help us decide about a price hike for beeminder premium plans

[Daniel Reeves]

Hi fellow Akratics,

Guess what! We want to increase the prices for the Beeminder premium
plans. Don't worry, we'll grandfather existing premium people
(hurry!). It's been over a year since we first introduced them and a
whole bunch more yumminess has been added (to premium plans, and
Beeminder in general). [1] You all seem to like Beeminder so much that
we thought we'd ask for your help in deciding how to do this.

Currently the premium plans are like this (or look at
beeminder.com/premium if you're signed in to Beeminder):

Bee Lite ($5/mo): custom goals, configurable retrorratchet, tips of the day
Plan Bee ($10/mo): unlimited freebees, autoratchet
Beemium ($25/mo): free shortcircuiting, access to our devel chatroom
(realtime support)
Beekeeper ($200/mo): your own actual human

And here's what we're thinking of announcing:

Bee Lite: $8/mo
Plan Bee: $16/mo
Beemium: $32/mo
Beekeeper: $256/mo

What do you think?

Thanks everyone!
Danny and Bethany and the rest of the Bee Team


[1] Since we introduced premium plans Beeminder in general got: Zeno
polling, new integrations (Duolingo, Jawbone, Draft, Code School),
much of the Android awesomeness, new world order!
(precommit-to-recommit), pessimistic presumptive reports, scheduled
breaks, supporters, and literally hundreds of small improvements.

Bee Lite in particular got configurable retroratchet a while back,
which just got better this weekend with the ability to retroratchet to
any amount of safety buffer including making today an eep day.

Plan Bee just got the ability to change your URLs (which we have mixed
feelings about since we hate broken links, but for Plan Bee people,
ok).

And Beemium is now the only way to shortcircuit the pledge schedule
(we got rid of the ability to pay to shortcircuit a while ago). We're
also about to add a default minimum pledge in account settings for
Beemium people, since a big draw of Beemium is making sure you always
have motivating amounts pledged.

--
http://dreev.es -- search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

[Kay Krämer]

Hi Daniel,

 

I think the whole general improvements you did are not so interesting for the pricing for the premium users.

Because you did them anyway, and in the end they are paid by all users which derail, and should not only be paid by the premium users (unless you have only premium users :-) )

 

Apart from that you have to decide yourself, if an increasement of 60% within one year is a fair rate... I don't mind, I'm grandfathered ;-) (hopefully also in the case I decide to pay the rest of the fee for a lifetime membership)

 

Another aspect is, that there are many apps with a monthly payment, like evernote, trello and so on. They all cost 5 bucks per month, and 8$ sounds a little bit high... Oh, you know, beeminder is a little bit expensive... I hear the people say down in the streets ;-) Only my humble opinion...

 

Have a nice day!

 

Best wishes from good ol' Germany

[Robert Felty]

I would get rid of the plan bee level, to simplify pricing. Maybe move one feature up and one down. Then you can better justify the bee lite increase, and hopefully get more beemium users

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[Kay Krämer]

Bad idea! :-)

[Rob Felty]

why is it a bad idea?

[Kenny Yang]

So if I'm at bee lite for $5 a month and decide down the line I want to upgrade to plan bee, would I need to pay the new price?

Thanks!

[Kay Krämer]

Because I use this plan! :-D

[Daniel Reeves]

Hey Kenny and Kay, good question! The simple way for us to implement
this would have you paying the new price if you switched frequency. My
instinct is to call that fine since (1) eternal grandfathering for
people who just want to stick to what they have feels quite generous
and (2) switching to lifetime means a pretty huge discount --
blog.beeminder.com/fair -- so it should save money even at the new
prices. If you have the opposite instinct, that that would feel
frustrating or at all slap-in-the-face-y, we'll reconsider that.

Oh, and more to the point: even if you sign up or upgrade or switch to
yearly or lifetime today you're still grandfathered. It's not just
people already premium before I started this thread. That's in fact
part of the point of this, to induce lots of y'all to sign up for
premium now while it's cheap rather than procrastinating indefinitely
as akratics are wont to do. :) beeminder.com/premium

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

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[David MacIver]

On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves <dre...@beeminder.com> wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly feel like this anyway.

You've built a really good service that I like a lot... the problem is that basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and everything added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of that. 

(OTOH you've reminded me that I do like the service enough to support it more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I've upgraded my account anyway)

Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free to ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what your user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better off removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan than raising the prices on the premium ones.

