It seems to me like Beeminder is not in the business of helping users

Hi!

I love the idea of beeminder and what it provides – loss aversion – but it is severely lacking.

Personally, I don’t want much. And I believe many other people out there believe my philosophy as well.
I just want an app that lets me

  • Enter whatever amount I would lose (Pledge short-circuiting)
  • Put me in a 100% guarantee no fuckery no excuses mode. If my house burns down or my car breaks or I die, you still charge me. I don’t care.

Now, support has valid reasons for not providing pledge short circuitry – then I won’t pay you! Yes, put me on a payment plan!

A couple issues:

  • When I make a goal, I can delete it within the first week - can you allow me to disable that manually?
  • I can opt out of no excuses mode right after enabling it. What’s the point?
    You are assuming that users can control themselves at their lowest point. I can’t. If I am going to derail, and I have the option of not paying money, I WON’T.

Now let’s say you get these two figured out, there’s one more problem – you are asking for $64/m for pledge short-circuiting! I’m a student and I don’t have nearly that much money to throw around. I’d be willing for $15/m but that is too much.

I’d wager that if you got rid of all other plans and just had one at $15/m, you’d have so much more users, and those users would accidentally fail their pledge as well and pay them in addition to their monthly costs.

With that said, as much as I want to use the app, I can’t in its current state, because its not in the service of the general user looking for hard commitment. As some other people have said, it seems to me more greedy than anything. (Which I bet you are not, but that is the vibe someone gets when pledge short circuiting – what people need to be successful – is locked behind that plan!) Thank you for reading.

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Long-term Beeminder user here. I think the claim about the Beeminder team being greedy is a bit unfair. Part of the reason that pledge short-circuiting is kind of locked behind a paywall is that often new users are over eager and pledge a crazy amount ($270). When they derail it tends to lead to adding fake data.

I would also like No Excuses Mode to have a cooldown before you can turn it off but I don’t think that it is the end of the world. You could create a beeminder goal that tracks how often you delete goals within the first week.

Using myself as a counterpoint to the title of the post Beeminder has helped me tremendously. I wouldn’t drink water, exercise, finish certain books, job search, and a host of other things that make my life great.

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I don’t disagree that Beeminder has helped many users greatly and it most certainly has.

Here’s some points mentioned by user braun, he put it very well in I want to get back into beeminder, here’s what’s stopping me

You can’t jump straight to amounts that really motivate you since Beeminder never gets paid that way. But [this] is a shame to have as a constraint! We want “making people awesome” to always come before “making Beeminder money”

  • Dan, from a beeminder article

But Beemium is basically still asking people to pay more money in order to risk paying more. Also, if you look at pricing, it’s quite a bit more ($50) compared to the normal $8 and $16 plans. My impression is they really don’t want people to do it.

I think there are two issues, one is the “justice” (not exactly right word) of paying for a service where, again, the perk is that you get to pay the service more money in order to be held accountable, and still not have the incentives aligned. To me this is really annoying. I don’t think I even understood at first that that’s why you couldn’t short circuit. I thought it was just some BM algorithm that optimally figured out the best way to have people achieve their goals – if I had realized that’s what was going on I might not have even used it in the first place. Hard to unsee now.

The second issue is whether – just from a purely maximizing profit standpoint – not letting people short circuit actually makes BM more money. Given it’s one off 5, 10, whatever payments before it gets to something motivating, I kind of doubt it (my guess is no lifetime plans is costing BM money too but that’s a different question). This is testable though. In my own personal case I’ve forfeited amounts that were motivating, but n=1 there. Related: I’d be curious if people really understand why BM doesn’t allow short circuiting, or whether (like earlier me) they just took the algorithm as given. Also if it was more widely known, I’d wonder how they’d feel about it (this isn’t a threat, ha, I have no desire to “expose” anything, just genuinely curious). To me it feels gross.

My incentive it to achieve my goals (by being motivated). Beeminder’s incentive is to make money. Normally our incentives would be aligned since companies make money by giving the users what they want. And, I think if more people knew why you can’t short circuit your pledge (because BM wants to make money at the expense of the core product, which is you achieving your goals) they’d be annoyed, and BM would fix this.

You are not understanding my point. I’m saying that Beeminder is not in service of me. And that is true. That is what I see, and that’s what I feel. It doesn’t change the fact that maybe it could tomorrow, or in a week. If I pay $64 and go through multiple hoops.

I could create some plan and leave it seven days, then I can’t delete it thereafter. But then I still have to deal with the emergency issue. I can always opt out. I could maybe tell support to never accept anything from me, even if I cancel the opt in. But that’s just stupid. Isn’t it the point of enabling it in the first place? This is just going through hoops for no reason.

