What Danny Has Against Beemium

Akrasia
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Yesterday (Black Friday!) we bumped up the price of Beemium again. It’s now at $50/mo. (Think of it as a Black Friday discount on Infinibee and Bee Plus, relatively speaking, I guess?)

Why didn’t we warn you so you could get in at the old price for the usual year of grandfathering? Businesses commonly do that, to encourage people to upgrade before a price hike. It’s a nice Act Now inducement to buy stuff. The answer is we don’t want more people getting Beemium. Why not? Let me count the ways:

  1. I personally dislike Beemium (it feels unbeeminder-y I guess?) and have never paid for it as user-me, even though user-me would happily pay huge amounts for Bee Plus (if we hypothetically charged huge amounts for Bee Plus).
  2. We may even want to kill Beemium eventually – see Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is Pledge-Focused | Beeminder Blog – though more likely Beemium is the principled exception, the thing we would keep charging for even if we made everything else free. Beemium is where the revenue-eating features go.
  3. In particular, Beemium includes quasi-real-time support and the charity option which is partially shirk-n-turked so I’m averse to creating any more Beemium users especially if they don’t care much about those expensive features.
  4. Pledge short-circuiting is something people think they want but tend to be wrong about. When someone jumps to something huge because they’re feeling all gung ho and hard-core, I suspect they’re more likely to weasel when they derail. Or freak out and quit when it gets hard. Climbing the pledge schedule like God intended can be more awesomeness-inducing. But this is highly individual.

I guess mostly we could call it a boring business decision. Beemium is expensive for us and is now a bit more expensive for you. Also the cool kids don’t need Beemium. Bee Plus is the coolest plan, IMHO. And look how cheap it looks now, next to Beemium! :money_mouth_face:

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Now you look like one of those websites that does the “price anchoring” with some ridiculously expensive plan, some bare bones plan that doesn’t include the things most people need, and then the reasonable one that a normal human might want. :laughing:

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Ha, yeah! Though I think in our case the free plan is the bare bones one and Infinibee includes what most people need.

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Beeminder needs an Enterprise plan block with “contact us for pricing” :wink:

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I forgot to thank @alys for encouraging me to post this! She actually suggested a blog post, which I could conceivably still turn it into.

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Let’s add a highlight around it then, like “the best plan for most people”

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