What we build
Hosted platforms, operated by us
We write the software, host it, and are reachable when something breaks on an event morning. One platform is in production today.
Conferences, membership, and live sessions for rare-disease communities.
Built with the Periodic Paralysis Association and open to other rare-disease organizations. Each one runs on its own subdomain with its own name, color, and registration list. The organization runs its community and its events; we build and operate the platform underneath. Members join from any browser, and anyone who prefers an app can install it from the page.
Events run on it
- Aug 2026Every Move Matters, a three-day virtual camp. Delivered.
- Oct 10, 2026First annual Periodic Paralysis Association conference. Multi-day, streamed, and free to attend online. See it live: Periodic Paralysis Association conference, October 10, 2026
Who we build for
Small organizations doing serious work
Size and stakes matter here more than sector. Two hundred members, a few staff, and a program people depend on. Per-seat enterprise software never reaches an organization that small, and consumer tools are not built to hold what members share.
Too small to be sold to
Nobody runs a sales cycle for a two-hundred-member organization. We price for the organization, not the seat.
Run by a few busy people
Whoever runs your event is usually doing five other jobs too. Running a live session takes a web browser, not a technical crew or special software.
Members share more than they would elsewhere
Diagnosis histories, treatments that did not work, things they have not told their families. That sets the bar for how the data is handled, and it decides the architecture.
How we build
Four decisions the rest follows from
These are the constraints we design against, in the order they get argued about.
One codebase, many tenants
Every organization shares the same code and the same upgrades. That keeps the price reachable, and a fix for one customer ships to all of them the same afternoon.
Your members are yours, not ours
We sell to the organization and we never get between it and its people. Members, lists, and content belong to the organization that gathered them. On a member-facing page the community's own name and color lead, RarePause is visible as the platform underneath, and Common Plays is not mentioned at all.
Health writing is stored apart and never sent to an outside AI service
Members write things about their health they would not put anywhere else: how long a diagnosis took, what a treatment did to them, what they are afraid of. We store that writing apart from the rest of the platform, under separate access control. Any AI processing of it runs on hardware we control rather than a third-party model service, and none of it is used to rank or recommend people.
We do not claim what we cannot verify
When something fails, our software says what was not saved instead of promising to fix itself. When a number cannot be fetched, it is left out rather than shown as zero. Your members are making medical decisions, so a confident wrong answer costs more here than an honest gap.
Where we're going
What we are building next in RarePause
This is the RarePause product roadmap, not a company one. Nothing here carries a date. These are the next things on the list, in roughly the order we expect to reach them. If one of them is the reason you would sign, tell us and it moves up.
RarePause roadmap- In progress
Self-service event setup
An organizer builds a full multi-day event without asking us for anything. We stop being a step in the process.
- Planned
Captions and searchable transcripts
Every recorded session becomes readable and searchable after the stream ends, so the archive is useful to someone who could not attend live.
- Planned
Support groups on a schedule
Recurring private sessions a community runs on its own calendar, with its own moderators and a roster that never leaves the organization. Small-group video already works for this ad hoc. It should be something you schedule once and forget about.
- Planned
Peer support, offered not exposed
A member who has already been through getting diagnosed, or through a hard treatment decision, can volunteer to talk with someone facing that now, and set what they are willing to discuss. It works like signing up to mentor, not like being listed in a database. Nobody takes part without asking to, and the community decides who does.
- Planned
Research and trial surfacing
Pointing members at papers and open trials that relate to their own diagnosis, written in language a patient can act on.
- Open
More communities on the platform
Every organization after the first one tests whether this is a platform or a bespoke build. Getting to the second and third is the whole plan.
Who's behind it
Bryce Benson
Founder
I built RarePause for the Periodic Paralysis Association. They needed somewhere to host their conferences and somewhere for their community to keep talking in between, instead of spreading across half a dozen tools that were never meant for a group this size.
Common Plays is the company behind that platform. It can hold contracts, carry the hosting, and take the same work to other rare-disease organizations.
Contact
Running a member organization?
Hosting a rare-disease community happens on RarePause.
Start a conversation
If your software is fighting you and the vendors will not quote for your size, write to us. We answer our own email.
Details
- Entity
- Common Plays LLC
- Formed
- September 2, 2026 · Maine
- Founder
- Bryce Benson
- bryce@commonplays.co
Architecture, data-handling, and security notes are available to partners and reviewers on request.