Mega Feature List (and Premium Revamp Discussion)

@apolyton, another good question. No, archiving or finishing a goal doesn’t give you back a free one. Deleting does. Of course you can only delete in the first week.

We’re going to be super generous about giving additional free goals for anyone bothered by this, especially as we’re figuring out if we’re actually shooting ourselves in the foot here. (Thanks also to @msjoanna just now for articulating this fear as well!)

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I don’t think so, given that I wouldn’t be able to create new ones without subscribing.

(Of course it definitely helps that I wouldn’t instantly have to pony up or lose access to what I already have. But for continued use, I don’t think it makes a difference in my reaction.)

One of the things I love about Beeminder is that I can add, alter, and archive goals as my needs evolve. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for that to be behind a paywall. For comparison, I happily ponied up for a year of Complice after a 30-day trial convinced me the value was there for me. So it isn’t the paywall per se that bothers me. (The only reason I’m not already a premium subscriber is that I haven’t wanted any of that functionality.)

That said, the apps I’ve been happy to pay for are the ones that have given me full-featured, long-enough trials that I can definitively answer the question, “Is this worth the money for me?” In line with @msjoanna’s post, limiting free users to 3 goals may not be full-featured enough for them to answer that question. Hmmm.

Maybe unlimited goals for a 30- or 45-day trial would work better? After the trial, the user can either stick with free (and pick the three goals she wants to keep) or subscribe if she wants to keep more goals active.

Though I think that might feel “restrictive”/“ransomy”…perhaps simply: after the trial you subscribe or you stop. Period. But the trial isn’t a limited version of Beeminder. I think that would work best for me, as a new user. Here’s a paid service; I can thoroughly try it out for a month or six weeks and see if it’s worth paying for. Never does the new user feel limited or restricted.

I’m curious what others think.

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And in that vein, I can recast “what do you mean I’m going to have to pay for what I thought was free?” as “Lucky me, my no-cost trial period was a year and a half!” :slight_smile:

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For what it’s worth, I think $4/month is absolutely affordable, and very fair. In fact, it’s at the perfect sweet spot for me where it’s a no-brainer (I start to get cheap at $5/mo and up, and especially after around $8/mo). And for those existing users who are feeling a bit “salty”, I’d urge to think be grateful for the time we’ve had Beeminder for free and consider how in practice that means we’re getting a huge discount and really paying something like say $2/mo. You’re getting an even better deal!

I think $16 and $32/month is a bit steep, but I’m not sure how many users will actually be using these plans (you mentioned 28 people are currently on $32/mo Beemium, do we have stats for the other tiers?). As it stands now, I don’t really need the Bee Plus power features, though there’s one goal of mine that I’d consider paying a one-time fee to enable autoratchet for. The problem is that it’s not enough to justify paying quadruple the money for that privilege.

I wonder if you might make more money by dropping the power user plan to $8/mo (I derived this from gut feeling, but it seems to match some others in this thread), or by allowing users to pay a la carte for specific goals (either a one-time payment or a slightly higher monthly subscription rate). Probably not if you get sizeable numbers subscribing to the $16/mo plan, but worth considering if almost everybody stays on the $4/mo plan.

As for the $32/month tier, I feel like this is the plan for people with a lot of money to spend and/or want a way to support the Beeminder developers. In terms of features, I feel like this and the $16/mo tier could be merged, but I understand why for psychology reasons you want to have three tiers, so I think that’s fine.

I do think that maybe for newbees, a time-limited trial with unlimited goals (both number and type, though I understand the concerns about some types being confusing) may make more sense. Yes, it might feel like you’re holding user’s additional goals ransom, but it should be fine as long as it’s extremely clear the entire time. For example, in the dashboard/gallery view, you can have a dedicated section for your three “free” goals, and then a separate section for the rest (either “premium goals” or “temporary goals” or something), and let users drag-and-drop goals from one section to the other.

