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 November 1 – November 5, 2026

🧸 Child and Dependent Care Credit Joins the Federal Programs

The federal Child and Dependent Care Credit is now a single program shared by every state, like WIC, SSI, SSDI, the EITC and the Child Tax Credit before it. Until now only Kansas and Missouri showed it, through PolicyEngine. Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, Washington and New Jersey now show it too. Kansas’s own state credit is unchanged.

The credit returns part of what a working family pays for care for a child under 13, or for a spouse or dependent who can’t care for themselves. It covers up to $3,000 of care costs for one person or $6,000 for two or more. The rate is 35% at lower incomes and steps down to 20% above $43,000. Every parent on the return needs earnings, unless one parent on a joint return is a student or has a disability. The credit only reduces tax owed, so households that owe no federal income tax don’t see it. A parent earning $40,000 who pays $300 a month for a 5-year-old’s child care would see $660. Like the other tax credits, it covers the 2025 tax year, so a baby born in 2026 doesn’t count yet.

🤝 Local Helpers on Shared Programs

Each state’s organizations that help people apply (navigators) can now be listed on the shared federal programs, and households only see the ones in their own state. Before, a Colorado organization listed on a federal program would have shown up for families in every state. Partners who manage programs in the admin can now find and view the national navigators, but can’t edit them, because a change would reach every state.

🤖 Benji Learns How Partners Work

Benji can now read short staff notes on how each organization works, the “good to know” details that don’t belong on the results card. This started with a partner that helps people by phone, whose listing told people to email. The notes stay off the results page and the partner API, and can’t contain phone numbers, emails or links, so Benji still gives only the contact details shown on the card.

🌱 Work in Progress: New Jersey

Six more New Jersey programs were built ahead of the state’s launch:

– Early Head Start for children under 3 and pregnant women: valued at $13,446 to $16,909 a year depending on the child’s age

– NJ FamilyCare (CHIP) for children: $326 to $389 a month in coverage

– Medicare Savings Programs, which pay the Medicare Part B premium: $2,435 a year per person

– Work First New Jersey, the state’s TANF cash assistance

– Temporary Disability Insurance, for workers who are sick, injured or pregnant: up to $1,119 a week

– Family Leave Insurance, for bonding with a new child or caring for a family member with a disability: up to $1,119 a week

Early Head Start, CHIP, Medicare Savings and TANF are each built on a new national foundation that other states will move onto later. Nothing changes for those states yet. New Jersey remains unavailable to the public pending launch.

🔒 Security

Ten code-scanning alerts were resolved. Eight automated build and deploy workflows now run with only the permissions they need, and two error messages (from Benji’s connection and from translation loading) no longer show internal details.

Week of October 26 – October 30, 2026

🍼 WIC Joins the Federal Programs

WIC is now a single program shared by every state, like SSI, SSDI, the EITC and the Child Tax Credit last week. It replaces ten state copies whose amounts disagreed with no state policy behind the difference. Kansas, Missouri and Texas used PolicyEngine’s national figure, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts and North Carolina used hand-set amounts, and Washington used a flat $80. Every state now uses the national average of $64.89 a month for each eligible member.

WIC covers pregnant women, infants, and children under 5. A household qualifies with income up to 185% of the poverty line, with each pregnancy counted as an extra household member, or automatically through SNAP, TANF, or Medicaid. Massachusetts lists MassHealth instead of Medicaid, so the Medicaid route never applied there before. It does now. Households who said they already get WIC keep that answer.

Last week’s move left one gap. Households who had said they already receive the EITC or SSDI were shown those programs as new, because their answers stayed on the retired state copies. Those answers now carry over to the shared programs: 2,231 EITC and 6,085 SSDI answers in production.

🧾 Tax Credits Count the Right Children

Tax credits still cover the 2025 tax year, but a baby born in 2026 was being counted on the family’s 2025 return. For a parent earning $20,000, that added $1,700 to the Child Tax Credit. A child now counts only from the year they’re born, so that baby shows up on the 2026 return instead.

Children with income of their own, such as a teen with a job or a child receiving SSI, were sometimes treated as filing taxes apart from their parents. This hit hardest when a parent earned little, since the child’s income then outweighed the household’s. These children now stay in their parents’ tax household, which corrects the tax credits and other benefits that depend on who files together.

