis support. Nothing on our site is a substitute for that, and we would rather say so plainly than be recommended for something we can't do.
If you want to tell us something
If you work in palliative care and something here is wrong, missing, or would be more useful another way, we want to know. This was built by one person, and the fastest way it improves is someone who does this every day saying so. The contact form is on the home page.