We are excited to announce that Gyroscope just turned 10 years old! It feels like just yesterday that we were sending out the first beta invites. Today, we have three major announcements that will help truly change your life.
First of all, we just launched V7. The streamlined and simplified version 7 of the iPhone app is now available for download in the App Store.
Second: at the core of the new app is a brand new AI coaching system with higher intelligence, enhanced reasoning, and deeper integration across your entire app experience from calendar to food tracking.
And finally... this new AI coach is now powered by one simple and affordable membership: Gyroscope One. This new membership replaces the previous options to give everyone the best experience at an affordable price.
Simpler than ever
No more complex graphs, now you’ll see a simple actionable insight at the top of every section.
You’ll also have a clean and simple morning routine, with a short checklist of everything you need to do to get all the benefits.
Managing your nutrition is now a simple intuitive action you’ve done thousands of times before: taking a photo.
And working with your coach to reach your goals is now as simple as typing in a chat. All these simple and easy to use interfaces now form Gyroscope 7, with one simple but powerful app.
Meet the new App
The new Version 7 of Gyroscope brings our ultimate vision to reality for the first time.
There were two main themes of feedback we often heard from people: that it was too confusing, and that the different membership options were too expensive.
Today, we aim to fix both of those issues!
We are sorry it took this long, but there were many things that needed to be figured out along the way. Many pieces of the puzzle needed to come together, like how the human body actually works, artificial intelligence that was good, everyone having wearables, good cameras in everyone’s pocket, and more.
This year, we have rewritten the entire app from scratch. While still keeping a familiar interface, this lets us make it as smart and simple and fast as possible, so you can use the app many times a day and truly rely on it when you need it.
First of all, we are making the app infinitely more simple — now it is has just three core tabs, and each one can literally talk to you so you don’t need to browse a lot of complex graphs to get the underlying insights. The power and features you are used to are still there, but in a simple and intuitive navigation.
Now with the help of your new One Gyroscope coach, you can see just a simple sentence in plain English (or your native language), explaining what is going on. Behind the scenes, this took a lot of calculations and millions of data points and advanced reasoning, but your experience is very clean and simple.
The app and dashboard still have the data visualizations and graphs that we were famous for 10 years ago, but you no longer need to be a professional engineer, doctor or data scientist to make sense of it all or get value from the app.
We are also simplifying our membership options, making it much cleaner and affordable for everyone: now there is just one.
Now you get unlimited access to the world’s best AI for less than a dollar a day. This is priced the same as our previous “AI” tier, but now gives you unlimited tokens and much higher usage and the newest models with PhD level intelligence, while the previous ones were equivalent to a smart high schooler (still pretty good).
The amount of data and computation being used in the new app is infinitely higher than before, because the whole app — even the meditation you do in the morning — is now being created from scratch for your needs and using the latest models. This creates a great experience but can end up using hundreds of tokens a day on the backend. For this reason, we are moving away from a limited token system to unlimited usage in the latest membership. So you can just focus on your health instead of worrying about how many tokens are being used or how many meals you can track.
With V6 we created the world’s first health coach. It was the first test of our Superintelligence beta, and people seemed to love it. Now in V7 we have created something that is 10x faster and smarter, and we are excited to present to you what is now the world’s best health coach.
Best of all, we are keeping the monthly price the same as the previous AI tier, so you’ll get massive improvements at the same value.
In the coming years, we expect AI to keep getting more powerful and scale with compute, so we are planning to keep making this plan smarter and keep providing unlimited access to the latest features. No more worrying about what plan you are on, or needing to upgrade for the newest models. Just one simple plan for everyone, with everything you need across food tracking, fitness coaching, mental health, and all aspects of your body and mind.
Since everything is so new and built from scratch, we are going back to the foundations, and calling it Gyroscope One (G1 for short).
How we started
Gyroscope first started as a custom dashboard, and a way to share your life with others. Back then, no other tools for this existed. The Apple Watch hadn’t even been released!
Since then, both our app and the entire world has evolved. Now hundreds of millions of people use wearables and have data. The next frontier is not just tracking everything, but using it to live better lives.
Unfortunately, all these gadgets and trackers have not yet been able to stop the growing rates of obesity, diabetes, and other terrible problems affecting a majority of people in the world. Between 2010 and 2020, despite all these new trackers coming onto the market, obesity and diseases have continued to increase.
Is there a better way?
So how can we improve these numbers? Is it possible to avoid these diseases everyone seems to be struggling with?
