help us decide about a price hike for beeminder premium plans

1

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don’t worry, we’ll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It’s been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we’d ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
beeminder.com/premium if you’re signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here’s what we’re thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team

[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We’re
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

–
http://dreev.es – search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

2

Hi Daniel,

I think the whole general improvements you did are not so interesting for
the pricing for the premium users.
Because you did them anyway, and in the end they are paid by all users
which derail, and should not only be paid by the premium users (unless you
have only premium users :slight_smile: )

Apart from that you have to decide yourself, if an increasement of 60%
within one year is a fair rate… I don’t mind, I’m grandfathered :wink:
(hopefully also in the case I decide to pay the rest of the fee for a
lifetime membership)

Another aspect is, that there are many apps with a monthly payment, like
evernote, trello and so on. They all cost 5 bucks per month, and 8$ sounds
a little bit high… Oh, you know, beeminder is a little bit expensive… I
hear the people say down in the streets :wink: Only my humble opinion…

Have a nice day!

Best wishes from good ol’ Germany

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

1 Like
3

I would get rid of the plan bee level, to simplify pricing. Maybe move one
feature up and one down. Then you can better justify the bee lite increase,
and hopefully get more beemium users

– sent from my phone

On Jul 10, 2014, at 6:39, “Kay Krämer” cremoer71@googlemail.com wrote:

Hi Daniel,

I think the whole general improvements you did are not so interesting for
the pricing for the premium users.
Because you did them anyway, and in the end they are paid by all users
which derail, and should not only be paid by the premium users (unless you
have only premium users :slight_smile: )

Apart from that you have to decide yourself, if an increasement of 60%
within one year is a fair rate… I don’t mind, I’m grandfathered :wink:
(hopefully also in the case I decide to pay the rest of the fee for a
lifetime membership)

Another aspect is, that there are many apps with a monthly payment, like
evernote, trello and so on. They all cost 5 bucks per month, and 8$ sounds
a little bit high… Oh, you know, beeminder is a little bit expensive… I
hear the people say down in the streets :wink: Only my humble opinion…

Have a nice day!

Best wishes from good ol’ Germany

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

4

Bad idea! :slight_smile:

Am Donnerstag, 10. Juli 2014 14:59:13 UTC+2 schrieb robfelty:

I would get rid of the plan bee level, to simplify pricing. Maybe move one
feature up and one down. Then you can better justify the bee lite increase,
and hopefully get more beemium users

– sent from my phone

On Jul 10, 2014, at 6:39, “Kay Krämer” <crem...@googlemail.com
<javascript:>> wrote:

Hi Daniel,

I think the whole general improvements you did are not so interesting for
the pricing for the premium users.
Because you did them anyway, and in the end they are paid by all users
which derail, and should not only be paid by the premium users (unless you
have only premium users :slight_smile: )

Apart from that you have to decide yourself, if an increasement of 60%
within one year is a fair rate… I don’t mind, I’m grandfathered :wink:
(hopefully also in the case I decide to pay the rest of the fee for a
lifetime membership)

Another aspect is, that there are many apps with a monthly payment, like
evernote, trello and so on. They all cost 5 bucks per month, and 8$ sounds
a little bit high… Oh, you know, beeminder is a little bit expensive… I
hear the people say down in the streets :wink: Only my humble opinion…

Have a nice day!

Best wishes from good ol’ Germany

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

5

why is it a bad idea?

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Kay Krämer cremoer71@googlemail.com
wrote:

Bad idea! :slight_smile:

Am Donnerstag, 10. Juli 2014 14:59:13 UTC+2 schrieb robfelty:

I would get rid of the plan bee level, to simplify pricing. Maybe move
one feature up and one down. Then you can better justify the bee lite
increase, and hopefully get more beemium users

– sent from my phone

On Jul 10, 2014, at 6:39, “Kay Krämer” crem...@googlemail.com wrote:

Hi Daniel,

I think the whole general improvements you did are not so interesting for
the pricing for the premium users.
Because you did them anyway, and in the end they are paid by all users
which derail, and should not only be paid by the premium users (unless you
have only premium users :slight_smile: )

