Yeah, this is quality business advice! Thank you! In some ways we’re way ahead of you and have been talking about The Great Auto-Ratchet Flippening for a while. We want to make it so that goals on the free plan can’t accumulate more than a week or a month of safety buffer. If you have huge amounts of safety buffer, that’s a bit like a pledgeless goal, is not beemindery, and should be in Beemium with the rest of the unbeemindery or revenue-eating features. The “I just want a nice graph without ever risking paying anything” use case should, philosophically, be the expensive premium thing. Not the “I want to edge-skate this puppy” use case, as you say!
We’ve been putting it off though, for a bunch of reasons, some of which you’ve anticipated. I think the biggest is that auto-ratchet kind of blows up the road matrix and we really want to implement it better before unleashing it on the majority of goals. Also we have to really nail the interface and the messaging to not seem like jerks, or surprising people by stealing away their hard-earned buffer. (This may also tie in with auto-dialing .) You may be right that we could just not worry about that half of it and at least make auto-ratchet opt-in for free for everyone.