🤝 Denver Preschool Program Partnership

Families arriving through Denver Preschool Program’s link now see a co-branded Colorado screener, with the DPP and MyFriendBen logos side by side in the header. DPP also has its own dashboard, limited to the households they referred. It includes engagement and results-page activity as well as completed screens, which is new: screener activity now records which partner sent a household, so a partner’s results-page activity can be separated from everyone else’s.

📝 Smaller Screener Updates

The confirmation page now shows the student follow-up answers (enrolled half-time or more, in a job training program, on work-study, working 20 or more hours a week) under the Student condition, so people can check them before seeing results. Benji’s privacy notice now also asks people not to share their immigration status in the chat.

🌱 Work in Progress: New Jersey

Five more New Jersey programs were built ahead of the state’s launch:

– ANCHOR, the yearly property tax rebate: up to $1,500 for homeowners, and $450 for renters plus $250 more for seniors

– New Jersey’s Earned Income Tax Credit: 40% of the federal credit, or $260 for adults 18 and over without children who are turned away from the federal credit only because of their age

– New Jersey’s Child Tax Credit for children under 6, for households with income up to $80,000

– The Property Tax Deduction/Credit for homeowners and renters

– Free and reduced-price school lunch

New Jersey remains unavailable to the public pending launch.

🔒 Security

Updates to the API’s dependencies resolved 45 of its 76 open security advisories, including the one critical advisory.

Week of October 19 – October 23, 2026

🇺🇸 One Set of Rules for Federal Programs

Four federal programs — SSI, SSDI, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit — each used to run as up to nine separate copies, one per state, which drifted apart over time. SSDI was the clearest case: four states shared a rough version using a flat 18-to-65 age range and year-old figures, while four others each maintained their own.

Each is now a single program shared by every state. SSDI in particular got considerably more accurate — it now uses full retirement age based on birth month rather than a flat cutoff, counts only wages and self-employment against the earnings limit, and recognizes the separate paths for disabled workers, children, and surviving spouses.

Medicare Savings Programs were also corrected to test a couple’s income against the couple limit rather than the individual one, with North Carolina’s version updated to match.

📅 Tax Credits Now Say Which Year

Tax credit results never said which tax year they covered. Someone screening in the fall saw a Child Tax Credit or EITC amount for the previous year with nothing indicating that, and no sense that they could still claim it by filing late. Program pages now name the tax year directly, and the wording rolls over correctly each January.

✉️ Navigator Emails Are Correct Again

Navigator email addresses were being run through machine translation, which rewrote the addresses themselves. In production, 175 non-English entries differed from the English original across 89 navigators, and 70 of those still looked like valid addresses while pointing at the wrong inbox — información@ageoptions.org, or admission@ where it should have read intake@. Anyone reading the screener in Spanish and copying the address down was emailing somewhere that doesn’t exist. Addresses are now shown exactly as entered, in every language.

👥 A Clearer Household Roster

The household member screens were reworked so people can see their whole household while filling it in. Every member gets a card, including ones not yet entered, shown as placeholders. Completed members are marked with a check and can be clicked to go back and edit, and the person currently being entered is clearly highlighted.

🌱 Work in Progress: New Jersey

SUN Bucks, the summer grocery benefit for school-age children, was built and added as New Jersey’s programs come together ahead of an official launch. Children the state enrolls automatically — those in SNAP households everywhere, plus TANF and foster children in New Jersey — are deliberately not shown the program, since there’s nothing for those families to apply for. New Jersey remains unavailable to the public pending launch.

🔒 Privacy and Reliability

Colorado Energy Savings Navigator addresses are no longer written into web addresses or error logs — they’re now sent in the request body, where they aren’t captured by monitoring tools. Failed eligibility runs are now reported rather than silently returning no result, so a household that hits a problem no longer quietly appears to qualify for nothing. Nearly all known dependency security alerts were resolved, and a retired /co_energy_calculator address was removed in favor of /cesn.

