The values, the operations, and the audit. Said plainly. In one place.

The lane

What the desk is for, and what it is not.

The desk is one person — me — answering questions for the people in the room of a drink problem. The drinker, the family, the friend, the GP, the boss, the HR director, the solicitor, the trustee, the parent on the train. Free encyclopedia for the basics. Forty-nine pounds, paid once, for the bot. Higher tiers (£149, £295) on the sites where the work is structured — clinic compare briefs, employee containment briefs.

The desk is not a rehab. Not a fellowship. Not a coaching business. Not a charity. Not a clinical service. Not an emergency line. Not a referrer. Not an introducer. Not a broker. Not an affiliate network. Not a directory that takes a cut. Not a media business that takes ad money.

I will say plainly when you have come to a door I cannot answer for. The bot will too.

Where the money comes from

One source, named.

The only money that comes into the desk is from readers. Forty-nine pounds for the bot, paid once. £149 for a Clinic Compare Brief. £295 for a Confidential Containment Brief. That is the entire revenue line. There is no other line.

• No rehab pays the desk. Not as a referral fee, not as a commission, not as a placement bonus, not as a "marketing partnership", not as a "preferred provider" arrangement, not under any other label. A rehab cannot give the desk money in return for being on, near, or recommended within any page on any site in the network.
• No broker pays the desk. The brokerage industry — the people who phone you within hours of your first Google search and offer to "find you the right place" — operates on commissions paid by clinics. The desk is not in that chain.
• No fellowship, no charity, no coaching business, no app, no medication manufacturer pays the desk. Same rule. If they are named on the site, it is because the evidence puts them there, not because they paid.
• No advertising. No retargeting pixel. No newsletter sponsor. No affiliate links. The pages do not carry advertisements. The bot does not insert sponsored mentions. Your visit is not sold to anyone.
• No data is sold. I do not sell, share, or rent reader data. The technical detail of what is logged and for how long is on the legalities.guide page. Short version: the bot conversations are private to the reader's browser session and are not used for training, advertising, or third-party analytics.

That is the entire commercial structure. One revenue line, paid by readers, named on the page they paid on.

Where the money goes

The honest list.

The desk is not optimised for profit. It is optimised for being able to give a straight answer. That requires costing what it costs to keep one person, in one chair, answering questions honestly, with the lights on. The categories are these:

• TimeMine. Drafting, updating, fact-checking, reading the literature, replying through the bot, taking the £149 and £295 briefs through to delivery. The single biggest cost. The £49, £149 and £295 are professional fees for professional work — twenty-plus years of industry, nearly six years of sobriety, and the discipline to write the answer down without selling you the next thing. Not a donation. Not a tip. A fair trade for the time it took to be able to give a straight answer.
• Hosting and toolingThe websites, the bot infrastructure, the databases, the monitoring, the email. Boring infrastructure. Costs a known monthly figure.
• LegalA retainer for the questions I cannot answer myself — defamation risk, jurisdictional questions, the lines around "not medical advice" and "not legal advice", data protection. Named on the legalities.guide page.
• Editorial fact-checkingIndependent reads of the encyclopedia by people who know more than I do about a particular area. Paid for. Disclosed when material.
• Visiting clinics, attending meetings, talking to peopleTravel, time, occasional accommodation. The work that means a clinic named on the site is named because someone has been through the door, not because the website looked clean.
• RefundsWhen the desk fails the brief — defined plainly on each paid site — the money goes back. Refund-on-miss is structural, not goodwill. It comes out of the same pot as everything else.
• TaxPaid where it is owed.

What is left over after the categories above is what I live on. There is no investor. There is no parent company. There is no holding entity siphoning a margin. The desk is a single-person operation, registered, taxed, and named.

What the desk will refuse

The asymmetric stakes list.

Some things the desk will not do, no matter what is offered, because the cost of doing them once is permanent.

• No commission. From any rehab, broker, fellowship, coach, app, charity, or third party. Not now, not later, not under another name. If a rehab offers, the answer is no, and the offer goes on the public ledger below.
• No private endorsements. I will not write a letter, a tweet, a referral, or a "you should look at X" message in private that I would not also publish on the site. The same answer goes to everyone who asks the same question.
• No paid amplification. No sponsored posts. No bought placement. No PR-firm-managed coverage where the firm is paid to push the desk into a journalist's inbox.
• No "partner of" relationships with rehabs. Visiting a rehab does not make me a partner of it. Naming a rehab does not make me a partner of it. There are no partners. There is one desk.
• No client confidentiality breaches. Anything a paying reader tells the bot stays in their browser session and is not surfaced anywhere else. Not in a case study. Not in a podcast. Not as a "story I heard once". Even anonymised. The bot does not become content.
• No urgency tactics. No countdown timers. No "places filling fast". No "only three slots left this month". The work the desk does is not improved by pressure. The reader is already under enough.
• No exploitation of the moment. The desk does not write to people in a relapse window pushing a residential. Does not put the £49 in front of a reader who has just typed "I am about to drink" — the crisis routes come first, free, every time.
• No medical or legal advice. I am not a clinician. I am not a lawyer. The bot signposts to people who are. The legalities.guide page sets out the precise boundary in plain English.

