I think about this all the time myself.
Have you looked into StikK? They provide services like automatically donating to your most hated charity if you don't meet your goals (they provide options like the NRA and Planned Parenthood).
Have you looked into StikK? They provide services like automatically donating to your most hated charity if you don't meet your goals (they provide options like the NRA and Planned Parenthood).
We're very much active! (Though we did add a waitlist so we could onboard people in batches!) We're inviting people every week now though!
Beeminder cofounder here. Can I hear more about why you think this? There are definitely people for whom Beeminder doesn't work at all but you sound like you're making a different claim -- that it may work for a while but then stop working. That's the opposite of our experience. Our churn numbers get really good for those who stick around for a year and anecdotally we have lots of people getting PhD theses written thanks to Beeminder, etc.
But if you've had short-term success with things like Beeminder -- https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors -- and then had it fail, that would be valuable to hear more about.
Oh, and I should mention that Beeminder isn't necessarily entirely automated. If you derail and are about to be charged money but don't agree that it was a legit derailment, you talk to a human about that.