Week of October 12 – October 16, 2026

🗣️ Benji Knows When Your Results Change

Benji now notices when a household’s results change mid-conversation, so it stops describing programs the household no longer qualifies for. Its weekly accuracy report also stopped counting correct “you don’t qualify” answers as mistakes. The Benji chat widget also now fails safely: if it hits an error, the rest of the results page keeps working.

🤝 New Partner Pages and Footers

Denver Public Schools now has its own co-branded screener. Kansas and Missouri 2-1-1 now have their own footers, and North Carolina’s footer dials 2-1-1’s toll-free number. Footer phone numbers now come from each partner’s settings, so they can be updated without a code release. 211 Metro Chicago’s dashboard now counts households by partner.

🏫 New and Updated Programs

Head Start Preschool is now available as a federal program. Trump Account moved to the federal setup, so it’s maintained once instead of separately in each state. Nurturing Futures in Boulder County now uses HUD income limits. Medicare Savings program sizes are updated for the federal rules and North Carolina.

✅ Accuracy and Content

North Carolina school meals no longer show up for households over the income limit. The share popup moved to the bottom-left so it stops covering results. Dashboard denominators for the Household Member Actions card are corrected.

🔧 Reliability and Maintenance

Production deploys of the AI service now run once per release instead of twice. Groundwork landed for New Jersey’s Cover All Kids program, which is not yet public.

Week of October 5 – October 9, 2026

💬 Benji Describes Benefits the Way the Results Page Does

Benji now tells households who can help them apply. Each program’s page has a “Get Help Applying” panel listing local organizations, but Benji couldn’t see it, so it told households there was no one to help. It now names those organizations in the same order as the page. It gives phone numbers, emails, and websites only exactly as they appear on the card.

Benji also stopped calling one-time payments yearly. Its opening total no longer counts lump sums such as the $1,000 Trump Account, which it had presented as yearly income. When a program’s card shows text instead of a dollar figure, like “Varies” or “Up to $7,669 per home,” Benji now quotes that text rather than a precise number the card deliberately hides. This affects 21 programs across the states with Benji turned on.

🤝 2-1-1 Partners in Kansas, Missouri, and Chicago

The Kansas resource page named “United Way of Kansas” but linked to United Way of the Plains, a different organization. It now names United Way of the Plains. “How did you hear about MyFriendBen?” now lists United Way of the Plains in Kansas and United Way of Greater St. Louis in Missouri, so their referrals are counted and they appear in the dashboards’ Partners filter. The Kansas and Missouri co-branded headers now read “In partnership with,” matching Colorado’s. Every partner page now uses MyFriendBen’s standard fonts.

211 Metro Chicago’s co-branded Illinois screener is in place ahead of their launch. It skips the contact-information step, since 211 runs its own intake. Households who need housing get a link straight into 211’s housing directory. Their dashboard counts only households who arrive after launch.

🧾 Missouri Tax Credits Moved to the 2025 Tax Year

The Missouri Working Families Tax Credit and Property Tax Credit were calculated for 2026, a year households can’t file for yet. Both now follow the rule that tax programs use the prior tax year. For the Property Tax Credit, that means 2025 law: income limits of $27,200 for renters and $30,000 for owners, and maximum credits of $750 and $1,100. The 2026 expansion comes back when both credits roll forward on January 1, 2027. The Working Families credit now uses a child’s age at the end of the tax year, so a child who turned 19 this year still counts.

📍 Corrected Counties in North Carolina

North Carolina’s ZIP code map listed 12 ZIPs twice, and each repeat silently overwrote the first entry. For example, ZIP 28341 offered Bladen County when the right choices are Sampson and Duplin. The map was rebuilt from HUD’s current crosswalk, which changed the county choices for 93 ZIPs. 356 ZIPs now correctly ask households to choose their county.

🗂️ A Simpler Results Page

The Immediate Help tab no longer appears on results pages in Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Texas, Missouri, and Washington. CESN and North Carolina keep it. The tab’s content is kept, so any state can turn it back on.

📊 Campaign Filters on the Colorado Dashboard

The Colorado dashboard now has the UTM campaign, medium, and source filters North Carolina already had. Partners that share several tracked links can now see each one separately. Adams County Human Services, for example, can compare its website, lobby, and outreach links.