[Daniel Reeves]

This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
blog.beeminder.com/premium (under "No Carrots For You"):

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:

1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
category)
3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness tips
4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
premium feature for this reason)

I hope I didn't overcommit us with that. I no longer think that "the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool" is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who's at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here's a list of possible
current features to make premium:

1. SMS bot (HT dyang)
2. Retroratchet
3. Take A Break
4. fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
line (HT Paul Fenwick)
5. private graphs
6. beeminder.com/widgets
7. weaselproofing
8. no-mercy recommit
9. auto-quit
10. fine print
11. supporters
12. panic threshold
13. goal unit rescaling

And here are potential future premium features:

14. choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
15. zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
16. super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
become that after moving to discourse?)
17. expose more advanced settings
18. weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
19. expose more advanced settings
20. profile badges? (HT dyang)
21. early access to new features? (HT dyang)


[1] http://blog.beeminder.com/premium/#BEN

[Alice]

1. how much does that cost us?
2. what, no, everyone needs to retroratchet
3. what, no, everyone needs to take breaks
4. +1
5. +1 but do provide a reasonable reason for this
6. i dunno, i feel like we would rather encourage more widget use
7. what, no, there should not be barriers to weaselproofing
8. what, no, there should generally not be barriers to basic anti-akrasia things like this
9. +1
10. what, no, we should combine title and slug and description and fine print into just title and fine print
11. maybe? eesh. feels like a barrier. but maybe.
12. noooo. we blame ourselves for beeminder not having sufficiently effective reminders for anyone; this proposes becoming even more blame-worthy
13. only if it's falling under "general tricky tools"

14. shrug. brains are weird.
15. +1
16. shrug, brains keep being weird
17. what, no, refactor settings to make them less advanced
18. +1
19. what, no, refactor settings to make them less advanced
20. wut
21. brains are so weird

[David MacIver]

One relatively simple option for saying "Look, we're sorry, we changed our minds on how well we can sustain this free thing" is:

1) Provide a new "limited" free account with a reduced feature set

2) Grandfather in everyone who currently has a free account as being able to keep it in its current state

3) Say "we're willing to honour our previous commitment to providing an unlimited free account if you're really upset for whatever reason that we're not. Email us and we'll upgrade you to an unlimited version of the free account, no questions asked  (well, maybe questions asked, but we'll do it regardless of what you answer) - it'll still lack some of the premium features but it'll behave like the old free accounts"

In terms of premium features which would push people to upgrade... have you considered limiting the number of things you can beemind at once with free accounts (I know you do this for freebees, but I'm thinking even with pledges)? e.g. I'd consider anyone who has 10 beeminder goals is probably getting enough benefit out of it that they should really consider a premium. Maybe the same is true of anyone with 5? I've no idea what the right threshold here is. You'd be better placed than me to know what the goal count distribution is like. 

(again, obviously feel free to ignore all of this, you know your business and customers better than I do).

I don't have a strong opinion on making any of those features premium only except one: I'm already a little bothered by graphs being public by default. It would make me really uncomfortable to have to pay for them to be private (even though I don't currently have any graphs I care about being private. The possibility of privacy is important to varying degrees to different people and I think it's important not to punish people who need it more).

Take a break also seems a bit harsh to make premium. I'd probably feel more strongly about it if I'd actually used it.

[Kenny Yang]

Could you explain "switched frequency"? I'm not quite following.

so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide that I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the old price of $10?

Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite right now :)

[Daniel Reeves]

> Could you explain "switched frequency"? I'm not quite following.

Oh, yeah, by frequency I just meant how often you're paying (monthly,
yearly, etc). We nerded out on that beyond all reason, as you can see
here: blog.beeminder.com/fair (the Exquisitely Fair Slider, as we call
it. it's mostly me who calls it that.)

But the short answer is that any changes you make -- switching plans,
or switching from paying monthly to paying yearly (or whatever) --
happen at the new prices. So get on Plan Bee while the gettin's good!
:)

> so if I pay $5 a month right now for beelite and down the line I decide that
> I want to upgrade to plan bee. Would I pay the new price of $16 or the old
> price of $10?
>
> Just want to figure out if I want to commit to plan bee or bee lite right
> now :)

[Kenny Yang]

Ahh. I see. Could you explain the "auto trimming safety buffer"? There doesn't seem to be a description on it. 

Thanks!

[Philip Hellyer]

Hi Kenny!

That's an automatic version of Retroratchet

http://blog.beeminder.com/glossary/#retroratchet

It's my favourite feature, and the reason that I subscribed to Plan Bee. It lets me set a conservative slope on some goals, and ensures that I don't build up too much safety buffer.

Philip

--

[Essentiae]

I think I agree that there are too many levels and the distinctions between them are too small.

[Essentiae]

I think making private graphs a premium feature is really unappealing. That's a very big deal for something like this, where you're tracking your private data so closely. I think that's a minimum requirement and tend towards avoiding signing up (free or otherwise) to websites that require money to keep my info private.

I'm even more put off by the idea of auto-quit being a premium feature. Auto-quit is a safety measure for people who aren't comfortable with just trusting that everything will work out great. (Not only should it not be premium, I still think it should be the default (even if it prompts an email after a week or two that says, "Hey, would you like to remove the auto-quit on this goal?" or something like that. The risk should be opt-in, not opt-out, IMO.).) These kinds of "please don't hurt my credit card" are a matter of users feeling safe and should never be hidden behind plan walls, I think.

Fine print is just a part of the contract. I don't see it making sense behind a wall either.