One potential issue is that, depending on a user’s goals, a free trial may take a relatively long time for users to fully grok Beeminder, so I can see an argument for a free trial that lasts say 3 months. Forgoing those months of revenue may be well worth it though if at the end of the day you get a Beeminder convert who will pay $4/mo for several years, vs. trying to monetize users too quickly and only getting them for a few months or losing them altogether.

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Hugely appreciate the vote of confidence, @andrewlu! We’re also thinking hard about the more, well, cautionary feedback and have a veritable laundry list of ways we’ll soften the blow of this. You’ll see when we deploy it. Which I’m ready to hard-commit to doing by Monday.

Yeah, 88 Bee Lite and 151 Plan Bee.

The idea for the Beemium tier is it’s where the revenue-impacting features go. Like fully pledgeless graphs.

Btw, one thing that’s emboldened us a bit is that we learned from A/B testing that users have no problem entering their credit card info after creating just one goal. Actually paying for a monthly subscription may be a whole other ball of wax but maybe at $4 enough people are like you and that’s no-brainer territory.

I also like to think that auto-canceling subscriptions will make people feel much better about trying it. But that may just be me. Personally I’d feel infinitely better about paying from the start but not having to worry about canceling than having a free trial where I have to stay vigilant to keep from accidentally getting charged forever and ever. :slight_smile:

Thanks again for all the help thinking this stuff through, everyone!

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It would probably be best to explain this to users when they perform the related action on the site rather try to satisfy the angry ones that bother to mail support afterwards (as opposed to feeling dissatisfied and potentially leaving) :slight_smile:

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I’ve just had a new idea which might explain why I am struggling so much with this. I think there’s some part of me that wants to reject a setup where the regular system doesn’t work for me but I get grandfathered into some kind of discount. As in, if premium scheme X is optimal for Beeminder and the majority of Beeminder users, but I need special casing to be happy under scheme X, it is sort of admitting that I’m not representative of typical users (or else X wouldn’t be optimal in the first place). This may very well be true! But I think it is causing me some cognitive dissonance to internalize it.

To be clear, I’m not saying I wouldn’t appreciate a discount. Because I certainly would! But I think this is a long winded way to say I haven’t had success at separating my concerns from the hypothetical newbee concerns. :slight_smile:

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I have been reluctant to sign up for premium because to help think of beeminder payments as punitive I specifically withdraw them from an account that is otherwise reserved, separate from regular bills and other useful things.

That makes sense. The best ugly hack I can think of is to set up an automated transfer of the subscription amount from your regular account into the account you pay Beeminder with. So it’s as if the money is coming from a different account.

Logically it solves the problem, but whether your System 1 will accept the arrangement is something I can’t answer.

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@chriswaterguy: Smart. Or what about using the exquisitely fair slider to make the premium payments infrequent enough for it not to matter. (There’s even the option to buy lifetime premium.)

@drtall: Makes sense about the cognitive dissonance there! This is all experimental so it remains to be seen how different you. Also there’s more than one “typical” for Beeminder users. Like how some people view Beeminder as a quantified-self tool with a nifty commitment device feature and others, like @philip, view the QS stuff as just a nifty way to implement flexible commitment contracts.

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I only started last week, so it seems I arrived just in time to grab a free odometer goal. :slight_smile:

Overall, this seems like a reasonable pricing model, except I’m not sure about limiting goal types. The odometer reading goal really made me see value in your data-driven approach. This particular goal type has forced me to keep reading the same book. I tend to otherwise read 10 books in parallel… I would not have realized the benefit of this without trying it. I think limiting the number of goals makes sense, but how wise is it to make stuff non-free that people might not even realize they want?

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As a user on one of the old premium plans, what happens to us? I haven’t seen a single word about that?

So far, the premium plans look very nice. I’m a big fan of the auto cancel, and the $4 minimum plan is a much smaller bullet to bite than the previous $8 plan.

However, what happens to “auto cancel” for automatically-updated goals? I have a goal that updates automatically based on my computer usage. If I die and my next-of-kin use my computer, will Beeminder keep my account open?

