ReCharacter
A discharge upgrade is a paperwork problem with a 15-year clock. ReCharacter helps veterans build the petition.
A less-than-honorable discharge follows a veteran into every VA benefit, every background check, every job application, for the rest of their life. The policy to fix it exists. The paperwork is why most people never file.
What it is
ReCharacter helps U.S. veterans build a mental-health-based discharge-upgrade petition. It routes the veteran to the correct review board and form, interviews them to construct the nexus argument, drafts the supporting statement with AI assistance, coaches them on evidence gaps, and exports a ready-to-file packet that the veteran owns and submits themselves.
The legal ground is liberal consideration — the Hagel (2014), Kurta (2017), and Wilkie (2017) memoranda, which direct the boards to give favorable weight to mental-health conditions, including PTSD, TBI, and military sexual trauma, that contributed to the conduct behind a discharge. The policy is on the veteran's side. The process is not designed to be self-service.
What it does well
Routing that can't be guessed at. DRB or BCMR, DD-293 or DD-149, and the 15-year DRB filing deadline are resolved by a pure, exhaustively tested rules library — deterministic, stateless, no model in the loop. A bug there means a veteran misses a filing window, so it is the most heavily tested code in the product.
The nexus argument, built by interview. The boards want a specific connection drawn between a condition and the conduct. ReCharacter interviews for the facts that connection needs and drafts from what it actually collected.
No free-form AI endpoints. Every AI call goes through a single gateway with a registry of bounded tasks — fixed prompts, schema-validated output. The model drafts within a frame; it doesn't improvise the case.
Evidence coaching before submission. It tells the veteran what's missing while there's still time to get it, rather than producing a confident packet with a hole in it.
Isolation proven, not assumed. Every table is owner-scoped with row-level security, and the isolation is verified by two-user integration tests.
Who it's for
Veterans with an OTH, general, or bad-conduct discharge whose service-connected mental health played a part in what happened.
Veterans who have been quoted several thousand dollars by a firm for a petition they are legally entitled to file themselves.
Family members and advocates helping a veteran assemble a case.
What it looks like in practice
A veteran answers a short intake about their discharge. The routing service returns the board, the form, and whether the DRB's 15-year window is still open. The wizard interviews for service history, the condition, and the conduct, then drafts a supporting statement that draws the nexus explicitly and cites the liberal-consideration framework. The coaching step flags that no supporting medical documentation has been attached. The veteran gets it, uploads it, exports the packet, and files it under their own name.
What it's not
It's not legal advice, and it never represents a veteran before a board. It assembles documents and provides information.
It's not a guarantee. The boards decide. ReCharacter's job is that the petition arriving in front of them is complete, on time, and argued on the right grounds.
It's not a claims service. Discharge upgrades only — not VA disability ratings.
Pricing (planned)
| | | |---|---| | Free | Board and form routing, deadline check | | Packet | Full interview, drafting, evidence coaching, export |
Status
Live at recharacter.us with a scheduled uptime probe. The .NET rules engine and routing API are merged with 22 tests. Auth and persistence on Next.js plus Supabase RLS are built and tested. The AI gateway ships with per-user rate limiting and a managed-tier token cap, and recent work has been quality-focused: a recorded draft-quality evaluation pass, a fix so drafts stop implying enclosed evidence that was never collected, and preserved extraction provenance when a user confirms an unchanged fact. Intake, evidence coaching, packet export, and billing are the roadmap ahead; a re-platform onto the shared Qavren auth and database is planned. Tech: .NET 10 routing service + Next.js + Supabase + Anthropic API with BYOK support.