Product Releases

A week-by-week record of what we’ve shipped: new states, new benefit programs, partner launches, and improvements to the screener.

Week of August 24 – 28, 2026

Work in Progress: Missouri

Another six programs built and added. Missouri now has all of its core health, food, and energy coverage in place:

MO HealthNet (Medicaid) — Missouri’s Medicaid program, covering adults through ACA expansion, parents, pregnant people, seniors, and people with disabilities
MO HealthNet for Kids (CHIP) — Children’s health coverage, with Missouri’s monthly premium subtracted from the value so families see what the coverage is actually worth to them
Food Assistance (SNAP) — Missouri’s food assistance program. This one also unlocks others: several Missouri programs let a household qualify automatically if it already receives SNAP, and until now there was no way for a Missouri household to report that
Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) — Help paying heating and cooling bills
Weatherization Assistance — Free home energy improvements like insulation and air sealing
Nurse-Family Partnership — A registered nurse who visits from pregnancy through a child’s second birthday. Not statewide in Missouri: three regional providers serve 14 counties, so the screener only shows it where it’s actually available

Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

🛡️ Immigration Status Accuracy

A Washington partner (NWIRP) reported that selecting “Green Card, less than 5 years” showed Apple Health (Medicaid) and SNAP as things the household qualified for. Most lawful permanent residents in their first five years are barred from both, so this was telling people they qualified for benefits their status excludes them from — the worst kind of wrong answer we can give.

We went through every program subject to the five-year bar across all eight states and corrected them:

Medicaid and TANF in Washington, Kansas, and Missouri no longer show for green-card-under-five households
SNAP in Texas, North Carolina, and Kansas now correctly shows for **lawfully permanent resident children under 18**, who are exempt from the bar — three states were leaving those kids out
North Carolina Medicaid now covers lawfully residing children up to 21, which North Carolina opted into
Missouri SNAP was the only SNAP program in the country claiming to serve refugees and asylees; federal SNAP doesn’t, so that’s corrected

Where an adult might be exempt through a route the screener can’t ask about — veteran or active-duty service, 40 work quarters, disability-related assistance, being 65+ and here before 1996 — we now say so on the results page rather than silently dropping the program.

Translation Quality

We found and fixed the root cause of the longest-running translation complaint: the screener was sending placeholder text to the translation service unprotected. Placeholders are the slots we fill in per household — the word “you” versus “they”, a step number, a count.

Placeholders are now shielded before translation and the result is verified afterward; if a placeholder didn’t survive the round trip, that language falls back to English instead of shipping something broken. A follow-up the same week caught a related bug where the fallback produced blank text rather than English.

State updates

Texas — Expanded the Child Poverty Action Lab dashboard: a new All-Texas view alongside the partner-filtered one, and an attribution breakdown that answers a question CPAL raised. They’d noticed roughly 500 completed screeners when selecting all partners versus 1,200 when selecting none, and assumed the gap was people finding the Texas site directly. It isn’t — the partner filter only offers the 10 of 46 Texas referral sources flagged as formal partners, so word of mouth, social media, search, and flyers were never selectable. The dashboard now shows where those 755 screeners actually came from.

Colorado — Removed the Efficiency Works service-provider line from the heat pump copy in the energy screener, at the partner’s request.

All states — Fixed the electric vehicle and e-bike rebates showing with no item name on the results page.

Reliability and Maintenance

We caught a change that would have wrongly told people they don’t qualify for food assistance. Our benefit amounts come from an outside calculation service, and on August 26 it changed how it handles weekly work hours. Because we weren’t sending that information, the change would have shown $0 in SNAP to every working-age adult without children in all eight states — people who do qualify, told they get nothing. We spotted it before the deadline and started sending work hours, then re-checked every SNAP scenario to confirm the amounts held steady. Families with young children and adults with disabilities were never affected.

Kansas and Missouri households on SSI are now recognized by the programs that count it. Several benefits let you qualify automatically if you already receive SSI. For those two states, that connection wasn’t being made — so people were missing programs they were entitled to. Fixed.

Fewer dead ends on the results page. If our calculation service returned a type of Medicaid coverage we didn’t have a dollar figure for, it could stop the whole results page from loading. Now that one coverage type is left unpriced and everything else on the page still comes through.

Groundwork. We updated the tools that build and deploy the screener ahead of a September 16 cutoff, so nothing breaks or stalls when it arrives. We also cleaned up duplicated reporting queries that could quietly disagree with each other, and started a broader tidy-up of how the app loads. None of this changes what you see — it’s the maintenance that keeps the rest of the work moving quickly and safely.

