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.