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Newly Sober is a placement platform for recovery housing. We verify the homes that list with us, publish what each one requires, and match residents to homes based on the criteria both sides state. We are not a treatment provider, we do not provide clinical or medical advice, and we do not operate any of the homes listed.
My mother struggled with substance use for most of my life. When she took her own life, I didn’t grieve — I used. Harder than I ever had. I went into treatment in June 2023, and getting sober was the first honest thing I’d done in a long time.
Then I got out, and I had to find somewhere to live. I have never been more frightened. Nobody handed me a plan, nobody told me where to start, and I had about a week to decide where I’d live while I tried to stay sober.
I spent hours looking and found almost nothing — a few bad photos, mostly just house names and phone numbers. I wanted to see the place and know if there was a bed. That took twenty phone calls. And as a gay man with a dog, several of those calls ended in a no that could have been posted on a website weeks earlier.
I remember thinking: I’m fresh out of treatment, trying to find a house that will keep me sober, and this process would make me want to relapse.
Newly Sober is the thing I couldn’t find. A home tells you what it requires before you call. You can see whether there’s a bed. Nobody finds out at the door that they were never eligible.
I built it for the person I was in those first few days.
— Michael D’Amato, Founder
Finding sober living after treatment still runs on phone calls, spreadsheets, and word of mouth. A case manager with a client discharging Friday makes a dozen calls to find out who has a bed, what it costs, and whether the home will accept someone on Suboxone. A family does the same thing with less information and more at stake. A homeowner fields calls all week about people their home was never able to take.
Everyone in that picture is working from a different, incomplete version of the same facts. Newly Sober makes those facts legible before anyone picks up the phone.
When a resident’s interests and a homeowner’s revenue point in different directions, we build for the resident. That shapes concrete decisions: we walk through every home before it lists, we don’t sell placement priority, and we show a home’s requirements even when showing them costs the home an inquiry.
The bet underneath all of this is that recovery housing placement is a human problem with a software-shaped bottleneck in the middle of it. Clear the bottleneck, and the people involved get more room to do the part only they can do.
We’re a Florida company, onboarding homes and case managers here first — one at a time, so that every listing has been through a person before anyone relies on it.
The problem we’re solving isn’t a Florida problem, and we intend to go where it exists. But we’d rather be genuinely useful in one state than spread thin across fifty and accurate in none of them.
If you operate a home, manage cases, or have been through this yourself and something here is wrong — tell us. hello@newlysober.co