The current status quo is that only aggressive medication can change this. But we think there is a better way: just by adjusting your daily lifestyle and habits, you can control your health — if done correctly.
Despite many ads for supplements or various shortcuts, we have found just three important things matter: your mind, your food and your fitness. Without assistance, each of these could take a lifetime to learn and master. With Gyroscope, you can get up to speed in just a few days or weeks and start buildling those lifelong habits.
We have been constantly learning and iterating in the last 10 years to build a solution. Now, thanks to your help, and in collaboration with dozens of other companies, we finally have a fix for all the complex lifestyle problems plaguging most humans in the developed world. The bad news is that you are probably doing everything wrong — eating, sleeping, even breathing. Not so wrong that you die or end up in the hospital, but wrong enough that you don’t feel great. The good news is that once you fix it, you should start to see immediate improvements.
It isn’t anyone’s fault. If you are overweight or struggling, it isn’t because you are not motivated or intelligent or lazy. It is just a side-effect of all the things we have changed in our environment.
For example, we now have bright lightbulbs and electricity and computer screens around the clock. This is a very useful tool, but messes with our sleep. Thousands of years ago when the original human operating system code was being written, this was not an issue so it wasn’t factored in. It doesn’t mean it is impossible to sleep now, but if we do it on autopilot without any tools or help then we will probably do it wrong.
We have super tasty meals that can be delivered to your doorstep with one push of a button on your phone.
Have you ever tasted french fries or ice cream? Of course you have. Everyone loves them. They give you an amazing feeling, combining both fat and carbohydrates for a sense of extreme pleasure. It is human nature, and one that many food companies exploit for profit, at great cost to humanity.
It’s not just food. It is all parts of our life. We have comfortable couches and can now work from home without even leaving our houses. This is good for global productivity, but means more people are living a sedentary lifestyle than ever before. So on and so forth, even down to how we breathe.
If you are an average person that has struggled with any of these things, the solution is not just to have extreme willpower. Humans are not stronger than other animals, nor do we even have more memory or bigger brains. Gorillas or chimpanzees or lots of others have us beat on many of those aspects, especially strength. So why are they in the zoo then instead of us? There are just two key features enabled us to become the dominant species in the world: our ability to make tools, and our ability to communicate with each other. This lets each person specialize, and share their knowledge with others. These are our only strengths, and the same strengths we need to rely on to solve our health problems. We can’t do it all ourselves, but by relying on tools and communicating with others, we can become superhumans. This allows us to do all kinds of things no other animal could dream of, like drive a car or even walk on the moon. And it is also the solution to your health problems. Gyroscope provides you with both new tools (like your Health Score, mood meter, food camera, custom meditations, and more) that you can use daily to manage your body, and a new social network, communicating with your AI coach to get insights about what to do instead of needing to do it all yourself. Making these changes with lifestyle modifications is hard to do, which is why no one else is even trying it. Most doctors think it is a lost cause, and so medication like ozempic or statins are generally the only option on the table. But we think there is still a chance to fix this, and that humans are capable of being responsible and fixing our own lifestyles before it is too late. The alternative is scary: an entire civilization dependent on even more chemicals and complex patchworks of fixes. How do we know it actually works? Even though we are releasing V7 today, we have been testing this framework for many years and constantly learning. In 2020, we launched Gyroscope X, our human coaching division where we worked individually with our members to review their lifestyle and keep an eye on their data. The X program is when we learned out that almost everyone is deficient in protein, and lack of sleep is causing many people to gain weight, and strength training 3x a week seems to get the best results for the average person wanting to be healthy, and thousands of other things. We also skipped over many things that turned out to not give people good results. Many of these experiments are now documented in Gyroscope Labs, and you can even read the reviews from other members who have tried each habit. A few years later, we have tested these thousands of times and optimized the new AI coaches to help get you to your goal. Instead of needing to read a long guide or memorize thousands of insights in advance, we have put them into a fun and easy to use game instead! Every morning, you just need to open the app for a few minutes, check in with your coach, and keep seeing improvements. Best of all, using the latest AI we have been able to dramatically lower the price of great coaching so it is finally accessible to all our members including all the premium bells and whistles like automatic nutrition tracking, alcohol detection, glucose monitoring, and much more that was previously reserved for X tier. In the past, very rich and successful people had access to these tools. They were less likely to have diabetes or diseases because they could just hire a full time chef and personal trainer and therapist and a team of doctors and get pretty good results. But for an average person on a limited budget and a busy job, these were just not an option. Now in Gyroscope