There’s a lot of great discussion in this thread about the introduction of Feet-Wetting Mode for new goals:
I wanted to start a separate thread about getting all existing $0 goals bumped up.
Here’s a new blog post officially announcing the transition plan:
Eager to hear more thoughts, whether the honey money bribe makes it exquisitely fair, etc.
I think the bump-up on preexisting goals is a very sensible move, in the spirit of why Beeminder is useful, and eminently fair with the honey money bribe.
I also really appreciate the final paragraph of the blog post – because I don’t feel it’s unfair but I do value honey money (it’s been a huge positive in my relationship to derailing). Thanks for specifically addressing this point! 
What happens with $1 pledges and goals on other pledge schedules?
Maybe this could be an opportunity for aligning them all (to the same pledge schedule).
Yeah, that was an ancient and failed experiment with a different pledge schedule and we do intend to clean those up. We’d really like to revamp the pledge schedule further and have more flexibility in how the pledges change when you derail (and when you go long enough without derailing!).
In the meantime, it seems like people are feeling more and more receptive to the idea that Beeminder goals should pretty much always have real money at stake.
We’ve sent out the emails about this and I’m having a lot of good conversations with people. Only a couple unhappy people so far, one of whom just doesn’t believe in commitment devices at all.
One thing I’ve been asking people is whether they’d be amenable to a kind of honor-system quid pro quo that people use the free honey as part of a personal experiment with derailing-it-is-nailing-it mindset. Be ambitious with your commitments, accept that some derailments are inevitable, that that’s part of pushing yourself.
I don’t know if that makes the gift feel too strings-attached.
your feet to be deemed fully wet on your (username) $0 beeminder goals
If you’ve been following along on the blog and in beemails, you’ll know that one of the newer features of Beeminder is Feet-Wetting Mode. In short, new goals created with a $0 pledge get automatically bumped up to the standard initial stakes of $5 after the first week.
We’ve been talking to users about this extensively and almost everyone thinks this is totally-fine-thank-you-and-Beeminder-goals-with-no-money-at-risk-are-silly-anyway.
So this email is to let you know that your care-free days are limited! We’re starting the countdown now, and in 30 days your existing $0 goals (that were created prior to Feet-Wetting mode) will become $5 goals.
Affected goals: [list of goals]
And since we imagine there exist cases, rare as they may be, where users feel this is unfair and not what they agreed to when they created the goal, etc, we’d like to ensure exquisite fairness by offering you $5 of honey money per $0 goal, making your first derailment on each of them effectively free after all. This is a gift to you veterans who created goals before these changes but we do need you to REPLY TO THIS EMAIL to accept it. That’s because you may consider it sting-diluting and not actually want effectively free derails!
Starting one’s stakes at $0 has always been free, never a premium perk. Some people were worried we were taking away something people had paid for. Not the case! And it’s still the case that you can cap your pledges at $0 with the Beemium plan (but we don’t recommend that).
We were clarifying this all along but only in footnotes in the blog posts (wet feet and wetter feet) so it’s our fault that people missed that. Also we forgot to mention it at all in the monthly beemail. Thanks to @tierrabluebird for pointing that out.
PS: Also we just improved the UI to make it more obvious that with Beemium you can both start at $0 and stay at $0. Thanks to @mary for that.
We don’t want to give the impression that the honey money gift has strings attached and just want to say that it’s a great opportunity to stretch your wings and experiment with a derailing-it-is-nailing-it mindset. Thanks to @grayson for this framing.
But you still have to reply to the email to claim the honey money.
Any derailments (and premium payments!) will be deducted from your honey money balance as they happen. So technically it’s slightly different than having the first derailments on your previously-$0 goals being free.
Last call to claim your honey money per $0 goal being bumped up. If you have $0 goals but didn’t get the above-quoted email, send me a DM here in the forum!
aaaand, this has now happened. Holler if you see anything fishy! And/or just tell us how this ends up feeling.
PS: We’re considering sending out one final email to everyone listing again the goals that that got bumped up and asking explicitly if everything looks ok. Maybe even say that in case you missed the previous email, the honey offer is still good for another day.
But we’re torn because the first email included this:
This is a so-called transactional email, i.e., a one-time message about a change to your Beeminder account. As such there is no unsubscribe link down here. If you want to never receive something like this again […]
(emphasis added)
I guess we could try to filter the recipient list to active users who are highly likely to appreciate the additional heads-up and exclude the users who are super checked out and likely to spambox us if we email again. Email is hard, guys.
Anyway, hit 
on this if you’d have value for that additional heads-up and/or extension of the honey offer. I mean, anyone seeing this who cares I assume would’ve let me know already, so this is for the alternate-universe version of you who reads their email but not forum posts like these. I might be answering my own question about how valuable another email is…
New update: It looks like we may have had a terribly timed email outage that prevented at least two people’s replies to claim their honey money from coming through. 
So we’re sending a followup after all. If you sent any email you didn’t get a reply to, please reply or DM me here in the forum to let me know!