🔧 Reliability and Maintenance

We retired the old program validation system, since per-program spec tests now cover that job. This also fixed production deploy alerts, which had reported “completed with warnings” on every deploy. A new tool can safely repair 95 non-English translations where the translation renamed or dropped the spot where a number or name belongs, so the value never appeared. Groundwork landed for New Jersey, which is not yet public. Groundwork also landed for a shared “federal” setup, so programs like EITC, CTC, and Trump Account can be maintained once instead of separately in every state. Program code was reorganized, and two deploy blockers were fixed: a database migration conflict that stopped staging deploys, and an intermittent error when publishing dashboard changes.

Week of September 28 – October 2, 2026

⚖️ Federal Medicaid Rule Change for Refugees

A federal law took effect October 1 limiting Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare Savings Programs, and family planning to citizens, green card holders, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and COFA migrants. Refugees and asylees lost eligibility, and MyFriendBen had already removed those programs from their results. This release restored the two exceptions the law keeps.

Refugee children and pregnant people in states that still cover them can see those programs again — Massachusetts refugee children under 21 had lost MassHealth, and North Carolina refugee children had never seen NC Medicaid at all. Refugee adults in Colorado and Massachusetts now see Emergency Medicaid, which remains open to everyone regardless of status. North Carolina’s Emergency Medicaid also stopped excluding 64-year-olds, who are covered right up until Medicare begins.

🥫 Four New Programs

Commodity Supplemental Food Program launched in both Kansas and Missouri — a monthly USDA food box for people 60 and over.

Missouri Refugee Cash Assistance provides cash support to refugee families, with adult children counted as their own case.

Missouri Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) completes Missouri’s housing coverage, with income tested at half of area median income. Missouri’s version is the only one of ours that accounts for medical and child care costs.

📍 Corrected Counties in Kansas and Missouri

Kansas and Missouri ZIP code maps wrongly claimed every ZIP sits in exactly one county. About half of Kansas ZIPs and 42% of Missouri ZIPs actually span more than one. Households were assigned a county silently, with no way to correct it, and every county-based program then checked the wrong place.

People in these states are now asked which county they live in when their ZIP spans more than one. St. Louis City households also no longer silently drop out of housing programs.

💵 Benefit Amounts Brought Up to Date

An audit found 112 active program settings a year or more behind on federal poverty guidelines. The clearest symptom: SSI paid $6,840 a year in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas but $7,332 in Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington for an identical household. Twelve programs were corrected against source documentation. Every discrepancy found understated benefits — households were being shown less than they qualify for.

🤖 Benji Speaks Your Language

Benji was recording every conversation as English, even when the household was screening in Spanish. Both the chat and the server now record the real language, so we can see how Benji is used beyond English.

🔧 Reliability and Maintenance

Household members, incomes, and expenses now return in a consistent order. Age calculations were consolidated into one shared function, and per-state tests were replaced with a single shared contract test. Missouri TANF documentation was corrected to record that PolicyEngine does not model the state’s neediness test — an accepted limitation, now written down as one.

Week of September 21 – September 25, 2026

🤖 Benji Sees the Whole Page

Benji now follows people onto a program’s own detail page, and can see the Additional Resources tab. Before this, Benji knew only about long-term benefit programs — so someone who said they couldn’t feed their kids tonight got an answer built from programs that pay out in weeks, while a food bank open that afternoon sat one tab away on the same screen.

🚌 Two New Programs

Missouri Metro Transit Reduced Fare cuts St. Louis transit fares roughly in half, worth about $468 a year. Five ways to qualify — age 65 or older, a disability requiring accessibility features, Medicare, SSDI, or SSI — and no income test.

Massachusetts child care assistance now runs on Massachusetts’s own eligibility rules rather than the generic federal model, so the state’s own thresholds decide who qualifies.

🌐 Choose the Language You Send In

Sharing MyFriendBen and emailing saved results both used to send in whatever language the sender happened to be reading, so a bilingual user had no way to pass the screener to someone who reads a different language. Both flows now ask which language to send in.

✅ Accuracy and Content

Kansas Refugee Cash Assistance was showing the monthly payment standard where it should have shown the annual award. Missing seed data was backfilled so new environments match production.

