Discover how a non-technical CTO scaled a charity to 40k users without writing a line of code
Recently, our CTO, Joey Ceunen, attended the West Midlands Funding Network conference and gave two talks on how Carefree has been using no-code AI to achieve technical achievements comparable to teams 10 times our size! The talks focused on the possibilities of this technology, how we’ve grown with it, and how it could eventually cause a seismic shift in how we think about technology within the charitable sector.
What is node code AI? How have we been using it to deliver over 14,000 breaks to unpaid carers across the UK? Read on to find out…
No Code AI: The Future For Charities
When Joey took the stage in the morning, his opening line set the tone:
“I’m CTO at Carefree—and I still can’t write code.”
That statement drew a laugh and more than a few concerned looks. How does someone who doesn’t code run the tech stack of a national charity now serving 40,000 verified carers and delivering 14,000 hotel breaks to date? The answer, unpacked over lightning talks and a panel on Ethics & AI for Good, alleviated all those worries by explaining how pairing no-code platforms with AI assistants can help solve frontline bottlenecks and achieve a lot with a team of under ten people.
Carefree aims to help with one of the UK's most hidden social challenges: the unpaid carer crisis. Currently, the invaluable work of these carers with them saving the public purse £184 billion per year (more than the entire NHS budget). Despite increases to NHS funding over the last 10 years, increases to social care funding have not kept pace, and the care system is now relying ever more heavily on unpaid carers to bolster it.
Traditional respite care is expensive, complicated to access, and often doesn't meet carers' diverse needs. This is where we come in with our platform, offering annual hotel breaks to unpaid carers. Soon, we hope that every carer in the UK will have access to such a break. (Find out more about our mission here)
So, how will we get there?
How Does The Carefree platform work?
What we at Carefree have built challenges every notion about what's possible for small charities. Our platform encompasses six apps serving four different stakeholder groups: unpaid carers, hospitality partners, community partners, and the general public.
The platform facilitates a complex three-way marketplace where hotels donate unsold rooms, carers access breaks, and community partners make referrals—all while maintaining enterprise-level security, user experience, and reliability. Our current users rate the platform 9 out of 10 for ease of use, without a single line of code written. This entire ecosystem was built and is maintained by essentially two people using no-code tools and a small technical budget.
We’ve also implemented AI at several different touchpoints in our platform:
Intercom Fin: Helping Customer Support: One part of our AI strategy is Intercom Fin, an AI conversational agent that has helped to revolutionise our customer support. With access to years of support conversations, help articles, and our own knowledge base content, Fin automatically handles 72% of all support requests. Over 20,000 support requests are now handled by our human agents and the AI. Our users give FIN a 92% happiness rating.
Sneak Peek: Your Personal Break Assistant (in closed beta)
Imagine opening WhatsApp the moment your hotel stay is confirmed and finding a warm, knowledgeable companion who gets what it means to leave someone you love behind. Our new AI Break Buddy (codename "Cleo") is already chatting with a small test group of carers, answering everything from "What do I pack for a two-night spa break?" to "How do I shake the guilt of leaving Dad?"—in natural, human language. She offers practical tips, weather snapshots, door-to-door transport links and gentle wellbeing nudges that say, "Yes, you really do deserve this time off." 52% of carers have not taken a break in five years, with many citing the reason that they feel guilty for leaving their cared-for person. Cleo is here to help with that.
Stay tuned! We'll be providing updates very soon….
Why this AI shift matters
So, AI helped build our platform, assists with customer support, answers carer queries, and soon we will have Cleo available 24/7 to assist with all aspects of break delivery. Thanks to this, we have been able to deliver over 14,000 breaks to unpaid carers. Every break delivered means a carer gets respite, often for the first time in years. The 95% wellbeing improvement rate indicates that these aren't just holidays, but life-changing interventions.
This technology has massive potential ramifications for not just us at Carefree, but the sector as a whole.
Traditional charity operations face a cruel paradox: the more successful they become, the more expensive they become to operate. With no code AI, we’ve shown that this model can be broken. The 80% cost-per-user reduction means every pound donated goes further. The scalability improvements mean growth doesn't require proportional increases in overhead.
One aspect that Joey emphasised was how our adoption of no-code AI technology shows that sophisticated AI implementation is accessible to organisations previously excluded from the technology revolution. This democratisation of AI capabilities could transform how we approach social challenges across multiple sectors.
Funders investing in Carefree aren't just supporting one charity—they're backing a model that could reshape charitable effectiveness nationwide. The potential for replication and sector-wide transformation makes this a strategic investment in the future of social impact.
In Conclusion: Five Lessons Joey Shared with the Sector
Adopting AI does not mean excluding the work of human agents or simply implementing it and then leaving it running without any intervention. This is why guardrails must be in place.
1. Start microscopic: One workflow, two weeks, then iterate. Not to mention, there should still be flows in place for the digitally excluded i.e. a phone line and/or a postal address.
2. Appoint a “first follower.”: Build a very simple use case for a specific team member or board member or trustee. Let them experience it themselves and get to a point of success with your guidance. Once that person has experienced success, it's so much easier to convert the rest of the group that you're trying to address. This is because of social proof, the idea that "if that person can do it, so can I."
3. Treat your AI like a junior hire: Don't expect it to know everything. Expect that they're eager, expect that they're excited, expect that they want to do a good job, but quality assurance is very important. Daily spot-checks, feedback loops, and probation periods are crucial.
4. Audit for bias: AI can only train itself with the data that's available. There are biases, and therefore, those biases are expressed through AI as well. One of the things we try to mitigate is to measure the happiness scores of specific groups of people within our user base with different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different ages, and make sure that there are no outliers
5. Share the recipe: Open templates to accelerate the whole sector (Yes, the recipe card literally came out on stage.
