Carefree x Glide: Scaling National Respite Through No-Code Innovation

In May 2026 I had to fly to Belgium at short notice to care for my mum. The unpaid carer life finds you whether you booked it in the calendar or not. I am Carefree's CTO, and I am also one of the 5.7 million unpaid carers in the UK who save the public purse £184 billion a year. 65% of us cannot get a break when we need one. Carefree exists to change that, turning unsold hotel rooms into respite breaks, all delivered on technology built entirely on Glide's no-code platform.

With a team of only 8 and a total budget yearly of £795,000, we needed technology powerful enough to run a national service, flexible enough to change overnight, and affordable enough for a charity. Glide gave us all three: enterprise access at a charity rate, an embedded certified Glide Expert, and ongoing strategic support.

Six interconnected apps now serve more than 50,000 users and send roughly a million proactive support messages a year. We have scaled without scaling headcount.

The results are concrete. For Carefree: 20,000+ breaks delivered, £16.87 million in independently assessed social value, and a 21:1 social return verified by Just Economics. For Glide: their flagship social impact case study.

When an earlier billing surge threatened to overwhelm us, Glide did not hide behind the contract. They fixed it. That is what real partnership looks like.