Each of those is a no that costs the desk money. That is the point. The cost of saying yes once is higher than the revenue the yes would bring.

The public ledger

The audit anyone can read.

Twice a year — June and December — the desk publishes a Transparency Post on this page. The Transparency Post is the audit. Half-yearly is a stewardship pace; quarterly is a growth-hacker pace. The desk is not a growth hacker.

It contains:

• Revenue, by line£49 bot purchases, £149 Clinic Compare Briefs, £295 Confidential Containment Briefs. Counts and totals. Refunds, separately. Net.
• Costs, by categoryThe list above, with figures. What time, hosting, legal, fact-checking, travel, refunds, and tax actually cost in the half-year.
• The Refusals LedgerEvery approach from a rehab, broker, fellowship, coach, app, charity, medication manufacturer, or third party offering a commercial relationship. Named where naming is fair, dated, refused, with the type of offer specified — referral fee, commission, paid placement, sponsorship, data-sharing request, undisclosed partnership, affiliate link, advertising, newsletter sponsorship, podcast sponsorship, “preferred provider” framing, or any other label the offer arrived under. Specificity is the proof.
• The AI LedgerWhat the bot saw, what it remembered, what it did not. The model versions in use during the half-year, named. The data the bot held — and for how long. Any known instances during the half-year where the bot returned an edge-case error, a hallucination, an unsafe response, or a wrong answer the desk would not stand behind in a court — what was wrong, how the desk found out, what was corrected, and whether the model itself or the surrounding guard rails were changed. The desk uses AI. The desk is honest about how. This is how.
• Errors and correctionsAnything material that was wrong on any site in the network during the half-year, what was wrong, when it was corrected, what was changed.
• Reader complaints, by categoryWhat people complained about, how it was resolved, what changed.
• Refund rate, by productHow often the £49, £149, and £295 products were refunded for failing the brief, and what the brief was.
• What the desk got wrongEditorial misjudgements. Coverage I should have written and did not. Coverage I wrote and now disagree with. Said plainly.

The first Transparency Post is dated June 2026. The desk has been live for weeks, not months — the June 2026 post will be small. That is the point. Starting the audit early, while the figures are still small, is the proof. The December 2026 post covers the second half of 2026 in full. June 2027 covers the first half of 2027. They will be permanently archived on this page, not memory-holed when newer ones publish.

If something material changes between Transparency Posts — a refused offer worth naming, a correction that should not wait, a hallucination caught and corrected, a model version changed — it goes up immediately as a dated note above the most recent audit.

Who James is

The biography, the bias, the lane.

I am James Roberts. Fifty. Sober since June 2020 after a four-week residential at a UK clinic. Tenerife is where the desk sits — not a holiday, the chair I work from. Before sobriety, twenty-plus years as a senior person in industry — long enough to know what the slide looks like from the inside of an office, the inside of a marriage, the inside of a hotel room at three on a Wednesday with a bottle and a presentation in the morning.

The desk exists because in 2020, when I went looking for a resource like this, I found a thin, evangelical, mostly American mess. I found rehab websites that read like spas. I found brokers pretending to be neutral. I found fellowships pretending to be the only path. I found coaches selling certainty. I found nobody who had been through it, was on the other side of it, and was willing to write it down without trying to sell me the next thing.

The bias is mine and named:

• I went to a residential. I am biased towards residentials having a place, when the picture warrants one. I am also biased against residentials being sold to people who do not need them, because I know how that sale works.
• I went to AA after rehab and stayed for a while. I am biased towards twelve-step having a place. I am also biased against twelve-step being treated as the only path, or as a substitute for clinical care.
• I am science and fact based. I am not religious. I will name faith-based routes when they help people, labelled as such, so the reader chooses with their eyes open.
• I am a man, in my fifties, in Tenerife, who used to work in industry. The bot will write differently to a thirty-year-old woman in Glasgow than it does to me. It is supposed to. But it is still my voice underneath, and that voice has limits. I will say plainly when I have come to a door I cannot answer for.

I do not run a rehab. I do not run a fellowship. I do not run a coaching business. I do not run a charity. I have no commercial interest in which path you take.

The structure underneath

One person, named, registered, contactable.

The desk is operated by me, personally. There is no company shielding the operation. There is no anonymous ownership. The contact details, the registered address, the data-protection registration, and the legal entity are on the legalities.guide page — not buried in a footer.

If something on any site in the network is wrong, the route to tell me is also on legalities.guide. I read it. The bot does not. The half-year Transparency Posts include what came in and what changed because of it.

The bot — for any question about how the desk works

One-time, forty-nine pounds.

If you have read this page and you still want to ask a specific question about how the desk operates — for yourself, for a family member, for a client, for an employee, for an article you are writing, for a board you are reporting to — the bot is the route.

