[GhotiFish]

WOH-HO Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. That is just a flat out recipe for massive credit card charges and a boat load of pain.

They have a monetary incentive to interpret your data as failing to meet your goals. That is a huuuuuuuge amount of trust to bestow on a random company.

[dreeves]

It's really important for us to understand this reaction, so I'm glad you expressed it! It does seem super perverse on first blush. We've written about this a lot, actually. Eg, http://blog.beeminder.com/perverse .

Another counterargument is that any company has a monetary incentive to take your money and then under deliver on what you paid for. Beeminder, like most companies, is staking its reputation on providing some value that you'll be happy to pay for and tell others about (like the grandparent post here; thank you again!) and keep using. In Beeminder's case that value is making you more productive (or more fit or weigh less, or whatever graphable goal you have).

Eager to hear if that's convincing!

[GhotiFish]

I'm glad you guys actually recognize the perverse incentives at work here and...

  "Speaking of perverse incentives, we’re often asked about
   our own. It seems that from the perspective of those
   paying us, Beeminder is providing a ton of value and a 
   ton of motivation and the occasional cost of derailment 
   is a fair fee for Beeminder’s service..."

  "in other words, Beeminder is putting itself on the map 
   for exactly one reason: it makes people more awesome.

   But that can lead to the opposite complaint — that 
   Beeminder’s sting is so valuable as to be 
   self-defeating. In other words, it’s hard to be 
   motivated by the threat of having to pay Beeminder if 
   you feel that Beeminder has already earned that money!"

... Ok that only serves to scare me more.

This is a nasty psychological game beeminder is playing. So is GymPact. When people feel they have failed or they are at fault, a part of them wants to provide recompense for that failure. Beeminder and GymPact are not the first to fit this business model. Cable companies do it with wildly obtuse rules, ugly restriction, and massive overcharge fees, all with the line "Well it was your fault, it's written in the rules right here!"

That's what I see to be the problem. Beeminder puts itself resolutely in place as the 'go to' to seek punishment, striking where humans are at their weakest. Of course, rather than hail Marys, the punishment is money.

The fact is, because beeminder makes its money through my failure, it has a monetary insensitive to bring about that failure by any means, real or perceived. http://darkpatterns.org/ exists for exactly this reason! On what grounds do I have to believe beeminder would be immune to such an influence? Because beeminder loves me and wants me to get better?

That is how I saw it, from the outside looking in. I liked the idea, I really did, but with beeminder standing to benefit from the pledge, rather than say, a charity of some kind, I could never trust them.

[Cor]

If they do misinterpret my data, I'll simply go elsewhere. If there isn't an alternative, I'll try to build my own.

I haven't had to input my credit card details into Beeminder yet, so I don't see how they'd be able to take money from me, anyway. I don't use the pledge feature, and I've yet to fail any of my goals, so I've not had any problems on that front.

[GhotiFish]

it's optional? I can't believe the video said you needed a pledge to get back on track! It shattered my confidence in them.

[dreeves]

The way we think of it is that Beeminder is a goal tracking service that you pay for, except that if you never need Beeminder's kick in the pants -- if you keep all your datapoints on the yellow brick road -- then the fee is waived.

[GhotiFish]

...

So... not optional.

I find the way some people are thinking in this discussion to be very off putting.

It's like you're saying the demographic of people constituting your primary source of income are exceptions. That I can think of it is a completely free service since I am incapable of failure. How insane is that?!

[dreeves]

I'm confused but I think I mean it the other way around: most users will pay Beeminder occasionally. There are some exceptional people who never ever fail who will never pay Beeminder (and those people apparently didn't really need Beeminder's kick in the pants anyway).

[mryan]

Pledging is optional - I used beeminder for a long time without entering my credit card details, for exactly this reason.

[GhotiFish]

their introduction stated that if you slipped, you would have to pay to get back on schedule, and not on your terms either.

you would have to pony up a credit card number on the grounds that they could charge you if you slipped again. Basically if anything happened, $5, $10, $30

Oh no, my father was killed in south Africa, gotta go! $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810, $2430, Oh you were busy? Oh sorry.

If the video was wrong. Well OK. That seems like a horrific thing to lie about.

edit: now with actual numbers!

[dreeves]

We do have safeguards for that sort of thing. Like there's a deadman's switch for if you disappear completely. Similar to our auto-canceling subscriptions for our premium plans: http://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel

When people derail at higher amounts we always ask them if they feel like they got that much value out of Beeminder up until the point they derailed and pretty much invariably the answer is an emphatic yes.

We totally understand that this kind of crazy lifehackery is not for everyone though. For one thing, not everyone even has the problem that we're solving, known as akrasia, or acting against one's own better judgment. We also agree that there are many better ways to hack one's habits -- if they work. Beeminder is kind of like the nuclear option if other lifehacks (like the Seinfeld calendar) don't work and you really need to just force yourself to toe the line.