The other stuff is fine, but take away anything that so drastically reduces the (feeling of) safety or usability of Beeminder and you're introducing a major barrier for the new user to overcome when there's already a steep learning curve and a ~lot~ of scary opt-out settings.

Weasel-immunity should be in the $250 plan, if at all. Beeminder needs to keep some teeth, I think, or it won't be useful for us and, though we all think we'd be perfectly good, I would be reluctant to have that power granted to me.

I can think of several graph- and privacy-related features (and some from other categories as well) that I'd love to see added and so think they'd be great additions to the various plans, but that I'll save those for later.

[Essentiae]

If there are people who have many goals but are never derailing, then it's possible that they don't need that many goals, will realize that themselves, and will cancel the goals rather than upgrade. At least with more goals, there's the possibility that some will wind up derailed. If forced to keep them to fewer goals, many might just do that instead.

[Essentiae]

One more thought: I wouldn't introduce any new fees (or, to bang this same old drum, any new features) until the existing features aren't broken. There are a few sort of major things that need to be addressed, I think, before starting to talk about what plans to put these features in and how much to ask for the various plans. From just this user's perspective, I'd prefer stability and predictability over new features, and I think new features and reorganizing the plans might be what would be required to move on this. 

[Kay Krämer]

Hi everyone,

I'm not quite sure, but I think we are leaving the main topic a little bit.
The question was, how we, the beeminder users, are thinking about the new prices of the premium plans, and not, which features to put into which plan, and so on ...

I also asked a question - indirectly -  and wait still for the answer:
Do you - the beeminder team - think, that one year after introducing the premium plans at all, an increase of 60% is okay?
(I ask this, because normally I expect increments to be smaller, perhaps about 5-10 %)

And if you think so, why do you think so?

Or do you need this to survive?

What is the reason you come up with this whole idea at all?


Sorry that I ask all these questions, but when you ask us, how we think about your idea, I also have to ask a little bit :-)

[Daniel Reeves]

Replies to Essy! (Thank you so much; brilliant feedback as always!)

> I think I agree that there are too many levels and the distinctions between
> them are too small.

I think I at least agree that if we add this Fuzzy Buzzy plan ($2/mo
and only perk is the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder, maybe
plus tips of the day) then we need to combine Plan Bee and Bee Lite.
But which name would we jettison? They're both so cute!

> I think making private graphs a premium feature is really unappealing.

Roger that, consider it stricken from the list. (Told you this
feedback was hella helpful!)
But just for the sake of arguing, why doesn't it feel unappealing when
GitHub does that? It actually seems quite analogous to me. We want to
encourage public beeminding for the benefit of all! (We think it's
better for the individual too, plus you can always just name a goal
cryptically.) If you want to beemind something privately, yet use
Beeminder's hosting/infrastructure to do it, isn't it fair to pay for
that?

> Not only should [auto-quit] not be premium, I still think it should be the default

We agonized endlessly about this and came up with a way to do it that
we felt good about, thanks in huge part to you, Essy. I think our
reasoning is captured in blog.beeminder.com/nwo

I agree about fine print and weasel-immunity, I think. Tentatively
striking those from the list.

Good point about the danger of limiting number of graphs. We already
limit the number of pledgeless graphs (freebees) to 7, which probably
suffices.

Finally, your point about new features vs fixing bugs. We've been
focused on the latter for months now and have been getting antsy to
dive back into bigger things like generalized road dial and arbitrary
deadlines (long story about why that one's so hard!) and clientside
graphs. But both are important! Actually if we could ask a big favor:
keep telling us about bugs you encounter even if you think we already
know about them. Just a quick email to support like "argh! got bitten
by that bug with retroratching a do-less goal again!" (which, btw, we
think we fixed that last night). That helps us a ton in prioritizing.

Oh, and as for introducing new fees/features: the plan is to simply up
the prices and be done thinking about this for now. It's not the
highest priority thing.

[Daniel Reeves]

> Do you - the beeminder team - think, that one year after introducing the
> premium plans at all, an increase of 60% is okay?

We do! Pricing is super hard and confusing. Here are some links,
thanks to Nick Winter, that are influencing our thinking on this:
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/

> What is the reason you come up with this whole idea at all?

I guess the big picture answer is that we're a business so setting
prices to maximize profit is, to a first approximation, what we need
to do. Of course we also have motivations like "have as big an impact
as possible on the problem of akrasia". That's the reason for the "No
Carrots For You" section of blog.beeminder.com/premium

Right now premium revenue is 10% of pledge revenue which is why this
whole question is not exactly top priority. But we want to try this
price hike and see if premium revenue has potential to eventually
become our primary revenue source. We might prefer that.

The initial impetus was simply "can we induce more people to go
premium by announcing an imminent price hike?" :)
We will keep you all posted on the answer!

[Essentiae]

But just for the sake of arguing, why doesn't it feel unappealing when
GitHub does that? It actually seems quite analogous to me. We want to
encourage public beeminding for the benefit of all! (We think it's
better for the individual too, plus you can always just name a goal
cryptically.) If you want to beemind something privately, yet use
Beeminder's hosting/infrastructure to do it, isn't it fair to pay for
that?