And FYI, paying $5 is not enough to get me started on a hard goal for that matter. Nobody wants to go through weeks of payment just to get to their “motivational point.”

I agree that new users should not be allowed certain limits as that can cause certain issues – and it has an easy fix! Limit it to $50, and if users want more, make some requirements and have them email support for higher limits. It’s not that complicated, really. Everything I’m asking for could be done within a day or two. It’s all about whether Beeminder wants “making people awesome” to always come before “making Beeminder money” as Dan very well put it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback! It’s always helpful for us to hear from users and potential users about things that really don’t work for them.

We have a couple of blog posts covering related topics that you might find interesting in light of your feedback, and I’ll talk a bit more about them and how we think about things if you’re interested (at least from my point of view, as Support Czar – @dreev and others might have other thoughts, counterpoints to me, etc; we’re always discussing this stuff and evolving internally!):

The reason things get locked behind the really expensive plan is not because we want to force people onto it in order to make money, but because we don’t want people to immediately opt in and use it. Beemium is, if anything, for hardcore, fully committed users who know Beeminder well and want to fully customise the experience. The plan is expensive as a deterrant to people who don’t fit that bill.

Going through the pledge schedule step-by-step is a major part of why Beeminder works for a lot of people, and we’ve generally found that people who set their own pledges without going through the schedule often set the pledges too high, find them frightening, and quickly opt out or (much worse) start lying to Beeminder. The pledge schedule is a core part of how Beeminder works, helping people find a level that is motivating without being ruining.

I think there’s also a disparity in how we think about No Excuses Mode (and see it used by existing users) and how you’re envisioning it – I think you’re looking for something much more like the old “weaselproofing” option, which we ended because (on the whole) we could see that it wasn’t helping users or us. By contrast, No Excuses Mode is intended for hardcore, high-integrity users who aren’t going to lie to Beeminder and aren’t going to ruin their goals by weaselling out of them.

We actually thought we’d have to add something to make No Excuses Mode harder to turn off, which is one of your sticking points, but in the time since we implemented it in 2022, we’ve only received feedback six times (now seven) that people want it to be harder to turn off. It’s not usually worth implementing something really restrictive for so few people, when we know many more than that are successfully using the feature. If that changes and we get a lot of feedback about it, it’s still something we might do in future! But so far, it hasn’t proved necessary.

In the end, Beeminder can’t actually legally or practically force anyone to pay us. There will always be a loophole – though for obvious reasons, I’m not going to give examples! In the end, we design and operate things with an inherent understanding that there’s no way we can absolutely and completely stop people lying to us, otherwise we’d be spending a lot of money and time chasing people who are actively trying to avoid paying. There’s some amount of friction in the system to help avoid people making akratic decisions in the moment, but in general it’s proved a mistake for us to chase people too far down the rabbit hole – for us, and for the majority of Beeminder’s users. That means we can’t serve everyone, and there’s a group of people who want something like Beeminder who we aren’t courting, but that’s inevitable, and there’s a cost to trying to be everything to everyone.

Sometimes there’s a best-of-both-worlds option, and we’re always happy to hear people’s feedback and ideas about that, because sometimes we can do something like that. So thanks for sharing your thoughts and examples – it’s something we’ll talk over, and @dreev will probably have a lot of thoughts about (and maybe some questions for you too, if you’re game!). Hopefully this clarifies our thoughts a bit, in the meantime!

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The only thing that matters to me in the premium plans is the pledge short-circuiting.

Going through the pledge schedule step-by-step is a major part of why Beeminder works for a lot of people, and we’ve generally found that people who set their own pledges without going through the schedule often set the pledges too high, find them frightening, and quickly opt out or (much worse) start lying to Beeminder. The pledge schedule is a core part of how Beeminder works, helping people find a level that is motivating without being ruining.

Then they are not the right customers for it. Weaselproofing should only be for those who are committed, and should have an initial limit so its not too high.
It’s not that complicated imo, setting the price is just knowing at what lowest $ point wold you be driven to do the task.

I guess in the end, Beeminder is servicing those who have the integrity to pay up even if they fuck up – which I am not among, lol! See, I don’t care if I have to pay $20 or $100, I just want to be forced with no way out. If you give me a way out, I’ll take it.

I guess I have to look elsewhere ):

Shame, nobody is doing weaselproofing right, even Forfeit refunds you if you ask or complain even if you set the mode to no refunds (I was just testing if they will abide by it).

if anyone’s interested, here’s some other similar discussions beyond the one I linked above:

Beeminder alternative?

Please let us set the starting pledge without subbing the $50/month package!

Even if a hypothetical company had completely perfect weaselproofing, you’d be able to dispute the charge, right? Even if you didn’t win any of them, any payment processor would start charging the hypothetical company quite a lot for every transaction, and I don’t think it would take many customers like that before the company would get dropped by any payment processor.

