Not exactly super annoying but it has turned out to be super aversive for my stingy psychology. And I live overseas so there’s the added uncertainty layer of international transaction fees and fluctuating exchange rates.
Since I knew they were going to die soon, I have put off buying extras. I just derailed on an experimental goal this morning so I’m kicking myself now. I could have had 50 freebies for that price!
However, as a real paying customer now I don’t feel so bad putting in my request to move this change up the priority list
Personally, I think the fix for this is to make it easier to start with a flat road (currently the New Goal screen rejects “0”, so to get a flat road you have to check “Start with a week of safety buffer”, commit to X, and then immediately road dial to 0.) and then keep a flat road for experimental goals.
This lets you tinker as long as you want, but you don’t ever have Beeminder telling you that you have an emergency over no money. OTOH, maybe it is equally silly to “pledge” to do nothing.
First, to echo @chelsea, we’re keen to hear whether you, @bigmusic, mean that you like being made to pay something for freebees [1] or just that you want to make sure freebees will stay available?
To @chipmanaged, I like your thoughts a lot and I think we mostly agree, but note that one of the reasons for the “heretical freebees epiphany” is to simplify Beeminder and avoid the need for the term “freebee” altogether. Of course we can tolerate more complexity for premium plans, but I guess much of what you’re suggesting is already part of Beemium (skipping ahead in the pledge schedule, dropping to $0, and $0 pledge caps aka perma-freebees). The addition of a $1 pledge level (or fully customizable pledge amounts) I’m amenable to for premium people. Maybe if more folks chime in that that would be valuable?
i agree with this, but would actually take it even further - make the default pledge schedule for everyone $0 → $1 → ($2.50 ->?) $5 → current schedule. let everyone short-circuit for free up to $5. i could write an essay about this.
of course, that is my opinion, and i have absolutely no data to guess whether that would be profitable, actually bring in more people, or retain more current people.
First, to echo @chelsea, we’re keen to hear whether you, @bigmusic, mean that you like being made to pay something for freebees [1] or just that you want to make sure freebees will stay available?
I’m really not sure what the difference is to be honest.
I think that freebees should always be the first step when figuring out a realistic goal. Being able to tweak a goal starting with freebees is where I start. Using freebees allows you to learn what you are capable of instead of jumping to the $5 mark from the beginning. If every goal required me to start out @ $5, I wouldn’t be using beeminder at all.
If freebies remain in the Premium plans, then I have no use for the $1 goals (as I also have a meta-goal for beeminding the workout aside from the individual exercises, and so the accountability can be there, with the 16 individual exercises staying at $0). It was just a proposal in the event of a complete freebie elimination.
If freebee = initially pledgeless goal, then I think that should be the default. I thought freebee meant, could go back down to or stay down at $0 permanently. I think that’s the one worth eliminating.
Yup, the new “death to freebees” plan makes it so every goal will start at $0 if you choose. I had wrongly believed that Beeminder should, after some trial period, have all goals start at $5, thinking that it’s not really beeminding without money at stake. But I heard enough of you explain that even for veteran beemindees, there’s huge value in creating experimental goals that initially have $0 pledged. (I had had a bunch of counterarguments, like how you can delete goals in the first week, have initial flat spots, etc, but I was underappreciating both the psychological factor and the cognitive burden of understanding the counterarguments. It’s much cleaner for a goal you’re uncertain about to just start at $0.)
For what it’s worth, my 2c (pun intended) : 1$ for 10 free goals is a good way to have people think before adding a new goal. Not sure how you cover that in the new plan.
Why not do something as simple as having a free trial period - 30 days, 60 days, whatever? After the trial, the user has to enter a card in order to continue.
I’m not sure we want people to have to think twice about creating new goals. (Maybe I’m misunderstanding though. If you personally would get less value out of the new system where you can always create a new goal with $0 at risk initially, I’m very interested to hear that.)
This would be an improvement over the status quo but I think I like the new proposed system even better. It’s not a limited trial in terms of number of days (which I think is a big deterrent to people who don’t want to invest time and effort if they anticipate hitting a paywall that they may not be willing to scale) but rather limited in the number of new goals you can create. As a business we should worry about you never putting in a credit card and I see the temptation to cut those people off after a while. But my thinking is that if you as a user can get by with the limited number of goals and never derail then maybe we’re ok with you never paying us?
I think it’s also a cool value proposition that you can beemind diligently with the motivation of avoiding having to put your credit card in in the first place. Some people get a ton of mileage out of that. So much so that when they do eventually slip up they feel we’ve totally earned it and will probably go on to be paying customers at that point.
Of course there are also people who will never enter a credit card come hell or high water. But those people are completely irrelevant to us from a business perspective. No point in cutting them off – they’d never pay us anyway. So might as well help them as much as we can.
In conclusion I think we can do a lot better than a fixed trial period! (Also this has been hugely helpful thinking this through out loud; thank you! Happy to debate more if you’re not convinced too.)
Well, a goal that you can create with no cost (not talking about the first goals of a new user, which should be without cost so that he can test the service), is a goal that one would as easily drop out. But that’s at least how i thin, not sure how it would look to a larger group of people.
Ah, I see, you’re in the camp I was in originally, that it’s unbeeminder-like to create goals with nothing at risk (even just initially). I became convinced that for many people (at least some of the time) it’s important to be able to create goals with less cognitive friction. The default will (probably) still be to start at $5 (once you have a credit card entered) so I think the best answer for anti-freebee folks will be to just make a rule for yourself to always start goals at $5.
Disclaimer: Personal anecdote. May be true for others. tldr: $5 may be too much cognitive friction in acquiring users.
The no pledge goal helped me to try out Beeminder last year. I am also trying to sell (convince) my friends to use Beeminder because of the awesome goal tracking and follow up features.
Credit card penetration in India is very low. Specially credit cards that can be used for foreign currency transactions. It was only after I got such a credit card, I put it up on Beeminder.
$5 is also quite significant in an Indian perspective.
Not sure if Indian nerds with no international credit cards are your target persona.
Same here! Now that I’ve gone through the whole cycle of Newbee, Burn out, Trying HabitRPG, Coming back to Beeminder I agree that goals should not be made willy-nilly and that maybe $5 is even too low for me to start a goal at. But $0 was what got me hooked into this thing way back when.
I’m not sure what is the new plan, but $0 plans are essential to respond to the whole “these guys will trick me into taking my money on this stupid bet-kind-of-thing”
And no, free trials is not the same thing.