It does feel unappealing when other websites do it. I don't have a GitHub account (though, simply because I don't need one). I also don't have a Prezy account, a TheBrain/PersonalBrain account, or a Daytum account (anymore). All sites that require us to pay for privacy. Usually my thought process goes like this: "Hmm... I'd like to try this site/product and get to know it, but the thing I want to use it for is kind of something I'd like to keep private... but I don't know if the site is even worth subscribing to... and I'm not going to spend two weeks using test data to get to know the site before I decide whether I like it so much and it turns out to be such a big part of my workflow that I want to pay for it and then use it for the thing I actually want to use it for. I wonder what competition it has out there where I could just start doing what I want to do right away without broadcasting it across the web... *google search*"

And many people are going to be shy about the types of things they Beemind or feel they have to Beemind. Examples: New Year's joiners who find the site because they want to lose weight and start by Beeminding that or by tracking their calories eaten. Someone who would prefer their kids not know that they smoke and want to track their smoking so that they can work towards quitting. I mean, there are lots of reasons not to want to Beemind publicly.

If you want to encourage public Beeminding, make it so that we can share ~some~ of our graphs with ~some~ people. Either that will lead to a "oh, it wasn't so bad when those people saw it; maybe I could just make it public", or it will lead to the people we're allowing to see the graphs deciding to have graphs of their own. Alternatively, have the occasional "What are you Beeminding this month?" group going with everyone sharing in AkAn what they're doing and how it's going and linking to a graph they've made public. Or have monthly challenges like "Everyone pick a graph, make it public, and see who stay in the orange the longest. No red days at all. Bee the first to catch someone else's derail on an eep day and get a free upgrade to the next level of Beeminder for a month and the person is out. Last person standing gets a free upgrade to the next level for 6 or 12 months." (K, that was an elaborate example, but I'm just saying that there are all kinds of way to encourage people to go public without defaulting to forcing people to be public about something that might be very private, depending on what's being tracked.

(Cryptic entails friction. Friction when I have to remember what I've cryptically names my 14th graph. Friction when I have to remember what multiplier I used to hide what I'm really tracking cause a datapoint of 149.6 and a road rate of -1.5 is kind of a no-brainer. Friction is unpleasant.)

 

We agonized endlessly about this and came up with a way to do it that
we felt good about, thanks in huge part to you, Essy. I think our
reasoning is captured in blog.beeminder.com/nwo

Yeah we've chatted about the opt-in vs. opt-out thing a lot, but I think that having no opt-out is just way too far to the other end. Trying to think from the perspective of a "newbee" that's just very scary.

Good point about the danger of limiting number of graphs. We already
limit the number of pledgeless graphs (freebees) to 7, which probably
suffices.

Limiting it to 3-5 pledgeless graphs seems fine too. More with a plan. I mean, limiting the paid graphs seems like a gamble, but limiting the $0 graphs seems fine. It's a good way to keep newbies from being overwhelmed by trying too much at once, before they get what's up, too. Less rage quit = good.

But both are important!

Yeah I know that you're right here. 

keep telling us about bugs you encounter even if you think we already
know about them.

If only there were an "off" button to stop me.

Oh, and as for introducing new fees/features: the plan is to simply up
the prices and be done thinking about this for now. It's not the
highest priority thing.

If you're just upping the prices, then I have some thoughts about the new price list too. Will post a little later. 

[Paul Fenwick]

On 11 July 2014 17:20, Essentiae <esse...@gmail.com> wrote:

> (Cryptic entails friction. Friction when I have to remember what I've
> cryptically names my 14th graph. Friction when I have to remember what
> multiplier I used to hide what I'm really tracking cause a datapoint of
> 149.6 and a road rate of -1.5 is kind of a no-brainer. Friction is
> unpleasant.)

Bingo! This is exactly how I feel! When I first discovered Beeminder,
I remember wanting to track quite a number of things, and then
deciding not to because private graphs were not available.

I have a social justice view on this as well. Requiring public
Beeminder graphs disproportionately affects those people who can't
safely have their data visible online, and those people are almost
always marginalised to begin with.

~ Paul

[David MacIver]

On 12 July 2014 01:21, Daniel Reeves <dre...@beeminder.com> wrote:

Replies to Essy! (Thank you so much; brilliant feedback as always!)

 

> I think making private graphs a premium feature is really unappealing.

feedback was hella helpful!)
But just for the sake of arguing, why doesn't it feel unappealing when
GitHub does that? It actually seems quite analogous to me. We want to
encourage public beeminding for the benefit of all! (We think it's
better for the individual too, plus you can always just name a goal
cryptically.) If you want to beemind something privately, yet use
Beeminder's hosting/infrastructure to do it, isn't it fair to pay for
that?

(Acknowledged that you've said that you won't do it, this is just to help flesh out some thoughts around the idea and to help explain where we're coming from)

I think the difference is in the different purposes of beeminder and github. Github is about open source development, which is intrinsically public. Beeminder is about my personal data and behaviour, which is intrinsically private. So public and private defaults make much more sense respectively.