Apart from that you have to decide yourself, if an increasement of 60%
within one year is a fair rate… I don’t mind, I’m grandfathered :wink:
(hopefully also in the case I decide to pay the rest of the fee for a
lifetime membership)

Another aspect is, that there are many apps with a monthly payment, like
evernote, trello and so on. They all cost 5 bucks per month, and 8$ sounds
a little bit high… Oh, you know, beeminder is a little bit expensive… I
hear the people say down in the streets :wink: Only my humble opinion…

Have a nice day!

Best wishes from good ol’ Germany

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

6

So if I’m at bee lite for $5 a month and decide down the line I want to
upgrade to plan bee, would I need to pay the new price?

Thanks!

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 3:05:28 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don’t worry, we’ll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It’s been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we’d ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
premium – beeminder if you’re signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the
day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here’s what we’re thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team

[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We’re
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

7

Because I use this plan! :smiley:

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

8

Hey Kenny and Kay, good question! The simple way for us to implement
this would have you paying the new price if you switched frequency. My
instinct is to call that fine since (1) eternal grandfathering for
people who just want to stick to what they have feels quite generous
and (2) switching to lifetime means a pretty huge discount –
Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts | Beeminder Blog – so it should save money even at the new
prices. If you have the opposite instinct, that that would feel
frustrating or at all slap-in-the-face-y, we’ll reconsider that.

Oh, and more to the point: even if you sign up or upgrade or switch to
yearly or lifetime today you’re still grandfathered. It’s not just
people already premium before I started this thread. That’s in fact
part of the point of this, to induce lots of y’all to sign up for
premium now while it’s cheap rather than procrastinating indefinitely
as akratics are wont to do. :slight_smile: premium – beeminder

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 7:48 AM, Kenny Yang yangkennyk@gmail.com wrote:

So if I’m at bee lite for $5 a month and decide down the line I want to
upgrade to plan bee, would I need to pay the new price?

Thanks!

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 3:05:28 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don’t worry, we’ll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It’s been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we’d ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
premium – beeminder if you’re signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the
day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here’s what we’re thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team

[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We’re
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

9

On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly feel
like this anyway.

You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the problem is that
basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and
everything added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of
that.

(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough to support it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve upgraded my account
anyway)

Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan than
raising the prices on the premium ones.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

1 Like
10

This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:

  1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
    freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
    beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
  2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
    customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
    category)
  3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness tips
  4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
    premium feature for this reason)

I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think that “the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of possible
current features to make premium:

  1. SMS bot (HT dyang)
  2. Retroratchet
  3. Take A Break
  4. fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
    line (HT Paul Fenwick)
  5. private graphs
  6. widgets – beeminder
  7. weaselproofing
  8. no-mercy recommit
  9. auto-quit
  10. fine print
  11. supporters
  12. panic threshold
  13. goal unit rescaling

And here are potential future premium features:

  1. choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
  2. zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
    more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
  3. super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
    become that after moving to discourse?)
  4. expose more advanced settings
  5. weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
    self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
  6. expose more advanced settings
  7. profile badges? (HT dyang)
  8. early access to new features? (HT dyang)

[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com wrote:

On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly feel
like this anyway.

You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the problem is that
basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and everything
added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of that.

(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough to support it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve upgraded my account
anyway)

Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan than
raising the prices on the premium ones.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

11

  1. how much does that cost us?

  2. what, no, everyone needs to retroratchet

  3. what, no, everyone needs to take breaks

  4. +1

  5. +1 but do provide a reasonable reason for this

  6. i dunno, i feel like we would rather encourage more widget use

  7. what, no, there should not be barriers to weaselproofing

  8. what, no, there should generally not be barriers to basic anti-akrasia
    things like this

  9. +1

  10. what, no, we should combine title and slug and description and fine
    print into just title and fine print

  11. maybe? eesh. feels like a barrier. but maybe.

