The email we sent to people with $0 goals, for reference
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!
Updates and clarifications!
Pledgeless goals possible on Beemium as always
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.
Honey without strings attached
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.
Honey not goal-specific
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.