Needle is a personal planning tool. It asks a single question, over and over, at shrinking horizons — and keeps your answers. It is free to use, and there are paid plans for people who need more than the method asks for.
What’s the one thing you can do, such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?
You answer it once for the life you’re aiming at, and then again at each step down. Every answer is bounded by the one above it, so the small thing in front of you on a Tuesday morning is provably connected to the thing you actually care about — rather than being a task that merely felt urgent.
Your plan is private. If you want a second pair of eyes, you can invite one person — they see your vision, your goals and what you’ve moved, and can leave you notes. They cannot change anything, and you can revoke their access at any time.
You choose how far down they see. One setting, from “everything” to “from this quarter down” — each choice carries everything beneath it, so a coach helping with this week is not also reading your vision unless you meant them to.
A coach can also ask you the same short questions each week, and see your answers alongside what actually moved.
Everything you have written, and what became of it — kept as something you can ask questions of rather than a folder you have to remember to open. It works out which words in your plan refer to the same person or place, so “Milena” in your vision and “my daughter” in a goal are shown as one thing, and it will talk to you about any of it.
It is the one part of Needle that sends what you have written to a language model, and it can be switched off — which also deletes what was worked out from your writing. The privacy policy says exactly what is sent, when, and to whom.
Free is the whole method: one Overriding Goal at a time, the full cascade from three years down to today, your vision, your foundations, your history, and an export of all of it. One at a time is not a limitation there — it is the point — and most people should stay on it.
Needle Plus is $39.90 a month. It lifts the one-goal limit, for the season when one genuinely is not enough, and it opens your AI Brain. Coach is $89.90 a month and adds the tools for running a practice — triage, notes, and what changed since you last looked. Both start at $1 for seven days.
Needle is in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, and follows your browser unless you tell it otherwise.
You can write a whole plan without an account; it stays in your browser. Signing in with Google saves it to your account so it follows you between devices, and is what makes coach sharing possible.
Needle asks Google for your email address and nothing else.
This page said, until September 2026, that there was no analytics, no advertising and no third-party code anywhere in Needle. That is still true of the page you are reading — it makes no outside request of any kind, and it is written the way it is in order to keep that true. It is no longer true of the app, and the honest thing is to say so here rather than only in the policy.
The app loads Meta’s advertising pixel, so that money spent advertising Needle can be measured against what people actually do here. What Meta is told is the name of a moment — a page was opened, someone began the reflection, someone finished it, someone subscribed — and never your email address, your name, your vision, or the text of a single goal. A tracker blocker stops it, and Needle works exactly the same without it.
Your AI Brain sends the words of your plan to Anthropic, as a processor, and only when those words have changed. Nothing you write is used to train a model, and nothing you write is sold.
The privacy policy covers all of it at length, including the one identifier that is sent and the reason it exists.
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