Terms and conditions

Criteria. You tell us what you want watched: a jurisdiction plus text, meaning words and phrases, or text and boolean searches (AND, OR, NOT), optionally narrowed by topic, agency, bill type or named actor. You can describe it in plain language. Our team will help configure your criteria once you've signed up, and you can change them at any time on your dashboard or by email.

Alerts as fast as an hour. When we detect a new matching record in a source, you receive an email as fast as an hour after our detecting it, and within four hours, around the clock. Each alert carries a two-line neutral summary and links to the primary documents: the bill, the docket, the notice, the comment period.

A monthly digest. Everything matched in the month, grouped by jurisdiction, with status changes.

Staff summaries (add-on, either plan). Each week, someone on The Needle's staff picks the matches we judge most consequential, up to five, and writes 50 to 100 words on each: what the record appears to do and why it may matter. It is sent within 72 hours of the week's close.

Tracker views. Read-only access, for everyone on your staff, to every record in the trackers that your criteria match from the past two years, whether or not it sent an alert, with its current status, its history and the text we hold. Each record can be read online or downloaded as a Statute Scope document. Every record links to its official source, and the official version governs wherever our copy differs.

A quarterly review (Desk plan). A call each quarter to tune criteria against what the quarter produced.

Not journalism. Alerts are generated from the tracker record. No reporter writes them, and no story is held, advanced or shaped for a subscriber.

Not advance notice. You learn what we publish when our readers do.

Not legal advice. Nothing in an alert or a staff summary is legal advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation about what your organization should do.

Not a full analysis. A staff summary is a short orientation note on up to five records a week. Reading a full docket, coding a corpus or briefing your team is research work, sold separately on the research rate card.

Not resale. Alerts, summaries and downloaded records may be forwarded to anyone inside your organization. They may not be republished, resold or fed to another service.

Not exclusive. Any organization may subscribe, including organizations that disagree with each other.

Watch, $150 a month or $1,500 a year. Up to 5 criteria, email alerts as fast as an hour and within four hours, monthly digest and read-only tracker views. Licensed to your organization, not by seat.

Desk, $450 a month or $4,500 a year. Up to 20 criteria, everything in Watch, and a quarterly criteria review call. Licensed to your organization, not by seat.

Staff summaries, $150 a month or $1,500 a year. An add-on to Watch or Desk, billed with the plan and at the same rate: $97.50 a month or $975 a year at the nonprofit rate, and $75 a month or $750 a year at the solidarity rate. Add it at checkout, or email us to turn it on later; it starts with your next bill.

Solidarity rate. Nonprofits and community or mutual-aid groups that are both trans-owned and trans-led, and within the nonprofit-rate size limits below, pay 50% of either plan and of the staff summaries: Watch $75 a month or $750 a year; Desk $225 a month or $2,250 a year; staff summaries $75 a month or $750 a year. Ten solidarity subscriptions are held open each month, first come.

Nonprofit rate. Nonprofits with an annual budget under $5 million, and nonprofit universities with an annual budget under $100 million, pay 65% of either plan and of the staff summaries: Watch $97.50 a month or $975 a year; Desk $292.50 a month or $2,925 a year; staff summaries $97.50 a month or $975 a year. Full rate applies to for-profit companies and larger organizations.

Billing. Monthly by card, or annually by card or invoice. An annual subscription costs ten times the monthly price, which is two months free. Cancel any time; the term in progress is not refunded.

Your organization is the subscribing entity and its own staff, on one email domain. Everyone on your staff may receive alerts; there is no seat count and no login to share.

A criterion is one saved search: a jurisdiction plus text (words and phrases) or text and boolean searches, optionally narrowed by topic, agency, bill type or named actor. Our team will help configure your criteria once you've signed up.

A new match is a record that first appears in the source and meets a criterion. Each record alerts once.

An hour and four hours run from the time we detect the record, around the clock, for every jurisdiction. We aim to alert within an hour; four hours is our commitment. The trackers poll the sources on The Needle's schedule; we can only alert on a record once we have detected it, so a source outage or a source that posts late is not within the hour or the four hours.

Slow states. Massachusetts and South Dakota cannot be polled hourly, so bills from either state may be detected, and reach you, later than bills from other states.

The staff summary covers the five matches we judge most consequential that week. Weeks with more than five leave the rest to the monthly digest; weeks with fewer are shorter. It is sent within 72 hours of the week's close.

Proposed rules only. On regulations.gov we fetch proposed rules. Extension notices, final rules, supporting documents and public comments are not tracked and do not generate alerts.

Sources covered: the 50 state legislatures, the Council of the District of Columbia, the United States Congress and regulations.gov. Courts, local governments and executive orders are not covered unless they appear in one of those sources.

Your contacts. The names and email addresses on your account are kept to run the service. They are not shared or sold.

Your criteria. The Needle reserves the right to use the criteria, search terms and plain-language descriptions you file, in whole or in part, in its own reporting and coverage. Filing a criterion does not make it confidential.

Naming subscribers. We may say publicly that your organization subscribes only with your written consent.