Week of September 14 – September 18, 2026

🤖 Benji is Live

Benji, our AI assistant, is now available to everyone across all eight states. Until now it has only run in testing. Benji sits on the results page and answers questions about the programs a household actually qualified for — which one to apply for first, what documents to bring, how long an application takes. It only discusses programs on that household’s own results, and it says when it doesn’t know something rather than guessing. Benji also follows people onto a program’s own page, which is where the questions get specific.

👍 Tell Benji When It Misses

Every Benji answer now carries a thumbs up and a thumbs down. A thumbs down asks one short follow-up — whether the answer was inaccurate, not about their results, didn’t answer the question, or was confusing — so we can see what is going wrong and fix it rather than guess.

🆘 Immediate Help, One Tab Away

The results page has a third tab, Immediate Help, for people who need something today rather than in six weeks. It appears wherever a state or partner has resources to put in it. Benji knows the tab is there and will point people to it when the honest answer is that a benefit application will not arrive in time.

🏘️ Two New Programs

Kansas Property Tax Relief for Low Income Seniors (SAFESR) — gives homeowners back 75% of the property taxes they paid on a Kansas home. It is claimed once a year on its own state form, even by people who do not file taxes, and refunds arrive in 20 to 24 weeks.

Missouri Child Care Subsidy — helps families pay for child care while a parent works, studies, trains, or looks for work, and the state pays the provider directly. Missouri put the subsidy on a waiting list on March 1, 2026, so families are told up front that they may be placed on the list instead of starting care right away.

📍 Help Beyond Benefits

Illinois added two resources for 211 Metro Chicago. The Homelessness Prevention Contact Center helps people pay rent or utility bills after a recent crisis, and Coordinated Entry is the front door to Chicago’s housing system for people who are homeless, sorting who gets housed first based on need.

Week of September 7 – September 11, 2026

Kansas and Missouri Are Live

Kansas and Missouri now appear in the screener’s state dropdown, making them publicly available for the first time. Both states had been reachable by direct link and offered to 2-1-1 referral partners who named them specifically, but anyone arriving at MyFriendBen can now choose them alongside the other six states.

Four New Kansas Programs

Kansas launched with four new benefit programs built this week:

Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) — Kansas DCF’s child care subsidy, covering children under 13 and children 13 to 18 who are unable to care for themselves. Because Kansas sets this benefit from its own maximum hourly rate rather than what a family actually pays, the estimate is a deliberate middle ground: it understates full-time care and overstates care from a relative, and it is labeled as an estimate for families.

Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) — Kansas becomes the fourth state with Section 8, after Illinois, Texas, and Washington. Eligibility follows HUD’s Very Low Income limit — 50% of area median income — for the household’s county and size.

Weatherization Assistance Program — home energy improvements at an average value of $7,475 per home, with income limits published out to household sizes of 16 rather than stopping at 8.

Refugee Cash Assistance — cash support for refugee families who cannot get TANF. Kansas routes refugee families with children to TANF first, so this program reaches the households TANF does not. A household member already receiving SSI drops out of the case while the rest of the family keeps its eligibility.

Help Beyond Benefits

Four new resources were added across the states. Ticket to Work, the Social Security Administration’s employment support for people receiving disability benefits, and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which mails free books to young children, are now available in all eight states. Washington added Foundational Community Supports for housing assistance, and Kansas added Lawrence Transit’s fare-free service for Douglas County riders.

Benji Knows What to Bring

Benji, our AI assistant, can now tell people which documents they need and pass along the timing warnings a program carries. Previously Benji would honestly say it didn’t have a document list, even though nearly every program in the system ships one — so someone asking what to bring to an Early Head Start appointment got nothing useful. Benji can now also relay instructions like Lifeline’s note to enroll in SNAP first, which is exactly the kind of ordering advice people need.

Reliability and Maintenance

A production deployment test gate was fixed after it was found to not being reliably running. Real-API tests now run and block a bad release. Missouri’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs also gained protection against a subtle problem where the programs could read simulated eligibility instead of what a family actually reported receiving.

Week of August 31 – September 4, 2026

🛡️ Lifeline and Immigration Status

The Justice Department ruled in May that the 1996 welfare law limiting benefits for immigrants applies to Lifeline, the federal phone and internet discount. We had been showing Lifeline to people whose status the law excludes.