Week of August 17 – 21, 2026

Work in Progress: Missouri

Missouri had its biggest week yet — six more programs researched and added, and it’s now nearly ready for launch:

Temporary Assistance (TANF) — monthly cash assistance for families with children
Missouri Working Family Tax Credit — the state’s own version of the Earned Income Tax Credit
Property Tax Credit (“Circuit Breaker”) — a credit that helps older adults and people with disabilities with property taxes or rent
Medicare Savings Program — help paying Medicare premiums, deductibles, and copays
Child and Dependent Care Credit — a credit for families paying for child or dependent care so they can work
Lifeline — a monthly discount on phone or internet service

We also finished researching MO HealthNet (Missouri’s Medicaid program) and MO HealthNet for Kids (children’s health coverage), which are next up to build.

Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

Help Beyond Benefits

Sometimes what someone needs isn’t a benefit program. We added two new tiles to the immediate-needs resources: Medical Expenses & Debt, available everywhere. When selected, users are shown “Dollar For” — a nonprofit that helps people get hospital bills forgiven under hospital charity care laws. We also added a Transportation tile for Missouri and Kansas, pointing people to local transit and ride assistance.

Where a state or partner hasn’t set up its own legal aid links, the screener now falls back to national legal help resources instead of showing nothing.

State updates

Washington — The Food Assistance Program (FAP) is now live: state-funded food assistance for legal immigrants who don’t qualify for federal SNAP. We told you about the research last week; it’s now built and running.

North Carolina — Finished the co-branded screener work for the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, and added two new urgent-need categories: Homeless Services and Free/Low-Cost Medical Care.

Colorado — Grouped the steps of our energy screener into a single confirmation section, so people review everything in one place before submitting instead of page by page.

Kansas — Research is wrapping up on WIC, the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, and the ACA Premium Tax Credit. Kansas isn’t open to the public yet; we’ll share more when it launches.

Reliability and maintenance

A large one this week: we finished a significant reorganization of the engine that calculates eligibility. Rules that had been copied separately for each state now live in one shared place, and 64 hand-maintained index files were retired in favor of programs that register themselves — which means less room for a program to be quietly missed as we add states.

We also standardized Lifeline across all eight states, adopted PolicyEngine’s data on which benefits a household is already receiving (as distinct from what they could receive) for SSI, TANF, SNAP, and WIC, and built a test system that pins program results to specific PolicyEngine versions so we catch it when an upstream change moves a number.

Week of August 10 – 15, 2026

🌽 Work in Progress: Missouri

Missouri keeps growing — this week we finished researching two more programs that go beyond the federal basics:

Missouri Working Family Tax Credit — the state’s own version of the Earned Income Tax Credit, extra money back for working families
Property Tax Credit (“Circuit Breaker”) — a credit that helps older adults and people with disabilities with property taxes or rent

Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

🌻 Work in Progress: Kansas (and Missouri, together)

Benefits are only half the story — sometimes people need a food pantry or a utility assistance office this week. So we researched and verified 83 local resources for the two states: statewide lists for Missouri and Kansas, plus city-specific resources for Wichita, Kansas City, and St. Louis.

🛣️ A new state enters the pipeline: New Jersey

We kicked off the New Jersey rollout by reviewing a mapping of roughly 32 state programs — spanning health care, food and nutrition, and cash assistance — and deciding how each one will be calculated. We’re following the same playbook that’s working for Missouri.

🌊 Washington

We finished researching the Food Assistance Program (FAP) — Washington’s state-funded food assistance for legal immigrants who don’t qualify for federal SNAP — and settled on how we’ll build it into the screener. Implementation is up next.

We also removed a tooltip on the savings-and-assets question that contradicted the question it was attached to (thanks to our partners at NWIRP for flagging it!).

🏔️ Colorado

The screener now recognizes Nurturing Futures — Boulder County’s direct cash assistance program for families — as an income type people can report, so households receiving it get more accurate results.

🏀 North Carolina

Head Start is now displayed as “Head Start + Early Head Start”, making it clearer that the program serves infants and toddlers too, not just preschoolers.

📊 Sharper analytics

Last week we told you about our new state-by-state analytics. This week we fixed the events that track which programs people actually see on their results page — they had been quietly running into technical limits in our analytics platform. Now we can trust the numbers. As always: we track how the screener is used, never who is using it.

🔧 Reliability and maintenance

A big one this week: we replaced our homegrown in-memory cache with Redis, which had been pushing our servers past their memory limits. The screener now has more headroom and steadier performance.

