I used talkspace from approx Oct 2016 to Feb 2017. For me it was the perfect way to get started with therapy.

I'm a guy and def have the "guy" feature of keeping everything inside and not wanting to talk about it so there was NO WAY, since i had never done any kind of therapy in my life (I'm 57), i was going to sit down face to face with a total stranger and spill my guts. The anonymity of talkspace was, for me, a perfect way to dip my toe into therapy and learn how it works. You are anonymous to your therapist unless you care to tell them more. That aspect gave me the ability to tell her stuff i wouldn't even admit to myself. Yikes!

I got lucky perhaps but my therapist and i "clicked". I requested a female and talkspace assigned me one about my age and within 100 miles of where i live so we could relate on cultural issues like music and tv shows and our physical environment.

I really liked the 24 hour ability to post my thoughts/worries/issues, etc. Because problems don't just come up during the once-a-week 45 minute typical therapy deal. They happen 24/7 (at least for me). I also liked that i could post a link to something like an article on Psych Central or You Tube. And she could post links for me to read too. That's not as easy to do in a in-person face-to-face session.

The downside stuff:
Once my talkspace therapist realized how many problems i had and how much help i needed she strongly encouraged me to see a local therapist in person. So i think chat therapy is only good up to a certain level of crazy or need and i went WAY past that. Not talkspace's fault or my therapists fault. Just the cesspool that is my head.

Because i could bombard my therapist 24/7 ... I DID!!! She couldn't keep up. She was drinking from a fire hose. And the pricing structure of talkspace means a therapist can only spend so much time a week on each patient otherwise they are working for a really low hourly rate. I know mine went WAY above the call of duty as she was helping me on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. I really thanked her for that.

I did some video chats on talkspace after A LOT of chat therapy and they were helpful to me. But the quality of the video call was lousy, which admittedly could have been on my end, so that made the calls frustrating too.

I was OK with the cost but that's just me.

Anything else you want to ask, I'll blabber about it more.