Maybe you’d need a completely different model to get the weaselproofing you say you need?

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Yeah you can always chargeback, but there are reasons preventing me from doing so:

  • I would use a debit card instead of a credit, so not much protection for me
  • Were I to even chargeback with a credit card, I probably still wouldn’t
  1. I probably would be motivated by just $20.
  2. It’d be stupid to try to chargeback $20, since it would affect my bank and hurt real chargebacks in the future.

Only skimmed your post, but yeah, I’m thinking you may be underestimating the effort it would take to get to perfect weasel-proofing.

You can straight up enter fake data on a manual goal. You can report fraud or cancel a card (even a debit card). Depending on the auto data source, there’s probably opportunities for smart users to cheat on the other end, outside of Beeminder’s control (stupid example: put your fitbit on your dog). I’m no lawyer, but a company that automatically takes your money and refuses to give it back in any circumstance probably opens itself up to legal risk.

A hypothetical Beeminder-like service that treats its users perfectly adversarially is likely to be entirely impractical, or at least forced to provide an extremely limited feature set.

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Chiming in here since I noticed this thread linked to my thread from a few years ago.

Update on my situation (the original thread is locked for some reason): I still haven’t used Beeminder since my original post, and this is still mainly is the reason why. I stand by everything I said:

  • While I don’t think the word “greedy” is helpful, it’s true by not letting you jump to amounts that actually motivate you (even though you’re paying a monthly subscription), BM is putting making money > making users awesome. This isn’t an assertion/projection, Dan said this is why you can’t short circuit.
  • I find all the other defenses of the pledge schedule very flimsy, especially because if new/naive users were actually the problem, there’d be other ways to get around it.
  • The claim “short circuiting would cost BM money” is a testable, empirical prediction. I would bet (~75%) it’s wrong.
  • Not directly related, but came up in the other thread — whether BM would make more money with a lifetime plan is also testable. I bet it would. After my post, I even had someone privately message me asking if I’d sell mine to them (!). I paid ~$300 for my lifetime plan, and then ~3x that amount in pledges over a few years. I’m not even sure I would have signed up had I had to pay monthly.

All in all, everyone (and all the customers and people on this forum) at BM seem like very nice people, but like you @geoxcaliber I find all this very frustrating and have no plans to use BM anytime soon.

Mostly I agree with Nicky and Adam and Narthur, including the fact that regardless of where we disagree or whether we’re prepared to support these use cases, it’s definitely valuable feedback.

We do have elaborate plans to revamp the pledge schedule, which might end up at the best of all worlds. (The problem is they’re a bit too elaborate and have ended up shelved for way too long.) In the meantime, we’re generally ok with some amount of paternalism, such as “we know you think you want to jump to $1k at stake, but trust us, that so rarely works out well”. Ideally there’d still be a way for power users to override that, but there are tricky needles to thread.

Anyway, I’ll keep chewing on this. Thank you again for voicing it!

PS: Here are thoughts on why we came to hate lifetime plans:

I even added a comment a year or so later about how the cost of ever having introduced them just keeps accruing.

Also, yikes, no reselling allowed! But you should keep milking yours for all it’s worth – that’s totally fair. Assuming we ever support your use case of more ironclad commitments and pledge shortcircuiting.

Not to derail this thread but…

That’s fine. I don’t really find any of the arguments persuasive, except maybe 4, which I believe. Items 1, 3, 5 are the customer’s “problem” (i.e. you can say buy at your own risk and FYI, one of the things we do is offer premium credit and buying a lifetime plan means that won’t mean anything to you).

Again this is all an empirical question and I’m sure you’ve thought about it way more than me. I get why it doesn’t make sense for American Airlines to offer lifetime plans. The point of/how you use BM though is by paying more money to BM, so I don’t think it’s the same (note I get there might be support costs etc and to the extent people don’t derail/use a lot of support they might be costing you money) .

But Forfeit, for example, has no plans, they just keep all your money when you don’t do what you say would. I (accidentally) forfeited $5 today and (purposely, after considering the tradeoffs) $20 on Monday. I would guess they’re cool with that, despite the fact I never “paid” (monthly or lifetime) to use their service.

I don’t use BM anymore so it’s more of free advice/an interesting theoretical exercise to me. I think (and as evidence by someone reaching out to buy my account (1)) you’re underestimating the aversion that some people have to subscriptions, and again, given your service is people pay money to you in order to remain accountable to themselves I think you might be missing out on the pledge money these people would bring in, but it’s definitely your call.

