Currently user-Nicky hat on here:
Because this is a little misleading, I just want to clarify: /readreadread is a sort of anthology goal which keeps tracking my page count over multiple years. However, I have yearly goals:
- /2024reading - Aiming for 300 books in a year
- /2024reading_ex - Aiming for 365 books in a year
- /2024reading_sav - Aiming for 400 books in a year
- /2024pages - Aiming for 84,000 pages per year
- /timeforme - At least an hour of reading per day
And before them there were goals for 2023. Not sure if I had those goals in 2022 – I think not.
All of those goals have $5 pledges. /readreadread is never likely to derail, and isn’t really intended to anymore – it’s there because it holds continuous history. This is fairly unBeemindery thing to do, and I won’t be mad if it gets taken away and I have to put a pledge on it. I just didn’t really have the heart to archive it and lose the history.
My progress on that goal is being enforced in multiple different ways, though, with money at stake, on goals which have derailed and for which I have paid. What it absolutely isn’t is an example where someone has beeminded without money at stake. 
With a slightly more worky hat on, since I don’t think anyone would believe I’m entirely unbiased on this front! (Though it’s perhaps worth knowing that poor @dreev hears a lot from user-Nicky when they’re unhappy, believe me.)
It’s a bit late to go into the confusion here, but it does sound like something tripped you up here, because it’s been free to start at $0 (with an increase to $5 after derail) all along. You didn’t need Bee Plus for that, and I don’t know of a time when that wasn’t the case – certainly not while I have worked for Beeminder. Until the feet-wetting feature, anyone could start a goal at $0.
Anyway, as possibly the person who originally suggested increasing the pledge from $0 to $5 after a week, and definitely a major advocate for it, one major concern for me is the number of people who have $0 pledges and never allow a derailment to stand. The costs are high for support – the services of myself and the rest of my team don’t come cheaply, nor should they, and all of my team are worth their weight in gold. So just on a financial level, there’s the fact that the permanently-at-$0 goals cost us money to support without actually providing anything in return.
I had two suggestions about that at the time:
- If you derail on a $0 goal, it’s at $5 now even if it was non-legit, OR
- Feetwetting as currently implemented
One thing that was kind of ruled out by previous strategy (read the strategy memo on the blog) was forcing people to use premium. That didn’t work and I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to repeat it.
The other factor is just my own experience based on what I see in support and what I do on my own goals: I can manage perfectly well with goals at $0 until I hit a certain level of life stress, and then things cave in around my ears. A valuable use for Beeminder – to me, one of the most important – is placing a cost on deviating from your goal. So, my theory (and we’ll see how well it’s borne out by data) is that it will be awesomeness-maximising (i.e. help people reach their goals better) if they have something really at stake.
If it turns out to not be awesomeness-maximising, I’ll advocate to roll it back – that’s something we’ve never been shy about doing. So far, I’d say that my feeling on the water temperature around that is that it’s a successful experiment, but I don’t look at the data myself (usually; I did run one experiment myself); my job is to talk to people, squish it all together in my mind and present @dreev with my conclusions. 
So definitely if it’s not working, we’d like to hear more about why – does it stop you from wanting to make goals? Is it fixable by starting with more safety buffer until you find your feet? Is there anything else that would be helpful? Do you prefer my suggestion #1 from above?