I'm not super keen on your pushing public beeminding too hard. I think things like the supporters feature are a better way of achieving the social benefit of public beeminding without the downsides of exposing data you want private or semi-private to untrusted sources.

I also don't think "If you want to beemind something privately, yet use Beeminder's hosting/infrastructure to do it, isn't it fair to pay for that?" is a good argument. They are paying for that: With pledges! You've already said that pledges make up 90% of your income. (The case of people who want everything to be a private freebee is the only example where this isn't the case. Do you get enough of those people that this actually matters to your income?)

David

[David MacIver]

On 12 July 2014 01:45, Daniel Reeves <dre...@beeminder.com> wrote:

 

Right now premium revenue is 10% of pledge revenue which is why this
whole question is not exactly top priority. But we want to try this
price hike and see if premium revenue has potential to eventually
become our primary revenue source. We might prefer that.

Out of curiousity, is that because people have high value pledges with high failure rates, or is it because most of your users aren't premium? If the latter, would it be better to see if you could encourage people to upgrade to premium rather than raise the prices?

In general it would be super interesting to see some aggregated breakdowns of how people use beeminder. In particular I'd love to know typical failure rates by pledge value. Totally understood if you don't feel comfortable sharing that though.

 

The initial impetus was simply "can we induce more people to go
premium by announcing an imminent price hike?" :)
We will keep you all posted on the answer!

Well it worked to get me to upgrade to a higher rate premium anyway. ;-) Though that was more because it made me think about the value I was getting out of beeminder than because I wanted to avoid paying the higher price later.

 

--
http://dreev.es  --  search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

[Daniel Reeves]

Hey David, we're delighted to answer these kinds of questions and share data.
We're an Open Company after all: http://www.opencompany.org/directory/ :)

The pie charts at http://blog.beeminder.com/exponential/ may answer
your question about the breakdown by pledges. It's harder to quote
statistics about success vs failure because most goals are open-ended.

As for why most revenue is from pledges, well, sadly only 138 people
are premium (thanks so much for being one of them!). Per-user revenue
is higher for premium than pledges so, yes, we'd be happy to induce
more people to sign up instead of raising the prices. But our best
idea so far is to induce people to sign up *by* raising prices. And
then there are all the other ideas in this thread for new premium
features or existing non-premium features to make premium. But that's
not top priority yet. If the price hike gets lots of people to sign up
and then the higher prices reduce signups then we'll work on more
inducements (we won't lower the prices again -- we're just accepting
the small risk that the new prices will be too high).

PS: Good arguments against privacy-as-premium-feature, from all of
you. At first I struck it from the list but still thought y'all were
wrong. Now it's stricken from the list and I think you're right! :)
(But to answer your parenthetical, there are lots of people who get
massive value out of Beeminder without ever paying, often because the
threat of paying is super motivating, so it would be great to convince
them that they should really be premium. But currently we don't have a
way to do that and I'm ok with that for now.)

[Alex Schell]

In my view you could bundle retroratchet, configurable retroratchet, and auto-trimming of safety buffer at the same premium level, or maybe just move retroratchet to Bee Lite. These all feel like advanced tools that are nice to have but aren't essential to beeminding. (My guess is that retroratchet is relatively rarely used to non-premium users, and that the advanced retroratchet features wouldn't be used much by the non-premium user population even if they could use them.)

Re: private graphs, why not treat these like you do freebees? 2-4 free secret goals would be reasonable IMO, and this takes care of the concern that enforced public goals are a barrier to initial beeminding. If you do this, consider not displaying mystery goals in people's galleries.

Have you thought about offering free trials of premium plans?

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 4:52:02 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:

[David Ernst]

Hi all,

I was going to link to Patio11's beloved https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing. Glad you guys are already thinking along those lines.

Reviewing Patrick's post again, and looking at the plans/pricing as they are now, I can't help but notice a major gap: It's unclear to me what "Bee Lite", "Plan B", "Beemium", and "Beekeeper" translate to. Seriously, I'm baffled.

Patrick's over there trying to make the point: Segment your customers! Who are they and how do they get value from you? What did they come to you for and what do they want??

And all I see from these plans is Plan A, B, C, & D. So they're ordered, sure, but who are they for? I certainly don't know which of these categories *I* fit into. In the current scheme or the new one you propose. And note, I've been a user for months, & read nearly all your blog posts, discussions here, FAQs, etc, and still this leaves me confused.

Just throwing this out there, I would imagine segmentation more along the lines of:

• New Bee: "Dip your toes into world of Beeminder". (No subscription cost)
• The core Beeminder experience. The free plan that new users start off on. Basic commitment pledges, a few private goals, & less (than now, even) things to distract one with.
• Worker Bee: "Be even more productive, with less work".  ($10/mo? $20? idk, test it!)
• "Pro" things like unlimited private Beeminds, custom goals, auto-ratcheting, configurable ratcheting, SMS integration, weaselproofing, tips of the day.
• Super Bee: "All the things." ($35/mo? Dunno)
• The fun toys for the true lover of quantified-self. Free short-circuiting, unlimited free-bees (for more experimentation), change goal URLs, "fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average line (HT Paul Fenwick) ", "expose more advanced settings", early access to test out new features.

