Hmm, interesting, I guess we kind of assume it’s obvious or something? (To be clear, it’s very useful to know that it is not and that this is flawed reasoning, and that it’d be good for us to make it more obvious or add it.) Or that you’ll just pick the same goal type as we suggest for a similar goal… I’ll think whether/where we should work it into the documentation, but for now I can answer the basic question!
All of the goal types use the exact same moving parts as custom goals, and can be converted into custom goals if you have Bee Plus/Beemium and you want to change that.
- Do More: they use aggday “sum” and have the cumulative option set. If you add multiple datapoints a day, it’s additive – essentially a datapoint of 3 is saying +3, a datapoint of 10 is saying +10, and with both of them added it’s +13 for the day.
- Do Less: they use aggday “sum” and have the cumulative option set too, it’s just that more is bad in this case.
- Odometer: they use aggday “last” and do not have the cumulative option set. If you add 3 and then 10, you’ve entered 10 for the day (and indeed for the whole goal). The next day if you’d done 7, you’d need to enter 17 for your +7 to be counted.
- Weight: they use aggday “min” or “max” depending on whether it’s a weight gain or loss goal and are non-cumulative. You’d enter your data (whether weight or something else simply using the same logic) as whatever ‘weight’ you were that day.
- Whittle Down: they use aggday “min”, and are non-cumulative. You add your current datapoint, e.g. I have 1250 items in my Readwise inbox at the moment, so my datapoint is 1250. If I archive 10 of them, then my datapoint is 1240.
For an inbox goal, you’d probably want a Whittle Down goal; that’s the use-case Whittle Down goals are pretty much designed for.
To change it, you would convert the goal to a custom goal, and then make any changes you want there:
To change whether the days get added to each other, you’d uncheck “cumulative”. To change how datapoints behave within the day, you’d change the “aggregation” dropdown; in my example it’s already been changed to “cap1”, for instance.
As for why custom goals are expensive, it’s because they get complicated, both for users to understand, and for us to fix if they go wrong. They’re expensive to support, so they’re expensive to create (though if you have a custom goal set up, it keeps working that way even if you then go down to infinibee or no subscription). The official goal types are all tried and tested combinations of settings, which the support team can handle at a glance.
We don’t do any psychological pricing tricks like “price something high to make something else look more reasonable”. Things are priced so that they pay for themselves, as best as possible. Custom goals exist so folks can do cool stuff that Beeminder itself won’t do, like have a non-cumulative goal with a flat line. A lot of the aggdays are unique to custom goals, rather than being built for an integration. The integrations almost all use the major goal types, e.g. Gmail Zero uses Whittle Down, Withings uses Weight, Rescuetime can use Do More or Do Less, etc, etc. The exception is Curlex, which comes as a custom goal by default, for anyone.