One, you’ll get access to an entire team and suite of features, fully personalized for you, to give you all the benefits that used to cost thousands of dollars — for less than $1 a day! Now the only reason to not be healthy is if you truly don’t want to. Price, knowledge, science, lack of time, or a slow metabolism... all these things have been solved! The only question is, are you ready for change? This is actually an important question, because change is scary. It is important to acknowledge that. Any change tells our lizard brain something unsafe is happening. Even if it is a “positive” change, like getting more healthy or having a lot more money or being successful, it is important to realize that a significant part of our biology is going to resist it and not want it to happen. (This makes getting people set up on Gyroscope particularly challenging, but once you consciously understand what is happening you can override it with your prefrontal cortex!) We believe the future of human health requires three things that are missing from our current systems: it should be preventative, personalized, and also fun. Fixing the problems before they happen rather than after will be much less painful. A common Silcon Valley startup saying is “sell painkillers, not vitamins” — this is human nature, but also how we end up in our opioid crisis. Signing up for Gyroscope before you need it may feel unnatural and goes against human instincts, but will save your future self a lot of pain, suffering and expenses in the future. If you are sold on the idea of preventative health, your new Health Score is going to be the tool to check. It’ll tell you exactly what is going on, and getting your score as high as possible will help you feel good both today and in the future. Do you want to give the 10-year-older version of yourself a gift? Or give them a lot of extra work to do and reverse this year’s mistakes? The choice is yours. It is no surprise that most people haven’t prioritized their health until now. Even if people wanted to, it was almost impossible to do. One has only to open social media to see thousands of conflicting advice on every topic. Is that salad healthy? Or is it giving you dangerous plant defense chemicals? Is diet soda good because it has no sugar? Or is it killing your gut with artificial sweeteners? So confusing! Instead of relying on influencers online, now you can use a reliable algorithm to lead you. In our modern world where almost everything is designed to prevent a healthy lifestyle, it is hard to be different and stay healthy. For many people, personalized guidance is the only solution. It is finally possible to use your actual data to navigate to the best solution. Using data and technology, now health advice does not have to be generic. Now you can use the tools to see what actually works for you. This helps avoid going down the wrong path, and also makes the process more fun and interactive. For example, if sleep is your current problem then doubling down on time at the gym may not just be unhelpful but counterproductive. One person may have high iron levels and need to cut down, while someone else may be low and need to add more. Copying what worked for someone else may help you, or it may not. Personalization helps with precision, better insights and also makes the process more fun because you can see the improvements. Personalization requires accurate data, so Gyroscope is the best (perhaps only) where you can get truly personalized guidance, tailored to all aspects of you: your goals, challenges, biometrics, even your genetic profile and latest blood levels. Everyone agrees the key to health is consistency. How do we keep you doing something all year, rather than try it for a few days and then get bored? It needs to be fun. Now we are making the entire experience into a game you actually want to play rather than something boring or scary, that you put off doing or just try once a year. People love games, but hate homework. What is the difference? Our brain has very specific reward systems, and games are a natural way to harness them. In the new Gyroscope 7, you can play a simple but powerful game that will guide you step by step to becoming your best self. To build on this, you will get tokens and experience when you do positive actions. After a few times, your brain will start to associate that with positive rewards and do it more often. In the latest app, you’ll get fully customized reports from your AI coach, explaining how you are doing in each category. These will be different for everyone, and even for each person can vary by week depending on what is going on in your life. For a system this powerful to exist, we believe privacy is essential. This doesn’t just mean keeping your data safe, but having someone you really trust with your well being. If we didn’t build Gyroscope, someone else probably will — but it would likely end up being your insurance company or government or some big soulless entity that doesn’t really care about you and probably won’t do it well. This consolidation has already happened for social media, healthcare, big food, and many other industries. Is there an alternative? We are just a small team with a simple subscription, but if we can get enough people using this then we have an opportunity to shape history and define the way our descendants will live — hopefully without all the diseases and problems that are common today. Our approach is a new one: instead of ads or selling data or your employer paying for your care, or all the variety of other models out there where you’re not the customer, we let our members pay for their entire costs directly. Currently the alternative models that prey on your attention and reduce your health are currently winning — the biggest companies of our time like Google and Facebook are built on this insight — because people really hate paying for things. Many people really don’t like paying for services, which is natural. But it is essential to realize that is probably the best way forward. This trap of “free” things