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I’m curious what happens to the people who purchased “lifetime” for the life coaching that is retired. Maybe they are in a vault somewhere? :popcorn:

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Oh, you just keep them! “Tenet the fifth” in the blog announcement. We’re sending out discount coupons for switching to one of the new plans shortly. We’re thinking 10% to 50% off based on your tenure (50% off if you jumped on a plan back when they were first announced and 10% if you did so just before this change and linearly interpolating in between). What do you think?

That could be a problem if you die, but you’d literally have to have next-of-kin doing activity that creates non-zero Beeminder datapoints. We figure that’s pretty rare. While you’re thinking of it you could add a note to your next-of-kin to get in touch with us. :slight_smile: Another thing that would, ironically, solve it is having an obscenely high pledge cap. In that case we’ll eventually notice and manually make sure the derailments were legit, which if you had died they wouldn’t be! (Now @chelsea’s waiting to see the first “not legit; i died” reply to a legit check in support (kidding))

All these life-and-death questions today! The answer is no one did that, but since it’s an interesting hypothetical, here’s what I said in the comments of the first blog post announcing premium plans:

Mainly we don’t seriously expect anyone to have that much faith in us as to plop down over $6k for lifetime beekeeping. But if anyone does, I’m now thinking the fair thing to do is to go ahead and accept the money but if we ever have to discontinue the program we refund the amount that makes it still have been more cost efficient than if they’d prepaid for the entire tenure of the program but no further.

In short, there exists a fair way to resolve it and we’ll do that. If you really are certain that you want to be beekept for as long as beekeeping is a thing, and if you have $7k sitting around, then lifetime will indeed be the most cost-efficient option. (I’m hereby guaranteeing that, regardless of how long we have the Beekeeper program.)

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You know, I get so used to dealing with regular companies that it’s easy to (unfairly) forget that you folks are not scum lords like all of the rest. :slight_smile:

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:heart: “Not a scum lord” is the nicest thing someone’s said to me all day! You know @bee and I are quite public about our fairness fetishism, right? :slight_smile:

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I thought of another hack: Buy a lifetime subscription! Or maybe yearly will be infrequent enough to avoid the problem or make @chriswaterguy’s idea not too tedious to implement manually.

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I’ve branched off a new thread for talking specifically about how to make sure these changes are easy to swallow for all existing users. If the changes are still stuck in your throat, please pretty please chime in in the following thread:

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I’m not sure if this should go here or the other thread, but since it applies to both existing and new users, I’m going to post it here.

Lifetime memberships and upgrading to a higher tier

It’s been suggested that for some people, their issue with the change can be solved by having a one-time payment. I had a question about that: if you purchase a $135 lifetime Infinibee subscription for example, and then later want to upgrade to a higher tier plan, do you get a discount? I think that’s what the Beeminder ethos is, but the actual beeminder.com/premium page doesn’t have a FAQ answer on this, and could be another obstacle to premium plan signup.

Waiving Infinbee if you average $4/mo. in pledges

Also, regarding the free/waived Infinibee for people who average $4/month in pledges, how exactly does that work? Is that a simple cumulative average, because I feel like that could have the bad effect some others were worrying about. Would it be better instead to do something like not count the last 1-6 months of pledge pay-outs?

I guess this depends on whether you think the goal is to be exact and say: if you already pay us $4/mo., you don’t need to pay us more; or if the the goal is more like: we don’t want to charge heavy users who already send us a good bit of money our way a monthly subscription fee on top of their payouts.

Personally, I think the latter conceptualization makes more sense.

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Yes, absolutely, a discount that reflects the amount remaining on any plan subscription. This applies in principle to any length of subscription, not just lifetime purchases.

@dreev’s current thinking is that on a lifetime plan, you’ll always still have a lifetime remaining, so the discount should amount to $135, regardless of how much time passes before the ‘later’ upgrade arrives…

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