Yodl is Slack-style team chat for small healthcare teams and small businesses that cannot use WhatsApp, iMessage or group texts for work. It signs a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) on every plan and costs a flat $10 a month per location for 5 people. The name comes from a yodel, the call that carries across a valley, and the product started life as the team chat inside PhiClaw.
What Yodl is, in one paragraph
Yodl is team chat with channels, threads, direct messages, file sharing and search, the layout most people know from Slack, built for teams that handle patient information: a dental office, a med spa, a home care agency, a three-location physical therapy group. It runs in any browser on a phone or computer, with a Mac app and an iPhone app in beta. The part that matters for a clinic: we sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), the contract in which a vendor accepts HIPAA obligations for the patient information it handles, with every customer on every plan, including the $10 one.
Where the name comes from
A yodel is a call that carries across a valley. Before phones, that was how people on one mountainside reached people on another: a short, clear sound that traveled further than ordinary speech. We liked that picture. A small practice is a valley of its own. The front desk is at one end, the treatment rooms at the other, the owner is between locations, and a caregiver is in a client's living room across town. A message has to carry across all of that and still be clear.
We dropped the vowel because the short form is easier to say, to type and to fit on a browser tab. The domain is yodl.cc. That is the whole story; there is no acronym.
It started inside PhiClaw
Our company is PhiClaw, in Miami, Florida. Our main product is the PhiClaw AI employee, which works inside medical practices and handles the kind of tasks a practice would otherwise hire for. To let staff talk with each other and with that AI employee in one place, we built a team chat inside PhiClaw: channels, DMs, threads, files, with the AI sitting in channels and answering when mentioned.
Then practices started asking for the chat on its own. Some were not ready for an AI employee. Some just wanted their staff out of WhatsApp groups and into something with a BAA, and they wanted it this month. So we separated the chat, kept everything that made it work for healthcare, and put a price on it that a five-person office does not have to think about. The AI teammate stayed a PhiClaw product: it can join a Yodl workspace, but it is not part of the $10 plan.
Why a flat $10 instead of per seat
Nearly every chat tool charges per user per month. That is reasonable for a 500-person company and faintly absurd for a five-person office, where the office manager ends up doing math about whether the part-time hygienist deserves a seat. We did not want anyone doing that math. So the Team plan is $10 a month per location and includes 5 users, 20 GB of file storage and the signed BAA.
| Situation | What you pay |
|---|---|
| One office, up to 5 people | $10 a month |
| One office, 7 people | $10 plus 2 extra users at $2, so $14 a month |
| Two offices, up to 10 people | 2 locations at $10, so $20 a month |
| Add the API (REST API, webhooks, bot users) | Plus $20 a month per workspace |
| Unlimited users and locations, dedicated instance | Enterprise, custom pricing |
Extra users are $2 each, so adding a per-diem nurse is a two-dollar decision. It is month to month, you can cancel anytime, and there is no free trial. Checkout is self-serve through Stripe; nobody has to book a sales call to buy a chat app.
What we deliberately left out
A product is also the things it refuses to be. A few choices we made on purpose:
- No end-to-end encryption. Search, retention, audit logs and admin controls need the service to process messages, which is the same model Slack and Microsoft Teams use. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest on HIPAA-eligible infrastructure, under a BAA.
- No voice or video calls, and no SMS sending. Plenty of tools do those well. We wanted to do staff chat well.
- No patient-facing messaging. Yodl is for staff talking to staff. Patient messaging lives in PhiClaw and in our sister product Talkya.
- No free plan. A free plan for a healthcare tool tends to mean someone else is the product. We chose month-to-month billing instead.
- No ads, no selling data, no training AI on customer messages. Written down, not implied.
- No SSO or SAML yet, and no public app marketplace. We would rather say so than hint at it.
What you get on day one
- Public and private channels, direct messages, group DMs, threads, reactions, @mentions, saved messages and channel topics.
- File sharing with previews for images, PDFs, spreadsheets and voice notes, plus a team files library.
- Full-text search, scoped to the rooms you belong to.
- Channel roles (Manager, Member, Viewer), workspace owners and admins, and invite-only membership by exact email address.
- Passkeys (Face ID and Touch ID), email verification and a 15-minute inactivity lock.
- An audit viewer with CSV export, retention controls and legal hold, and a 13-gate HIPAA readiness checklist in the admin panel.
- Push notifications that never include message content.
- Website lead forms that can land in a channel.
Who it is for, and who it is not for
Yodl fits a team of a few people up to a few dozen that needs a BAA, dislikes per-seat pricing and wants the familiar channel layout. It does not fit a hospital that needs on-call schedules, alarm integration and a sales-led rollout; those teams should look at clinical communication platforms built for that scale. It also does not fit a practice whose main problem is patient communication, which is a different product.
If that sounds like your office, Yodl is $10 a month for 5 people with a signed BAA, on the pricing page.
Yodl is the team chat we built inside PhiClaw, split out because small practices wanted a BAA-covered chat without an AI employee or per-seat math. The name is a yodel, a call that carries across a valley.
Frequently asked questions
What does Yodl stand for?
Nothing. It is short for yodel, the mountain call that carries across a valley. We liked the image of a small team spread across rooms and locations still hearing each other clearly.
Is Yodl a separate company from PhiClaw?
No. Yodl is made by PhiClaw in Miami, Florida, the same company behind the PhiClaw AI employee, Talkya and several other products. Yodl started as the team chat inside PhiClaw.
Why is there no free plan?
We did not want a free healthcare product that has to be paid for some other way. Instead the plan is $10 a month, billed month to month, so trying it costs one month if it is not right for you.
Is Yodl certified for HIPAA?
HIPAA does not certify any app, so no vendor can honestly claim that. Yodl is built to support HIPAA compliance with a signed BAA on every plan, encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, an audit log and retention tools. Compliance is the practice's responsibility, with a vendor that holds up its side.
Can I add the AI teammate later?
Yes. The AI teammate is a PhiClaw product and is not included in the $10 plan, but it can join a Yodl workspace's channels and DMs when you are ready for it.