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Comment by leoossa | Hacker News Reader

https://www.stickk.com/ The very same idea with more developed solution, already community and more features (Just for people who looked for such things like me ago)

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Yeah I was a bit gutted when I found Stickk after spending a bunch of time building Kommit. It's super similar and I felt a bit silly for not doing the research beforehand.

However, considering Stickk has existed for something like 14 years, it doesn't feel particularly mature. I don’t want to be too disparaging (and I’m obviously biased) but I found their website quite clunky and the apps don’t receive great reviews (1.8 on IOS and 3.0 on Android).

A few aspects that I believe are better in Kommit:

  - More control over deadline schedules (you can set it to repeat on multiple specified days of the week).
  - More control over punishment rules (you can choose how many consecutive failures are allowed before you're punished).
  - You can give yourself skip days (useful if you know you’re likely to need a vacation).
  - You can update commitments (there is a mechanism to allow updates while preventing you from dodging punishments).

That being said, they do have some cool features such as donating to an "Anti-Charity" (a controversial charity that you don’t support) upon failure.

Another similar site is beeminder - pretty cool concept! There is more than enough room for similar sites.

Definitely don't be discouraged by the existence of StickK! They technically already have the referee feature (that being your key distinction from Beeminder, which has a much less powerful version of that feature) but everything else about StickK is... well, I think you've already surpassed them despite their decade+ head start. They seem to have sadly been in zombie mode for years, since the founders left. I guess they're still making money though, which should be encouraging for Kommit!

Btw, here's our argument against the anti-charity feature: https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/

(I'm a cofounder of Beeminder, if that wasn't obvious. Also I just added Kommit to https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/ -- very excited to have you as a competitor!)

Thanks for the kind words! It means a lot coming from yourself. As I've said elsewhere, I think Beeminder is the best competing solution I've come across :)

Love your attitude towards competition and I'm excited to be considered a competitor!

Beeminder[0] is another. I particularly like that they keep a list of competitors in this space[1] - active, up and coming, dormant or dead. OP, perhaps you could think about asking Beeminder to add you to their list :)

[0] https://www.beeminder.com/overview

[1] https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/

Yeah Beeminder is cool, probably the best of the competing solutions that I found.

One way I hope Kommit can add value, is that it doesn't require your commitment to be digital and there doesn't need to be an API integration (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations). If you can prove your commitment with an image, video or text, your good to go. The downside is that nothing is automatic.

Update: You can manually enter data into Beeminder, therefore it can also handle non-digital commitments. However, as far as I am aware, the manually entered data is not verified (e.g. by having it checked by a reviewer) hence I didn't feel like it was their focus.

> (Beeminder is primarily based on API integrations)

This strikes me as a significant mischaracterization of Beeminder. I've used Beeminder for 5+ years[0] and I've never used an API integration — Beeminder supports manually entering data for any goal. (And basically none of my goals have been digital; I'm not sure where you got the impression that Beeminder exclusively targets digital goals).

[0]: https://www.beeminder.com/codesections/gallery

My bad, I thought the primary selling point was that it would would hook into the services you already use for tracking your commitment (Strava, GitHub, etc.). I am aware that you can manually enter some data but I didn't think there was any way to validate the data that you enter and I didn't think it was their focus.

Anyway, sorry for the misrepresentation. I will update my comment above to be more accurate.

Thanks for the update, and you're absolutely right that Beeminder doesn't offer any way to validate the data you enter. They discuss why (in their view, of course) trusting user-entered data works in this blog post: https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating/

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