Inflow after the Cerebral deal: should you still pay?

Inflow's own FAQ now lists $199/year or $47.99/month after a 7-day trial, and since March 2026 the company behind it is Cerebral, which paid $7 million to settle FTC allegations in 2024 about handing health data to advertisers. The course inside Inflow has published evidence behind it, though less than the acquisition announcement claims. Both of those facts should change what you do at the checkout screen.

We haven't taken the Inflow course. This is based on Inflow's published pricing and FAQ, the peer-reviewed trial of the app in PLOS Digital Health, the FTC's April 2024 announcement, the DOJ's November 2024 press release, and trade coverage of the March 2026 acquisition, checked July 29, 2026. How we research.

What it costs now

Straight from Inflow's FAQ: $47.99/month or $199/year, after a 7-day free trial. Cancel through Apple or Android settings, and deleting the app does not cancel anything, which the FAQ says in italics because enough people have learned it the hard way.

Older writeups and comparison sites still quote a cheaper app-only tier around $22.49/month or $95.99/year, separate from a coaching tier. Inflow's current FAQ lists one set of numbers. Treat the lower figures as historical until you see them on your own checkout screen, and check what your existing subscription renews at if you signed up before March.

At $199/year, Inflow is the most expensive thing in the ADHD app category by a wide margin. Structured charges $29.99 once. Tiimo runs about $42 a year through its web checkout. You're paying roughly five Tiimos for a CBT course.

The part that works

Inflow isn't vaporware, and it's worth saying that clearly before the rest of this page.

It's a cognitive behavioural therapy course delivered as short interactive lessons, with tools, tracking, and guided support built around ADHD-specific problems. It has been studied, which puts it ahead of every visual planner app in this category, because those have been studied approximately never.

Now the part the announcements get wrong. Cerebral's acquisition release says Inflow "has been evaluated in peer-reviewed studies including a randomized control trial," and trade coverage repeated it as an 8-week RCT. The peer-reviewed study we can find is a 7-week open trial in PLOS Digital Health, and its own first line describes its purpose: "we assessed usability and feasibility to prepare for a randomized controlled trial (RCT)." A study run to prepare for an RCT is not an RCT. There's no control group in it at all.

What that study did find is real and worth knowing. Among the 93 participants with complete data, self-reported ADHD symptoms fell with a medium-to-large effect, d = -0.71 overall and d = -1.0 for inattentive symptoms. Those are respectable numbers for a self-help app.

Read the denominator too. 205 people enrolled. 95 completed the week-7 survey. More than half stopped before the finish line, in a study where researchers were actively checking in, and the results describe the ones who stayed.

Finishing a structured course is the exact task ADHD makes hardest. If you've abandoned four apps this year, a lesson-based course at $199 is a bet against your own track record.

Who owns it now

On March 24, 2026, Cerebral announced it had acquired Inflow. Financial terms weren't disclosed. Cerebral framed it as extending support for people with ADHD beyond scheduled clinical visits by pairing its therapy and psychiatric services with Inflow's digital tools.

Cerebral is a telehealth company with a specific history, and if you're about to hand it eight weeks of self-reported ADHD symptom data, the history is relevant.

In April 2024 the FTC announced a proposed order under which Cerebral would pay $7 million and be barred from using or disclosing sensitive consumer health data for most advertising. The complaint alleged the company had disclosed the personal health information of nearly 3.2 million consumers, including prescription histories and insurance information, to third parties including LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok. It also alleged Cerebral kept charging people while running a cancellation process the agency described as complex, multi-step, and often multi-day.

Then in November 2024, Cerebral entered a non-prosecution agreement with the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York over practices that encouraged unauthorized distribution of controlled substances between 2019 and 2022. It agreed to forfeit $3,652,000, an amount prosecutors tied to the increase in ADHD revenue from patients who were diagnosed and then prescribed stimulants. A further $2.9 million fine was deferred because the company did not have the ability to pay it. Cerebral had stopped writing new stimulant prescriptions in 2022 after the investigation became public.

Settlements aren't convictions and Cerebral didn't have to admit the allegations. Both matters are closed. The point isn't that the company is uniquely bad. It's that the two things regulators went after are the two things that describe your relationship with an ADHD subscription app: what happens to your health data, and how hard it is to stop paying.

What Inflow's FAQ says about all this

Nothing.

As of July 29, 2026, four months after the acquisition, Inflow's consumer FAQ makes no mention of Cerebral, of new ownership, or of any change to how subscriber data is handled. Every acquisition changes who controls the servers. A user reading the FAQ to decide whether to subscribe would not learn that the company answering the question changed hands in March.

That's a disclosure choice, and it's the single strongest argument for waiting. Before you enter a card, open the privacy policy inside the app, check the "last updated" date, and see whether Cerebral appears in it. If the policy predates March 2026, you're agreeing to terms written by a company that no longer runs the service.

What to do instead, if you skip it

Body doubling is the cheapest intervention with any evidence behind it, and free versions exist. It won't teach you CBT skills, but it moves tasks, which is what most people are buying Inflow to accomplish.

For structure without a subscription, Structured's one-time $29.99 buys a planner you own. For the medication half of the problem, iOS 26.2's Urgent reminders ring through Silent mode for free and beat every paid reminder app on the only metric that matters.

And for actual CBT, an eight-session course with a licensed therapist is often available through insurance for less than $199 out of pocket. The app exists because therapy has a waitlist. If yours doesn't, take the therapist.

Who should still pay

Someone recently diagnosed, without access to a therapist, who has finished a structured online course before and knows they can. For that person the effect sizes in the open trial are meaningful and $199 buys real content.

Use the 7-day trial as a filter, not a formality. Do three lessons in the first three days. If you don't open it on day two, cancel on day three. The study's own dropout curve is the warning: more than half the people who enrolled were gone by week seven, and nothing about paying $199 makes you the exception.

Set a calendar alarm for day six. The FAQ says refunds happen if you forget, which means enough people forget that they built a policy for it.

Sources

• Inflow FAQ (pricing, trial, cancellation)
• Usability and feasibility of a cognitive-behavioral mobile app for ADHD in adults (PLOS Digital Health)
• Cerebral acquires Inflow (Behavioral Health Business, March 24 2026)
• Cerebral acquires Inflow (MobiHealthNews)
• FTC proposed order against Cerebral, April 2024
• Cerebral to pay $7 million and limit health data use (The Markup)
• DOJ: Cerebral agrees to pay over $3.6 million (US Attorney's Office, EDNY, November 2024)
• Cerebral hit with $6.6M penalty in settlement with prosecutors (Behavioral Health Business, November 2024)

Prices verified July 29, 2026 against Inflow's own FAQ. Nothing here is medical or legal advice, and the settlements described were resolved without admissions of liability.