or instant gratification is how we got into the mess we are in. For now, we don’t need everyone on earth to use Gyroscope. For now, just the early adopters and leaders and trend setters and people who are ready for change and interested in paying for their own membership fees. Eventually, everyone else will follow once they see it works. Price is the most common question people have. We get it. No one wants to spend a lot of money, especially in this economy where everything is so expensive already. In the past, these types of services cost hundreds of dollars, so they may have been totally out of reach of most people. Bryan Johnson famously spends millions of dollars on a team of doctors to optimize his longevity... but if you don’t have millions of dollars to constantly run tests or hire a concierge doctor, what can you do? Our focus is on making the best possible experience, one that extends your life by many years and gives thousands of dollars of value. By distributing that to many people and building reusable software, we can still keep the costs low while providing thousands of dollars of value and extend everyone’s life by a decade or more. Often when people say the price is too high, they really mean they aren’t getting that much value. So instead of lowering our prices further, we are optimizing the app to provide you with thousands of dollars of value and savings. All for less than a dollar a day. We are simplifying our pricing from a variety of different tiers and options to just one great plan: everything you need is now just twenty nine dollars per month (or slightly less with the annual plan and in certain countries with conversion rates). In the past, we had different sales or annual offers and custom prices to try and accomodate everyone, but now we are getting rid of all sales and moving to just one simple monthly price for everyone. If you are already paying for other apps or services, you may find that you are going to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars from switching. Or you can use them all together, as Gyroscope integrates seamlessly with thousands of other apps and devices. We have experimented with lower-cost options in the past, even trying out a “scholarship” program to offer subsidized rates. Unfortunately, these don’t seem to work. It turns out that only people who are paying for the service seem to get benefits and use it. So by giving it away for free (even to friends), we are actually doing them a disservice. Every few years we tried giving it for free to some people with gift cards, but literally none of them were consistent with using it. On the other hand, the people who were paying hundreds of dollars for our X program would actually check the app many times a day and were actually more happy and satisfied than the people who we gave it to for free. It is counterintuitive, but turns out to be part of human nature. When setting the pricing for the new version, we looked through our data as well as years of pricing science and studies. We found a few really shocking studies that have reshaped our understanding of human psychology, and will let us bring a more powerful experience for our members. One study (done in 2005 by Shiv, Carrnon and Ariely), gave some people a power drink that was $2.89. Others got a discounted version of the same exact drink, but it was only 89 cents. Then they got a puzzle solving test. The people who had the premium drink and didn’t get a discount performed better on the mental tasks. Unexpected insight:The brain performs differently when paying for a premium product and a discounted version may actually be worse. So that gives us a hint at the pricing. A lower price that people just blindly pay (and don’t even use the service) is probably the best for our profitability: more customers, and less usage fees. But ultimately, less results too. However, a price like $99 may be actually too high for some people, so that is how we settled on $29 — the same as our previous generation of AI yet still enough to pay the bills. What about yearly versus monthly? Previously we had offered annual prices as a way for people to commit. It is considered a best practice for companies, since you get more money upfront and helps reduce churn. It is common to want to pay for a year upfront, especially when it is cheaper or on January 1 when people are excited. We thought prepaying would be a good way to ensure people keep using the app all year long. However, it turns out that can backfire. Many people would sign up for yearly, but then not use it later in the year after the initial excitement wore off. A 1998 study (by Gourville & Soman) on pricing found that fitness is an exception to the benefits of annual pricing, and monthly pricing caused increased usage as people felt more motivated by the “pain” of the payment to earn the value back by being healthy. Based on this science, we are recommending the new monthly membership for all our members instead of requiring a commitment of a year upfront. You can still select the annual option though, if you prefer to prioritize extra savings and are sure you will stay consistent. For the past 10 years, we have lost money most years despite keeping our costs as low as possible. Even though we had paying customers, we have been reinvesting all that and much more on engineering, design, servers, and more to try and make the best experience and solve these hard problems of the human body. Until now that has been ok, and we have been in research mode focused on making the best possible app rather than making money. We are fortunate to have some of Silicon Valley’s greatest seed investors (the same people who first funded small companies like Apple, Fedex, Fitbit, Peloton, and many others) that helped us get the company started until we get the product fully working. Now that the app is fully operational and the costs of each person have gone up significantly, it is essential that we charge a fair price that reflects the ongoing costs of the service. This will allow us to not only keep the