What you currently list as Beekeeper, separate out into a more distinct product. Don't confuse it with the plans. Because it's not really the same, right? A human beeing (ha). Fundamentally different from any of the plans. Maybe joining the Beekeeper program could include a 30-day trial of Super Bee as an additional perk, and then half price on all plans after that. But I would try to separate it otherwise from the subscription plans. Because you know, one is increased software options, and one is a person that gives their time to you. And I'm not sure the two are so directly related. E.g. I could see more Free Plan users buying coaching, even though they don't need more software features, but the current ascending list confuses them away.

Also, I would make it clearer that you're getting a Beekeeper. The way it's currently written on the Premium Plans page suggests the user is the Beekeeper. I think it would be more compelling to say "A beekeeper to take care of you". Maybe this is just semantics, yet right now I default to reading the listing not as "want someone to look after you?" but "want to make bees your occupation?". Subconsciously, it feels like more work.

On a different note, I'm very curious how these premium plans intersect with pledge revenue. My hunch is that signing up for premium would cause a user to Beemind more things (thank you sunk cost fallacy). Thus more pledge'd money at stake, and (thus?) more pledged revenue. Does raising the price of these plans cause less people to take their relationship to the next stage, and then also hurt pledge revenue? In other words, does optimizing subscription revenue come at a cost of pledge revenue? Of course, I'm making too many uninformed assumptions...

Thinking more on this theme, what about using money delivered from pledges as credit to spend on the premium plans? Thus avoiding the potential zero-sum dilemma above. And the user feels a bit less bad financially when they fall off the road, because they can still "use" those credits towards premium. Maybe they'll put more money on the line, because "hey, if I fail, then at least I can still use it for a premium subscription!" And then more New Bees convert to premium status, great! And all the while, Beeminder Inc doesn't lose revenue from this arrangement because the money still gets charged, and for the most part those premium features have trivial marginal cost. It's just letting the pledged money go farther (get double "spent"). Is this too radical? Maybe. Would love to hear others' opinions on it.

One last thing. Without changing the subject too much, if we're still talking about finding more sources of revenue, I would strongly suggest giving TagTime some love. It *seems* like there is a seriously great product there. And such a perfect complement to what Beeminder already offers. Why not bring it into the family more tightly? It clear from reading your blogs etc that you guys make such heavy usage of it, but I wonder how many users do too? I don't know! I haven't even ever been able to get it working (Windows & iOS -- ugh, I know). Yet it seems to hold such promise. If it was more of a 1-click install ("Beeminder Desktop"), and offered a no-bullshit GUI decoupled from cmd, it could be much more accessible for the average Beeminder. And seriously improve the value of the whole package for the user.

--- My 02¢. Hope this helps.

[Daniel Reeves]

Alex and David E, thank you so much for this! Brilliant ideas here.
This is going to hugely helpful as we put more love into premium
plans. I too am curious about others' thoughts on the idea of counting
pledges as credits toward premium. I actually mentioned that
possibility to Bethany the other day (I'm not sure who first had the
idea but it's been kicking around a long time -- probably originated
on this list) and she recoiled in horror. It is dangerous because it
softens the stingy-ness of derailments.

I agree about TagTime. Note that it's open-source --
github.com/dreeves/TagTime -- so we'd love to entice you to help us
give it the love it desperately needs. :)

[David Ernst]

Hear you on the point that offering credit could soften the stingy-ness of derailments. BUT what does that lead to? Maybe it takes a $10 pledge to offer the same sting as $5 now. Thanks to http://blog.beeminder.com/exponential/ & http://blog.beeminder.com/nwo/ that's just one derailment away :-)

The automatically increasing nature of pledges would still adjust to Most Effective Sting.

And in the process they get more opportunity to upgrade and y'all get more return for all your hard work.

[Brian Ball]

Re: Social Status

I'm not good at BeeMinding. I don't know what. I'm akratic. Am I apathetic? Am I just not conditioned to respond appropriately?

However, I can think of a way that would be fun for me to participate.

1. Give BeeMinding a social status and rank.

If I see I'm 10,203 out of 10,300 - well, I can see I've got 10,000+ people I can "learn" from. That ability to connect and learn with people that are just a few steps ahead of me would be invaluable.

It would give me motivation, social interaction, and data. Also, the nature of competition speaks to our lizard brain. We want to win the 'battle' for survival and so it helps heighten our 'focus' (which is probably my biggest challenge with all this.)

So, speak to my lizard brain directly - and you can have all my money.

-Brian

[David Ernst]

Interesting. What's the measure for ranking?

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[Brian Ball]

Right. To rank people, you'd have to have rankings for an activity.

Steps taken with FitBit. Hours slept with Zeo? Number of YouTube followers? BMI?

Rather than having the whole social rank concept be overwhelming - we could certainly start with a single, trackable thing that most people can engage with (walking, writing, tweeting).