(1) I don’t get why is illegal BTW. I’m not really interested in selling mine (we never discussed price) but in theory it doesn’t seem that different from allowing for temporary premium accounts to create goals then cancel. In this case it’s all within what the site allows – I just change the username, email, and payment method on the account. As econ nerds I thought you guys would maybe appreciate transferable property rights.

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Great thoughts here (and, unironically, great to see Forfeit stealing some customers – we need this kind of competition; it’s very, ironically, motivating!).

As to the common subscription aversion, we’re with you philosophically. See the post Nicky linked to:

(The lifetime plans we sold are part of our hangup on pushing forward on moving away from premium subscriptions, though we’ve taken various baby steps, like allowing you to get more goals by paying pledges rather than paying for premium. I don’t think we should be hung up on that, but psychologically, it’s hard not to be.)

You definitely know the way to our hearts but I would say, to use an exaggerated analogy, that that would be like buying an all-you-can-eat dinner and then selling your spot when you get full. In other words, we priced it under assumptions about customer longevity etc etc. There’s some degree to which the all-you-can-eat dinner analogy holds in terms of support, but I need to think more about what feels most exquisitely fair. If you do end up with an actual offer and we convince ourselves it ought to be allowed in principle (both very big ifs) then at least give us the chance to match it. As we talk about in the deathtolife blog post, we thought pretty hard about whether there was a fair and affordable way we could buy back all the lifetime premium plans in the wild.

We really need to be more hardnosed though. We have this line in the blog post about how having a lifetime plan entitles you to those perks forever and ever “or at least as long as they exist – we never said whose lifetime haha”. Despite the “haha” I think that’s 100% true. We sold those lifetime plans in good faith but if we finally effect a fuller transition away from premium perks, it’s possible for a thing you paid for to just not exist anymore.

Giving the support point of view again: yes, this is a concern, and a reason we’ve discussed adding fees for contacting the support team, or requiring a subscription for contacting the support team. This has also been a problem for people with lifetime plans, who use Beeminder’s resources (including the support team) without ever paying again. I’m pretty sure I sent Danny an example last year of someone who was definitely now costing us money to have as a user, after paying for a lifetime premium plan a little before we removed the option.

Ideally, I want the support team to remain free at point of use (i.e. priced into what users pay in derailments), because these cases are a minority. But that whole debate is probably not best rehashed here – suffice it to say it’s one that we have semi-regularly, because there are some exceptional users who cost us money, including lifetimers.

Fundamentally, though, we’re not selling lifetime premium plans because we’re not guaranteeing that subscriptions will always exist, based on experiments we’ve already run which showed us pledges remained the most important part of our income. There were two ways we could pivot: try to make premium plans more attractive, and spend more of our time and energy on that – or, knowing people’s aversion to paying for derailments and premium subscriptions, and given the actual purpose of Beeminder is the pledges, to move toward not having premium at all.

We chose the latter, and actively plan to move premium features to the free version. If we allowed people to continue to buy lifetime plans, and then we moved all the features in their premium plan to the free version, they would be quite rightly angry!

There are probably ways to hedge round such a purchase with caveats that the service purchased may become “free” (priced into derailments, actually) later on, but I think we’d still get backlash because people simply don’t read that stuff, and instead operate on what seems like common sense and common understandings of how e.g. a lifetime purchase works. When companies change that, it often feels slimy.

(Case in point: our customer relationship management software, Help Scout, recently decided to change how companies pay for their service, which will ultimately be a 150% price increase for us. We last paid for our annual plan in February, and “common sense” would say we’re grandfathered in until our next payment in February. Not so! Help Scout have changed the price now with a six-month notice period, it will hit us in October, and our “annual” renewal will be pulled earlier by it. This is because you pay in advance for a year, but it’s more like a deposit that they then gradually take money out of, one month at a time. Help Scout themselves see no problem with this because it is fairly clear in their documentation, but many people are shocked by it because that’s not what an annual payment usually means.)

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Then, aren’t you guys taking way too long to transition to this model of pledges > premium?

I would’ve loved (and still would) to use beeminder similar as in forfeit. Pay you with my pledges. Heck, I don’t care about support. You can create a subscription of just $2-4 to “use the app” but in reality, it’s just to help pay for support. Easy.

You guys are taking too long to transition to more customer-centered imo and in the process losing more and more customers.

People want accountability, hard accountability. Few of those people match the type that beeminder wants; this “special” person that’s willing to still pay you despite not even having to.

This is very limiting. If you see Forfeit, they are already transitioning into a subscription model themselves – but case in point: It’s not $64/m so they can set the amount of $ that they fear.

I understand transition is hard, but now is the time to do it. You have a large customer base, and many utilities for syncing and tracking outside services. It would be great if it functioned like forfeit. (And their success is proof that it works)