app online and maintained, but also keep making it even better, growing our team and continuing to make the app more intelligent and powerful to better improve your life. We will also be sharing more details with our community, with more transparency about sustainability, aggregate membership numbers (while still maintaining everyone’s individual privacy), profitability and the upcoming roadmap to really know where your membership is going. Some people may find that $1 a day is more than they want to invest in their health, or just want a very cheap app. That is ok. Our goal now is to provide the best value and results, not the lowest price. In the past we tried to have different free and low cost alternatives to keep everyone happy, but that turns out to not be helpful to anyone and makes it more expensive or complicated for everyone else. Now our priority is to provide extreme daily value to our members, for a fair and affordable price. Enough theory. You probably want to see what it looks like. Best of all, the app is available in the App Store today so you can just search for “Gyroscope” and jump in and start using it yourself! There is no substitute for getting your fully personalized plan and chatting with your very own coach. It is a magical experience that everyone should try at least once. Everyone now gets a completely personalized and custom app, so the screenshots may not be exactly what you see. We now support over 50 languages, and you can customize everything from the color to which tabs are in your navigation. Since Gyroscope is such a personal experience, we want everyone to be able to make it truly their own. You can now customize your coach as well, with 10 unique identities — some are humanlike and some are just fuzzy entities — all are loaded with the latest intelligence and fully focused 24/7 on helping you live a better life. You can even customize their personality. Whether you prefer someone who is very strict or more relaxed, or messages constantly throughout the day or just checks in a few times a week, or provides lots of science facts or just simple easy explanations — now the choice is yours. The new coach chat has a similar interface to the previous one, but behind the scenes we have switched to some brand new cutting edge models, including the just-announced GPT o1 and latest 4 omni technologies. As new advancements come out here, we will continue to update the G1 coach and make it as smart as humanly (or computationally) possible. We have also solved food tracking. This has probably been the hardest part of building Gyroscope and has taken the last 5 years, but we now have it working. To help people get real results in their body composition, nutrition tracking and insights have been the two missing pieces. First you need accurate data, then you need to understand what the data actually says. Until now, neither have existed. Step 1: take photos of your food. No one likes looking ingredients up in a food database, and then having to look up (or just guess) how many grams are in an ounce. So most people just don’t even bother tracking food or improving their nutrition. It feels too hard. Even if you can do it, it is unlikely you will do it for the rest of your life or for many months in a row — just taking photos is infinitely easier and more intuitive. And now it is even more accurate than you could do yourself. Step 2: check your personalized targets to see exactly what to eat. This will give you realtime feedback on both the quality and quantity of your meals. (If they are low quality, you will hit your calorie target but still be too low on protein) You may need to actually eat more in some cases, but specific foods. The main metrics to really keep an eye on every day is your calories and your protein. At higher levels, there are more variables to consider like fiber, micronutrients, fasting (and the game will guide you through them all) — but for people who want to lose weight we suggest not getting distracted and just master those two first. Now you still need to put in some effort, but Gyroscope 7.0 should take all the guesswork out of it. You can take a photo of everything you eat and everything will get figured out correctly for you, as if you had a team of a dozen expert nutritions watching over you. You’ll see simple targets for how much protein and calories to eat that day. And be able to chat with your coach to get gudiance or ask questions any time if you need help! Or just someone to notice your hard work and keep you motivated, as it can be a lonely process (especially if no one else in your community is trying to be healthy). The main thing you really need to focus is just using the app daily for the rest of your life (or until you can transition to intuitively eating and doing the same process in your head.) This isn’t a short-term diet or quick fix that you do until you lose weight, and then stop. It is designed to be a minimalist but essential part of your daily routine, used as long as you want to keep staying healthy and alive. Though we have been running Gyroscope for 10 years now, in many ways it still feels like day one. We have many more exciting things coming soon on the roadmap. The app you see today is the worst it will ever be! Even though it is quite good, we expect it to get 10x better over the coming months and years. Starting today, you can finally get the lifestyle improvements you wanted. A body that you can be proud of and always rely on. A brain that always runs smoothly when you need to make decisions. And hopefully a long and productive life. All in one place. With one new plan, for one price, welcome to Gyroscope One. Because we are all one. Are you ready to get started? You are the one we have been waiting for.The future of humanity
Preventative
Personalized
More fun
How to defend your privacy
How much does it cost?
What does the data say?
Prioritizing sustainability and profitability
What does the experience actually look like?
Personalization
Meet your new unified coach
The key to healthy nutrition
It’s always day one