We won't all care about all the trackables - so there should be points that could accumulate to an overall rank. Maybe somebody is #1 in steps per day - but they don't BeeMind anything else - so they only get 1000 points for that category. If they want more points (to rank in the global distrubition) they would have to track more things (thus encouraging more use).

Ideas?

[Jeff Alexander]

days_since_derail, maybe scaled against total number of beeminded goals?

What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. (Alan J. Perlis)

[David MacIver]

I'm not super keen on the idea of rankings. The problem is that beeminder is only really useful relative to how hard it is for you to stick to the goals on your own. If you make a game of it then it just provides incentives to "cheat". e.g. if you were to use days since derail as a metric of "success" you'd just be providing people who cared about their social ranking with an incentive against harder goals. 

(I mean, obviously to a certain degree, the pledges themselves already count as that, but it feels like there's something fundamentally different here) 

[Jeff Alexander]

I agree with David MacIver. My suggestion of a metric should not be taken as an endorsement of the existence of such metrics.

[Daniel Reeves]

Brian, thanks for this idea, even though I'm tentatively siding with
David and Jeff. We're being super slow on social features because
Bethany and I mostly hate that stuff. :) We finally added the
Supporters feature a while back though --
blog.beeminder.com/supporters -- and next we'll probably at least add
an easy way to share progress on facebook or something. After we have
basic stuff like that in place we'll revisit ideas like leaderboards.
Oh, group goals is another thing that we're tempted to add sooner
rather than later. (Just a dirt simple version where multiple people
can add datapoints to a single graph and they all get charged if it
derails.) We'd love to get a sense of how many people are clamoring
for that. Upvoting and adding thoughts uservoice would be a good way
to do that: http://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/2528624-group-goals-on-user-page-by-user-defined-categorie

[David MacIver]

Heh. Actually... there is one metric that it's just occurred to me would be an interesting thing to add as a ranking, but you probably shouldn't do it because it will hurt your bottom line!

You could add a "hall of shame" ranking for total amount of pledges paid.

[David MacIver]

(obviously given my prior stance on private data, I think any such ranking if you were to create one should be opt-outable and preferably opted out by default)

[Daniel Reeves]

Ha, well, it's not necessarily (or even typically) shameful! The
people who get lots of kicks in the pants (stings, we should say) are
the ones getting massive value out of Beeminder. We have people who
average hundreds of dollars a month of paid pledges and consider it
easily worth that much. (But yes to the privacy point.)

Related: https://trello.com/c/XAJnQtMD/40-embarrassed-to-be-minded

[David MacIver]

Huh. Typical mind fallacy on my part I guess. I've so far found even a $5 pledge sufficient to stop me derailing. I guess it's probably a good thing most of your users don't.

[David Ernst]

I hear you that being a Beeminder user is easily a point pride. But to be the "biggest" derailer? Color me skeptical.

This could be a seasonal contest. The Biggest Loser, Beeminder Edition. Obviously opt-in, and only in good fun. I'm terribly curious to see what effect something like this would have on the participants. Would participants sign up for more Beeminds to improve their odds? Would they purposefully derail? Or the opposite?

[indigo...@gmail.com]

Hi,

  I find beeminder is actually one of the better data-tracking apps on android, even without the antiakratic element. Perhaps because I'm used to it already.

  Like, I want to use it to collect data on things I don't have an akratic problem with.

  Obviously this doesn't give you any money, but you have most of the tech ready for it already, just needs a few tweaks. So this would be an ideal Premium feature.

  Seems fair, "either pay us by going off the rails on your akratic goals or pay us for fancy graphs and data tracking on other things you want to monitor"

    D

[Daniel Reeves]

Oh, hey, that already is a premium feature! Plan Bee lets you keep all
your goals at $0 pledged (turn off "auto-increase" to make sure they
always stay at $0). And, btw, anyone still reading this thread has
certainly earned a discount. Just email me or support and we'll get
you the old premium prices.

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[Jonas Meinertz Hansen]

On Thursday, July 10, 2014 9:36:24 PM UTC+2, Daniel Reeves wrote:

One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?

I would sign up for a Fuzzy Buzzy plan at $2/mo.

At the moment I feel like I am cheating because I use Beeminder for "toy goals" without any real risk of derailing.

I like the graphs that I get from beeminder so I use them for keeping track of my weight (https://www.beeminder.com/styrke/goals/weight) and how much I read. (https://www.beeminder.com/styrke/goals/reading)

As you can see I'm not in danger of derailing from any of them any time soon, but I would still like to pay for them.

On a topic slightly related to privacy, I love looking at other people's public goals and graphs to see how they use Beeminder. I would love it if Beeminder had some kind of show-and-tell page where people could contribute their goals to be shown to the world. There could be a simple checkbox in the settings that would add the goal to the public listing.

[Daniel Reeves]

> On a topic slightly related to privacy, I love looking at other people's
> public goals and graphs to see how they use Beeminder. I would love it if
> Beeminder had some kind of show-and-tell page where people could contribute
> their goals to be shown to the world. There could be a simple checkbox in
> the settings that would add the goal to the public listing.

