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.
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!
"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!"
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.
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.
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?!
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!
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.