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!