Your wish is our command:

https://twitter.com/beemuvi/status/490278986119774208

(We actually had that all along but it wasn't exposed; now it is!)

See also: http://showcase.beneills.com/

[Sean Fellows]

Howdy,

I'm a bit late to the party here but I thought I'd weigh in. I joined Beeminder on June 14. I fell in love immediately. I have found the technology extremely compelling and it is having a huge positive impact on my life. I am minding 11 goals and I'm using it all the time! I've also been active on the Uservoice Feedback forum.

I've derailed two goals for a total of $10 so I suppose I'm a paying customer (haha!). I also just had a support conversation with Bethany about a Do Less goal of mine that should have derailed but didn't due to a quirk in the way those goals are calculated.

All that said, I can't see myself ever becoming a Premium user. This is for two reasons, 1) the types of features offered and 2) paying monthly for a service that is otherwise 100% event driven.

Starting with #1, the types of Premium features seem to fall into one of three categories:

A) Features you could get for free by entering fake data.

B) Features that work around quirks or bugs in the website.

C) Non-technical features.

By A) I mean things like configurable retroratchet, trimming safety buffer, and free short-circuiting. Entering fake data feels like a cardinal sin. Beeminder's non-premium business model is entirely predicated on the hope that some people care about Quantified Self enough to not lie about their data to avoid derailing. I'm one of those people, but these features being dangled in my face feel like Beeminder is tempting me into cheating. It feels backwards from how it ought to be.

By B) I mean things like changing goal URLs. I have a lot of goals whose URLs I would change because I realized too late that the New Goal page drops all the text after the first space. I'm not going to pay $16/month to correct that. If Take a Break or Retroratchet became Premium (per your July 10 post) I would categorize them here, because they make the Road Dial less clunky. (I would also have never joined Beeminder in the first place had those been premium features at the time, but that's an aside.)

By C) I mean things like fitness tips or the real-time support. These actually might be a cool deal, but they're bundled in with all the A) and B) type stuff.

I'm not sure exactly how to phrase #2, but as a non-premium user I find it really attractive that Beeminder's cost to me is entirely based on things that I do or don't do. If I mind all my goals, I pay nothing. If I skip my workout today, there goes $10. I am just not sure that I would ever be comfortable with a monthly fee for features that are already implemented and that I don't want to use all the time. Today I'd like to rename some of my goal URLs. Tomorrow I'm not going to want to, because I just did.

All of this said, I would be willing to pay Beeminder money outside of pledges. I would be willing to pay money towards implementing new Beeminder features (like the backer.app.net campaign for GTBee for Android) if and only if they then become free. I'd love to see a menu of stuff you folks might work on and throw cash at it. I might also be willing to pay to enable or use specific advanced features, like a one-time fee to enable automatic safety buffer trimming for a particular goal forever.

I know pricing is hard and I certainly am not an expert. But I thought I would throw you my two cents.

Thanks,

Sean

[Sean Fellows]

Oops one more note. I listed "free short-circuiting" under category A), but what I meant was that if I want to jump a goal to $30, I can get there by faking two derails. It's not free, but the $15 one-time is much more attractive than $32 every month.

[Daniel Reeves]

Excellent feedback, Sean! Here's one loophole that we don't mind if
people want to exploit: Pay $32 once for Beemium, shortcircuit your
pledges to your heart's delight, then immediately cancel Beemium.

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[Sean Fellows]

Thanks for the quick reply. If you actually managed to read all that you deserve some kind of award. Thanks for the consideration. :)

[Tuk Bredsdorff]

Agree with Sean about "B) Features that work around quirks or bugs in the website.":
I think that you charging for changing URLs for example has nothing to do with combating akrasia, which is what you guys are good at. Actually it creates an incentive for you to not fix the UI in this case, which is unfortunate. (Have also been surprised by the space-hyphen behavior.)

All in all I think the premium features are a bit confusing and expensive. It's not that Beeminder is not worth a lot because it is. I just already paid a lot through derailing and I think that is a beautiful system.

I know you said that using derailment payments as credits towards premium features removes a bit of the stinginess but so does paying them to a sympathetic company one wants to support. If you really want maximum stinginess you should rather destroy the money or donate them towards an organization with a counter beneficial purpose ;) !

In all seriousness I am afraid all these different plans distracts you from focusing on creating the best anti akrasia platform. I would prefer just paying with derailments and if that is not possible because most of your users are better at not failing, then one, relatively cheap premium plan with features so nice than it would be obvious for all but the most basic users to sign up. (And then the BeeKeeper of course, but that one is very clear in why it needs to be expensive and what one gets.)

Lots of different plans with more or less random benefits are for companies without focus in my opinion, look at Microsoft and all their Windows versions...

Also, your idea about pushing people to sign up by announcing the price increase may also have the opposite effect in the future by keeping some on free version because they think that for instance 8$ is a bit much where 5$ might have been fine.

Brusk