  12. noooo. we blame ourselves for beeminder not having sufficiently
    effective reminders for anyone; this proposes becoming even more
    blame-worthy

  13. only if it’s falling under “general tricky tools”

  14. shrug. brains are weird.

  15. +1

  16. shrug, brains keep being weird

  17. what, no, refactor settings to make them less advanced

  18. +1

  19. what, no, refactor settings to make them less advanced

  20. wut

  21. brains are so weird

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:

  1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
    freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
    beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
  2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
    customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
    category)
  3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness
    tips
  4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
    premium feature for this reason)

I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think that “the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of possible
current features to make premium:

  1. SMS bot (HT dyang)
  2. Retroratchet
  3. Take A Break
  4. fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
    line (HT Paul Fenwick)
  5. private graphs
  6. widgets – beeminder
  7. weaselproofing
  8. no-mercy recommit
  9. auto-quit
  10. fine print
  11. supporters
  12. panic threshold
  13. goal unit rescaling

And here are potential future premium features:

  1. choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
  2. zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
    more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
  3. super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
    become that after moving to discourse?)
  4. expose more advanced settings
  5. weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
    self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
  6. expose more advanced settings
  7. profile badges? (HT dyang)
  8. early access to new features? (HT dyang)

[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com
wrote:

On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly feel
like this anyway.

You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the problem is
that
basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and
everything
added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of that.

(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough to support it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve upgraded my account
anyway)

Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan than
raising the prices on the premium ones.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

12

One relatively simple option for saying “Look, we’re sorry, we changed our
minds on how well we can sustain this free thing” is:

  1. Provide a new “limited” free account with a reduced feature set
  2. Grandfather in everyone who currently has a free account as being able
    to keep it in its current state
  3. Say “we’re willing to honour our previous commitment to providing an
    unlimited free account if you’re really upset for whatever reason that
    we’re not. Email us and we’ll upgrade you to an unlimited version of the
    free account, no questions asked (well, maybe questions asked, but we’ll
    do it regardless of what you answer) - it’ll still lack some of the premium
    features but it’ll behave like the old free accounts”

In terms of premium features which would push people to upgrade… have you
considered limiting the number of things you can beemind at once with free
accounts (I know you do this for freebees, but I’m thinking even with
pledges)? e.g. I’d consider anyone who has 10 beeminder goals is probably
getting enough benefit out of it that they should really consider a
premium. Maybe the same is true of anyone with 5? I’ve no idea what the
right threshold here is. You’d be better placed than me to know what the
goal count distribution is like.

(again, obviously feel free to ignore all of this, you know your business
and customers better than I do).

I don’t have a strong opinion on making any of those features premium only
except one: I’m already a little bothered by graphs being public by
default. It would make me really uncomfortable to have to pay for them to
be private (even though I don’t currently have any graphs I care about
being private. The possibility of privacy is important to varying degrees
to different people and I think it’s important not to punish people who
need it more).

Take a break also seems a bit harsh to make premium. I’d probably feel more
strongly about it if I’d actually used it.

On 10 July 2014 22:52, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:

  1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
    freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
    beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
  2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
    customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
    category)
  3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness
    tips
  4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
    premium feature for this reason)

I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think that “the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of possible
current features to make premium:

  1. SMS bot (HT dyang)
  2. Retroratchet
  3. Take A Break
  4. fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
    line (HT Paul Fenwick)
  5. private graphs
  6. widgets – beeminder
  7. weaselproofing
  8. no-mercy recommit
  9. auto-quit
  10. fine print
  11. supporters
  12. panic threshold
  13. goal unit rescaling

And here are potential future premium features:

  1. choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
  2. zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
    more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
  3. super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
    become that after moving to discourse?)
  4. expose more advanced settings
  5. weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
    self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
  6. expose more advanced settings
  7. profile badges? (HT dyang)
  8. early access to new features? (HT dyang)

[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, David MacIver david@drmaciver.com
wrote:

On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly feel
like this anyway.

