We definitely thrive on harsh feedback! And if you find one of our competitors works better for you we’ll concede defeat super graciously – just please tell us exactly what you like better!
That was @joshpitzalis and you’re going to make him sad! We stand by all the glowing things we said when we announced the new design but definitely want to hear more about things you liked better in the old design. Which, surprisingly, you can still actually use, at old.beeminder.com though more and more things are broken there and it’s definitely not supported anymore. But it could still be handy for comparing/contrasting and helping us improve things in the new design.
Eek, canceled in what sense? Was it possibly the bug where archiving a goal once meant that it would never automatically re-commit itself again?
(Btw, your next paragraph is a really eloquent argument for precommit-to-recommit! Absolutely right that that’s part of the whole point of Beeminder.)
I thought you were going to complain about things like weekends-off and the road editor (to be subsumed by the prototype at road.glitch.me that already anyone can use, premium or not) which I agree with. And auto-ratchet (capping your safety buffer) is starting to feel super backwards to me. Like auto-ratchet should be the default and the ability to accumulate unbounded safety buffer should be the premium feature. We’ll get there!
But pledgeless goals and short-circuiting the pledge schedule absolutely have to be in the expensive premium plan. I’ll defend those to the death. 
Those are features (along with the charity option) that impact Beeminder revenue. Beeminder is (mostly) funded by pledges aka penalties and we think that works out brilliantly for all involved but if you want to set it up so you won’t pay pledges then we offer that as a premium service. Also who says $32/mo is expensive? You admitted that Beeminder got you through a whole language course on Duolingo…
But you just said $200 is your Motivation Point, meaning the amount that you’ll be certain to not pay us. So we think of it as paying us money to to ensure you won’t ever derail. Of course the threat is still there, so I get that it can feel perverse. And your arguments that it’s simply too much money (like paying $135 in pledges before finally hitting your Motivation Point of $200+) are reasonable.
It’s not like that, baby… But seriously, we’re still not truly profitable in the sense of paying ourselves market salaries and can’t afford to hire people we’d like to. We’re actually talking about increasing premium prices (again). It’s definitely a survival question: we have to make the business grow and accept that some people will be priced out. Do DM us about things like student discounts, or just discounts in exchange for highly constructive feedback (thank you again!).