Hi! Thanks for asking – really helpful to hear about what isn’t clear.
Although goals are “public” by default, unless they’re featured in the gallery it’s very unlikely anyone is going to be looking. They’d need to know your username in order to even find your page, and we don’t maintain a list of users that people are likely to be looking through. “Public” goals aren’t absolutely public by default either; e.g. your data tab isn’t visible to people. More details in the Help Docs!
All the same, you can set it so all your goals are private by default by setting the new goal defaults accordingly.
The pledge cap is the point at which your pledge will stop increasing. So say you set your pledge cap to $30. Your first derailment could be at $5, then the next at $10, then the next at $30… and the next after that would be at $30 too, and the next, and the next, until whenever you stop the goal.
As far as multiple times per day per goal goes, nope! We only ever queue up one charge at once, so even if something went wrong, you’d only be charged once. But also deadlines only happen once a day, so it’s unlikely you’d ever derail multiple times in a single day, unless you do something like deleting past data (which tends to break things).
If you derailed and it wasn’t fair for some reason, you’d just reply to the “legitimacy check email” explaining what happened and why you shouldn’t be charged. You need to do that within 18 hours of the derailment for us to be pretty sure that we’d be able to cancel it (it goes through after 24 hours, and our average reply time is six hours); sometimes we’ll delay the charge to talk things through with you, just to ensure you’re not undermining the point of Beeminder for yourself, etc.
If a charge does go through, we are able to do refunds (for up to 30 days afterwards), but it’s better if you can get back to us on time, since refunding costs us money – the service really isn’t designed for people to rely on refunds. (We can also do refunds in our site currency, honey money, which can be used against future derailments or premium payments, so that’s another option we’d talk over with you if the situation arises.)
Does that all make sense? Eager to hear if there’s anything that isn’t clear etc.
