Subject:
switching Beeminder payment method for user [username]
You know how you’re using PayPal as your payment method on Beeminder? We have sliiiightly bad news. PayPal being a palpable pain for us, we’re dropping the ability to charge you via PayPal when you derail. So the first thing you should do is just go to https://www.beeminder.com/payment to switch your payment method to something non-PayPal.
(If you’ve tried that before and it didn’t work, try again! We’ve hugely improved things thanks to Stripe, our payment processor.)
And if it still doesn’t work or if you just really prefer PayPal, here’s the good news: You can still use PayPal by pre-paying for your derailments. You can do that at the same link:
As a reward for helping us escape the scourge in our codebase that is PayPal, we will automatically give you $X of honey money [1] if you get off of PayPal this week. Otherwise we’ll switch from enticements to threats. Just kidding. Well, kind of. We do need to actually shut off PayPal soon, so that’s the threat. Beeminder won’t work for you for long unless you do this!
Definitely hit reply with questions or concerns or to aver that we can take PayPal from your cold dead hands.
Yours in Honey,
Danny, Bethany, and the rest of the Hive
[1] Honey money, you ask? It’s the new name for premium credit which can now also optionally be used as derail credit. Beeminder store credit, basically. Not redeemable as cash.
Composing this convinced us we need to make it a little easier to buy Honey Money via PayPal. Currently the way to do that is to send us money via paypal.me/beeminder and put your Beeminder username and “honey” in the comment field.
In case anyone finds these interesting, here’s another one we sent recently:
Subject:
happy thanksgiving from beeminder, have a dollar of honey money (USERNAME)
You know how you’ve gotten honey money at some point? Maybe we gave you some or you bought some. This is a slightly mass email so we have to be slightly vague. Anyway, since we’re weirdos and insist on paying interest on your honey money balance, even if you got a perfectly round amount of honey and used up another perfectly round amount, your balance will end up very spiky. Like fractions-of-a-cent spiky. And sometimes, as in your case, you can end up with small negative amount of honey money.
Why does that matter? It mostly doesn’t! Just that we’re working on making honey money more central to Beeminder and one thing that means is that any time your balance goes negative we’ll be automatically charging your payment method to bring you back up to zero. So when that change goes live you were going to get a surprise charge of a dollar (the smallest charge payment processors allow) to bring you from slightly negative to slightly positive.
We figured that would be surprising in an annoying way and that instead we could just gift you H$1 and that would be surprising in a “gee thanks I guess” way instead. So there you go. Have a dollar of happy Thanksgiving honey as a thank-you for being an early honey money adopter!
Have questions or concerns? Hit reply on this email. We will definitely see it and respond. There are only like 67 of you getting this.
Seriously, we are grateful for your guinea-piggage and for being a hardcore Beeminder user. Thank you!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team
P.S. Because this is a one-time notice about a change to your account, there is no unsubscribe link down here. If you want to never receive this sort of email from us again, you probably want to delete your account. You can find out how to do that, and find other email-related settings at beeminder