Most people who search for affordable online counselling are braced for disappointment. They expect to find apps with rotating counsellors, trainees building their hours, or rates that call themselves affordable at £65 a session. If counselling at a price you can actually sustain sounds too good to be true, you are right to read the small print.

So here is mine. I am a counsellor in private practice, registered as a social worker with the SACSSP in South Africa, with over 40 years of listening experience — grief, trauma, anxiety, couples. My sessions are £40 / €45. The reason is not that the work is lesser. It is that I practise from Johannesburg, where that fee is a good professional rate, and a video call costs the same to make whether you are in the next suburb or in Leeds.

How much does counselling cost, usually?

In the UK, private counselling commonly runs £60 to £120 a session; in Ireland and much of Europe, €70 to €130. Those fees are not greedy — they reflect what it costs to keep a practice open in those countries. But at weekly sessions, they put sustained counselling out of reach for a great many people who need it, and counselling tends to work best when you can stay in it long enough to finish.

Geography is the honest way around this. My costs are South African; my fee can be too. Yours simply arrives over the internet.

Affordable is not the same as cheap

I want to be precise here, because "cheap online counselling" conjures something I don't offer: a junior counsellor, a rushed half-hour, a different face every fortnight. What you get with me is what a client paying £100 in London gets from a good counsellor there — a full 60 minutes, the same person every time, someone who remembers your mother's name and what you said three weeks ago, and a great deal of experience in the chair opposite you.

The fee is lower. The work is not.

What the fee is not

Some plain statements, because online counselling pricing has become needlessly murky:

  • No subscription. You pay for sessions you have, nothing else.
  • No per-message billing. This is real counselling over video call, not a texting service on a meter.
  • No contracts or minimum commitments. You book sessions when you need them, and you stop when you're done. We review together as we go.
  • No introductory rate that quietly climbs. The fee is the fee, and the first introductory call of 15 to 20 minutes is free.

Payment is by simple bank transfer; international transfers are welcome. The full details are on my fees and medical aid page.

If you are in South Africa

For South African clients the fee is R750 a session, and a sliding scale is available — money should not be the thing that decides whether you get help, and I would rather have that conversation openly at the start than have you quietly disappear when the maths stops working. Sessions with a registered social worker can often be claimed back from medical aids including Discovery Health, Bonitas, Fedhealth, GEMS and Momentum, depending on your plan — I'll give you everything you need to claim.

Who this suits

This arrangement suits people in the UK, Ireland and Europe who want a settled, ongoing counselling relationship at a fee they can hold for months, not weeks. It suits English speakers abroad whose local options are the wrong language or the wrong price. And because South African time runs so close to European time, sessions fit into ordinary evenings and lunch hours — no small print there either.