You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the problem is
that
basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and
everything
added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of that.

(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough to support it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve upgraded my account
anyway)

Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan than
raising the prices on the premium ones.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

13

Could you explain “switched frequency”? I’m not quite following.

so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide
that I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the
old price of $10?

Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite right
now :slight_smile:

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 3:36:24 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Hey Kenny and Kay, good question! The simple way for us to implement
this would have you paying the new price if you switched frequency. My
instinct is to call that fine since (1) eternal grandfathering for
people who just want to stick to what they have feels quite generous
and (2) switching to lifetime means a pretty huge discount –
Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts | Beeminder Blog – so it should save money even at the new
prices. If you have the opposite instinct, that that would feel
frustrating or at all slap-in-the-face-y, we’ll reconsider that.

Oh, and more to the point: even if you sign up or upgrade or switch to
yearly or lifetime today you’re still grandfathered. It’s not just
people already premium before I started this thread. That’s in fact
part of the point of this, to induce lots of y’all to sign up for
premium now while it’s cheap rather than procrastinating indefinitely
as akratics are wont to do. :slight_smile: premium – beeminder

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 7:48 AM, Kenny Yang <yangk...@gmail.com
<javascript:>> wrote:

So if I’m at bee lite for $5 a month and decide down the line I want to
upgrade to plan bee, would I need to pay the new price?

Thanks!

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 3:05:28 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don’t worry, we’ll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It’s been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we’d ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
premium – beeminder if you’re signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the
day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here’s what we’re thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team

[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We’re
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an
email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

14

Could you explain “switched frequency”? I’m not quite following.

Oh, yeah, by frequency I just meant how often you’re paying (monthly,
yearly, etc). We nerded out on that beyond all reason, as you can see
here: Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts | Beeminder Blog (the Exquisitely Fair Slider, as we call
it. it’s mostly me who calls it that.)

But the short answer is that any changes you make – switching plans,
or switching from paying monthly to paying yearly (or whatever) –
happen at the new prices. So get on Plan Bee while the gettin’s good!
:slight_smile:

so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide that
I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the old
price of $10?

Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite right
now :slight_smile:

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

15

Ahh. I see. Could you explain the “auto trimming safety buffer”? There
doesn’t seem to be a description on it.

Thanks!

On Friday, July 11, 2014 12:40:19 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Could you explain “switched frequency”? I’m not quite following.

Oh, yeah, by frequency I just meant how often you’re paying (monthly,
yearly, etc). We nerded out on that beyond all reason, as you can see
here: Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts | Beeminder Blog (the Exquisitely Fair Slider, as we call
it. it’s mostly me who calls it that.)

But the short answer is that any changes you make – switching plans,
or switching from paying monthly to paying yearly (or whatever) –
happen at the new prices. So get on Plan Bee while the gettin’s good!
:slight_smile:

so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide
that
I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the
old
price of $10?

Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite
right
now :slight_smile:

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

16

Hi Kenny!

That’s an automatic version of Retroratchet

It’s my favourite feature, and the reason that I subscribed to Plan Bee. It
lets me set a conservative slope on some goals, and ensures that I don’t
build up too much safety buffer.

Philip

On 11 July 2014 16:58, Kenny Yang yangkennyk@gmail.com wrote:

Ahh. I see. Could you explain the “auto trimming safety buffer”? There
doesn’t seem to be a description on it.

Thanks!

On Friday, July 11, 2014 12:40:19 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Could you explain “switched frequency”? I’m not quite following.

Oh, yeah, by frequency I just meant how often you’re paying (monthly,
yearly, etc). We nerded out on that beyond all reason, as you can see
here: Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts | Beeminder Blog (the Exquisitely Fair Slider, as we call
it. it’s mostly me who calls it that.)

But the short answer is that any changes you make – switching plans,
or switching from paying monthly to paying yearly (or whatever) –
happen at the new prices. So get on Plan Bee while the gettin’s good!
:slight_smile:

so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide
that
I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the
old
price of $10?

Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite
right
now :slight_smile:

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

17

I think I agree that there are too many levels and the distinctions between
them are too small.

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 8:59:13 AM UTC-4, robfelty wrote:

I would get rid of the plan bee level, to simplify pricing. Maybe move one
feature up and one down. Then you can better justify the bee lite increase,
and hopefully get more beemium users

– sent from my phone

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

18

I think making private graphs a premium feature is really unappealing.
That’s a very big deal for something like this, where you’re tracking your
private data so closely. I think that’s a minimum requirement and tend
towards avoiding signing up (free or otherwise) to websites that require
money to keep my info private.

I’m even more put off by the idea of auto-quit being a premium feature.
Auto-quit is a safety measure for people who aren’t comfortable with just
trusting that everything will work out great. (Not only should it not be
premium, I still think it should be the default (even if it prompts an
email after a week or two that says, “Hey, would you like to remove the
auto-quit on this goal?” or something like that. The risk should be opt-in,
not opt-out, IMO.).) These kinds of “please don’t hurt my credit card” are
a matter of users feeling safe and should never be hidden behind plan
walls, I think.

Fine print is just a part of the contract. I don’t see it making sense
behind a wall either.

The other stuff is fine, but take away anything that so drastically reduces
the (feeling of) safety or usability of Beeminder and you’re introducing a
major barrier for the new user to overcome when there’s already a steep
learning curve and a ~lot~ of scary opt-out settings.

Weasel-immunity should be in the $250 plan, if at all. Beeminder needs to
keep some teeth, I think, or it won’t be useful for us and, though we all
think we’d be perfectly good, I would be reluctant to have that power
granted to me.

I can think of several graph- and privacy-related features (and some from
other categories as well) that I’d love to see added and so think they’d be
great additions to the various plans, but that I’ll save those for later.

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 4:52:02 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:

  1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
    freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
    beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
  2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
    customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
    category)
  3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness
    tips
  4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
    premium feature for this reason)

I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think that “the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of possible
current features to make premium:

  1. SMS bot (HT dyang)
  2. Retroratchet
  3. Take A Break
  4. fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
    line (HT Paul Fenwick)
  5. private graphs
  6. widgets – beeminder
  7. weaselproofing
  8. no-mercy recommit
  9. auto-quit
  10. fine print
  11. supporters
  12. panic threshold
  13. goal unit rescaling

And here are potential future premium features:

  1. choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
  2. zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
    more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
  3. super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
    become that after moving to discourse?)
  4. expose more advanced settings
  5. weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
    self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
  6. expose more advanced settings
  7. profile badges? (HT dyang)
  8. early access to new features? (HT dyang)

[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

19

If there are people who have many goals but are never derailing, then it’s
possible that they don’t need that many goals, will realize that
themselves, and will cancel the goals rather than upgrade. At least with
more goals, there’s the possibility that some will wind up derailed. If
forced to keep them to fewer goals, many might just do that instead.

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 5:46:53 PM UTC-4, David MacIver wrote:

In terms of premium features which would push people to upgrade… have
you considered limiting the number of things you can beemind at once with
free accounts (I know you do this for freebees, but I’m thinking even with
pledges)? e.g. I’d consider anyone who has 10 beeminder goals is probably
getting enough benefit out of it that they should really consider a
premium. Maybe the same is true of anyone with 5? I’ve no idea what the
right threshold here is. You’d be better placed than me to know what the
goal count distribution is like.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

20

One more thought: I wouldn’t introduce any new fees (or, to bang this same
old drum, any new features) until the existing features aren’t broken.
There are a few sort of major things that need to be addressed, I think,
before starting to talk about what plans to put these features in and how
much to ask for the various plans. From just this user’s perspective, I’d
prefer stability and predictability over new features, and I think new
features and reorganizing the plans might be what would be required to move
on this.

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 3:05:28 AM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don’t worry, we’ll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It’s been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we’d ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
premium – beeminder if you’re signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the
day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here’s what we’re thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team

[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We’re
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.