The bot on this site answers questions about the desk. How it is funded. How it is run. What it will and will not take. How it handles a specific situation — a rehab approaching it commercially, a family asking for a private referral, a journalist asking for a case study, an HR director asking whether the desk is a fit for a confidential containment. Same fee structure as the rest of the network. Forty-nine pounds, paid once, for as long as you need it.

• Built around my voice, my bias, my standards, the evidence under it all.
• Holds context across weeks. Picks up where you left off.
• Speaks plainly. No jargon. Spanish if you write in Spanish.
• Knows its limits. A companion, not a clinician, not a lawyer.
• Stays with you. Available through every quarter.

No subscription. No account. No login. The unlock lives in your browser. The encyclopedia is always free.

If your question is not about how the desk works but about a specific situation in the room of a drink problem, the right door is one of the others. sober.guide for the drinker. partner.guide for the person at home. theirdrinking.guide for the people on the outside making decisions. lovedone.guide for the people on the other end of the phone. discharge.guide for the day after rehab. relapse.guide for the night it started again. Same person. Same fee. Same standards.

What this site will not do

The rules, in plain English.

• No pop-up. No chat widget. No sticky bar. No newsletter. No retargeting pixel.
• No "trust badges". No "as featured in" logos that are not earned. No invented endorsements.
• No pretending the desk is bigger than it is. It is one person.
• No pretending the desk is impartial about everything. The bias is named, on this page, every time.
• No pretending mistakes have not happened. The Transparency Posts include them.
• No pretending the desk is the only honest route. There are other people doing honest work in this space. The encyclopedia names them.

If a thing helps the reader and the evidence is honest, it goes on the network. If a thing is faith-based and helps people, it goes on, labelled as such. If a thing is on the network and turns out to be wrong, it goes in the next Transparency Post, with what was wrong and what was changed.

Who this site is for

Anyone wanting to know how the desk actually works.

• The reader thinking about paying £49, £149, or £295
• The family member wondering whether to recommend the desk
• The HR director, in-house counsel, or family solicitor evaluating a B2B brief
• The clinician deciding whether to point a patient here
• The journalist working on the recovery industry
• The trustee asking who the desk is, on whose behalf
• The person who paid and wants to see the audit
• The rehab owner wondering why the desk will not take a referral fee

Whether the question is how is this funded, what does the desk refuse, where is the audit, what is the bias, who is liable for what, or can I trust this site — there is a door here for it. The encyclopedia does not care where you are starting. The bot does not either.

The other doors

Same James. Different rooms in the same house.

This site is the operations and values pillar. It is the page every other site in the network footers to. The other doors:

sober.guide

For the drinker, the family, the friend, the GP, the boss. The moment of deciding what to do.

partner.guide

For the person at home. The bottles, the argument, the question of whether to leave.

theirdrinking.guide

For the people on the outside making decisions on incomplete information. Parents, siblings, trustees, family solicitors, HR directors.

lovedone.guide

For anyone who loves a drinker but does not share their kitchen.

discharge.guide

For the day after rehab. The first ninety days. The quarter where most relapses sit.

relapse.guide

For the night it started again. Plain. Kind. Useful. No lecture.

legalities.guide

For the legal questions an individual or an organisation carries through any of this. Capacity, disclosure, employment, family, estate, jurisdiction.

insiderehab.guide

For what the four weeks actually look like, hour by hour, day by day, from someone who did them.

rehydration.guide

For the body's relationship with water, electrolytes, sleep, food, and the years that follow.

Forty-nine pounds, paid once, gets you James. Same person. Same standards. Independent of every rehab, in both directions. No referral fees, ever.

Start here

Pick the door that fits today.

• If you want to know how the money works → Where the money comes from →
• If you want to see the audit → The public ledger →
• If you want to know what the desk refuses → The asymmetric stakes list →
• If you want to know who James is → The biography →
• If you want to know who is liable for what → legalities.guide →
• If your question is specific to your situation → The bot, £49 once →
• If you are reporting on the desk → All of the above is on the record →
• If you are in crisis right now → Crisis routes — never paywalled →

If today is dangerous.

UK: 999 for immediate danger. Samaritans: 116 123 — free, twenty-four hours, they pick up.

Spain: 112 for immediate danger. 024 — national suicide and emotional-distress helpline, free, twenty-four hours, Spanish and English. Teléfono de la Esperanza: 717 003 717 — free, twenty-four hours.

Domestic violence support: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247 — free, twenty-four hours, confidential.

The bot will surface these plainly when needed and stop being clever. Crisis routing is never paywalled.

NHS 111: non-emergency clinical advice, England, 24/7.

"The reason the desk can be useful is structural. We have no commercial reason to give you the wrong answer. This page is how you check that for yourself." — James, Tenerife, April 2026

Last updated: May 2026 Next Transparency Post: June 2026 Operated by: James Roberts. Registered details on legalities.guide.