We also standardized county-name data across Washington, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri; cleaned out eligibility-code branches that could never actually run; fixed or retired a batch of skipped backend tests; and finalized the design for a “Currently Unemployed” button that will make it easier for people with no income to say so.

📣 One more thing

These release notes now have a permanent home — we added a Product Releases page to our website, so you can always catch up on what shipped.

Week of August 3 - 7, 2026

Work in Progress: Missouri

Missouri continues to fill in. Four more programs have been researched and added:

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) — monthly cash assistance for people who are older, blind, or have a disability
ACA Premium Tax Credit — help paying for marketplace health insurance
Earned Income Tax Credit — a refundable credit for working people with low to moderate income
Child Tax Credit — a credit for families with children

Missouri still isn’t open to the public. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

Work in Progress: Kansas

Kansas is also underway. Food Assistance (SNAP) has been added, joining over a dozen other programs, including TANF, Nurse-Family Partnership, Head Start, and the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit.

Kansas isn’t open to the public yet either. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

A co-branded experience for Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy

We launched a co-branded screener for the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy in North Carolina. People arriving through their site now see a screener that carries their branding, keeping the experience continuous with the help they were already seeking.

A redesigned confirmation page

We rebuilt the confirmation page people see before submitting their screening, making it easier for them to review what information they are about to submit and go back and edit it as needed. See a sample of the new confirmation page.

Better insight into how the screener gets used

We’ve recently built out a detailed analytics system across the screener, and this week extended it so we can view these analytics by state. That means we can see where people hesitate, where they drop off, and which programs actually get clicked through to — and use that to fix friction instead of guessing at it. We track how the screener is used, never who is using it.

State updates

Massachusetts — Added the CommonCorp Program for Youth to the screener, along with a new SNAP navigator: the YMCA of Greater Boston, which can help people apply in person.

Washington — Fixed an issue that had kept the Working Families Tax Credit from appearing in results, and improved our benefit estimate for Housing Choice Vouchers. We also added a note that Section 8 vouchers can be hard to secure even when you qualify, so expectations are set honestly up front.

Illinois — Head Start is the newest live benefit in the screener. We also clarified how we describe LIHEAP’s different levels of energy assistance.

Texas — Improved the accuracy of our Children’s Health Insurance and Family Planning Program eligibility checks, and updated the homestead exemption estimate.

Colorado — Added a new SNAP navigator for people who need help applying, and removed a resource that’s no longer available.

Reliability and maintenance

We upgraded our hosting platform ahead of an end-of-life deadline, improved how the screener counts household members for tax credit eligibility, retired legacy data fields, and removed a confusing tooltip.

Week of July 27 - 31, 2026

Coming soon: Missouri

We’ve begun building out Missouri. The state-specific configuration is in place and the first four programs have been researched and added:

Early Head Start — free early learning and family support for babies, toddlers, and pregnant women
Head Start — the preschool-age counterpart
WIC — nutrition support for women, infants, and children
National School Lunch Program — free and reduced-price school meals

Missouri isn’t open to the public yet, and more programs are still to come. We’ll share more when it officially launches.

🌻 Coming soon: Kansas

Kansas is well underway, with about twenty programs researched and added so far. Three more came in this week:

Temporary Assistance for Need Families (TANF) — cash assistance for families with children
Low Income Energy Assistance (LIEAP) — help paying heating bills
Nurse-Family Partnership — free home visits from a nurse for first-time parents

Like Missouri, Kansas isn’t open to the public yet. We’ll share more when it launches.

A co-branded experience for CU Denver

We launched a co-branded screener for the University of Colorado Denver’s Wellness & Recreation team. Students who come to MyFriendBen through CU Denver now see a screener carrying CU Denver’s branding, so the experience feels continuous with the campus resources they started from.

We also built CU Denver an aggregate dashboard — no personal information, only totals — so they can understand their campus impact: how many screenings were completed, the average number of programs matched, and the estimated dollar value of benefits surfaced, with a breakout for students.

A clearer income section

We rebuilt the part of the screener where people enter their income. Instead of asking everyone to work through a list of income sources, we now start with three plain-language questions about employment and other money coming in, and only ask for detail where it applies. Fewer questions for most people, and less confusion about what counts as income. See the new income section in action.

State updates

Massachusetts — The BabySteps Savings Plan is now in the screener. It’s a statewide program that seeds a $50 college savings account for every newborn and adopted child in Massachusetts.

North Carolina — We added a short survey to the results page so people can tell us directly about their experience.

Reliability and maintenance

We cleaned up legacy data fields, reverted a caching change that didn’t behave as expected in order to keep production stable, and fixed a handful of small interface bugs.