We corrected it across all eight states:

Non-citizens and green-card holders in their first five years no longer see Lifeline. Both the qualified-status requirement and the five-year bar apply to it.
Refugees and asylees keep it — they’re exempt from the five-year bar.
“Other lawfully present, with permission to work” keeps it, with a warning. That single option covers two groups the law treats oppositely: parolees and VAWA self-petitioners can qualify, while TPS holders, DACA recipients and student or work-visa holders cannot. Rather than drop the program for everyone in that group, we now say plainly that work permission isn’t enough on its own and point people to the Lifeline Support Center.
Added the Lifeline Support Center’s phone, email and website to the five states whose listing gave people no one to call.

Doing this, we found last update’s green-card fix hadn’t fully taken hold on Lifeline: the restriction was removed in several states, but an age-based duplicate of the same rule was left behind it, so the program kept showing anyway. Both are gone.

The FCC hasn’t finalized its matching rule, so people in these statuses can still lawfully enroll today. We’ve moved ahead of the rule. Showing someone fewer programs than they might get is the safer mistake, but it is still one, and we’ll revisit when the FCC acts.

🗺️ State Updates

North Carolina — Two new options on the urgent needs step: “Help finding shelter” and “Free or lower cost health care.” The closest existing option covered help with rent, mortgage or utilities, which doesn’t serve someone with no housing at all, and there was no route at all to free care — a gap that matters more now that many North Carolinians are expected to lose Medicaid under the new federal rules. Both route into NC211, filtered to the right category.

North Carolina — Child care savings were overstated for families with a school-age child. North Carolina uses two income ceilings: 200% of the poverty level for children under 6, and 133% for children 6 to 12. We were adding every child’s cost of care into the household total without checking each child against their own ceiling. A Durham family of three earning $4,500 a month saw about $1,097 a month in savings when the real figure is $717 — their seven-year-old shouldn’t have counted.

Kansas and Missouri — The public charge link on the disclaimer page was invisible. The sentence ended “…please visit the .” with nothing to click. The address was right the whole time; the label was never filled in.

Washington and Massachusetts — Those same public charge links had been pointing at dead pages. They were fixed a few weeks ago, but only in the live site, not in the files everything gets rebuilt from — so the next routine update would have quietly restored both dead links. Now fixed for good.

✅ Accuracy and Content

Application times were wrong for WIC and school meals. We timed the real applications: WIC in Kansas and Missouri takes about one to five minutes, against the 30 to 60 minutes some states were showing. School meals in Missouri is about five minutes, not 15 to 30. Someone deciding whether they have time to apply today was being told to set aside an hour for something that takes two minutes. Corrected across states, along with making the apply button read consistently where the link goes to an interest form rather than a full application.

Nurturing Futures income wasn’t lowering SNAP estimates. Boulder County found this while modeling families’ before-and-after scenarios: entering the payment under Government Benefits and then raising the amount left SNAP unchanged, while the same increase typed into the general income field correctly reduced it. Fixed. We also answered their team’s outstanding questions on running estimates for mixed-status households.

🔧 Reliability and Maintenance

We removed a piece of shared logic that could silently change who qualifies. Thirteen programs asked one place “is this household eligible for Medicaid?” before deciding their own answer — and if Medicaid hadn’t been worked out yet, the answer came back “no,” indistinguishable from a real no. Whether that produced a wrong result depended on the order programs happened to run in, and nothing checked that order. Each program now states what it depends on, and we test the sequence. This surfaced a live bug in Illinois, where the marketplace program could run early, read “not eligible” for two state programs that hadn’t been evaluated yet, and pass a check it should have failed.

Fewer ways for the dashboards to disagree with themselves. About 50 metrics were written out twice — once for a single state, once across all states — with near-identical logic kept in step by hand. Each is now defined once. Nothing looks different; there’s just no longer a way for the two versions to drift apart.

Groundwork. We cleaned up the last loose ends from reorganizing the program code, and finished the tracking behind the Colorado heat pump results page so we can see where people drop off between reading about heat pumps and looking for a contractor. No addresses or personal details are recorded.

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.