Tag Archive

Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts

Monday, May 13th, 2013
Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts

You know how a lot of services offer things like one month free if you pay yearly? We were nerding out over the math of that and thought, why not generalize to compute the perfectly fair discount for paying at any frequency you like, including every infinity years, i.e., paying once for a lifetime subscription? Just pick... »

Auto-Canceling Subscriptions

Friday, May 3rd, 2013
Auto-Canceling Subscriptions

“Well I’ve already paid for Netflix this month, so I might as well watch another episode of ‘Say Yes To The Dress’. I’ll get around to canceling later. You know, when I’m less busy.” — A slightly caricatured version of me. When you sign up for some subscription services they make... »

Beeminder Buzz: Front Page of the Wall Street Journal

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
Beeminder Buzz: Front Page of the Wall Street Journal

Exciting news about Beeminder today: we’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal! It’s an interesting little write-up about the Quantified Self movement as “digital mother” — capturing Beeminder’s relationship to Quantified Self beautifully — and features one of our favorite beeminders (Okay, we have a lot of favorite... »

Beeminder Error in Your Favor, and Other Crashes of Ineptitude

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013
Beeminder Error in Your Favor, and Other Crashes of Ineptitude

Earlier this month some dozens of you got a delightful little email from us like this: this is super embarrassing but there’s a chance you were affected by a bug where we thought we canceled a charge but then it went through anyway. partly as self-punishment we’re just refunding all the charges where that could possibly have happened. so either you’re rightfully getting a refund or you’re getting a random reprieve on a past derailment! either way a refund of $... »

Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet, and other New Year’s Coverage

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013
Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet, and other New Year’s Coverage

We’re so proud of our full-page feature in the Southwest Airlines inflight magazine this month that we’re reproducing it here (with permission): ... This new online tool forces you to shape up — or pay up. Here’s how Beeminder co-founder Bethany Soule describes the Web-based, incentivized task tracker:... »

Launch Anniversary! How Crazy Are We Now?

Friday, October 12th, 2012
Launch Anniversary! How Crazy Are We Now?

Answer: Still super crazy! Before we give a little one-year retrospective, allow us to demonstrate just how crazy we are. One of our long-time Beeminder users — and not someone we know in real life — just paid an $810 contract. That’s a new record and tops even me and Bethany. It sounds so ridiculous, I know, but the... »

Destroy All!

Sunday, September 30th, 2012
Destroy All!

Bethany and I woke up at 7am on March 7th to a text message from Jill that some graphs seemed to be fubar. Panic ensued as we hacked away nonstop till 5pm or so, never getting dressed or leaving the house. What was the problem? The night before we had run a seemingly innocuous... »

Perverse Incentives and the Paradox of Beeminder’s Sting

Sunday, August 19th, 2012
Perverse Incentives and the Paradox of Beeminder’s Sting

People often complain about Beeminder’s perverse incentives. We started to address that at the end of our recent blog post comparing ourselves to GymPact: 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... »

Beeminder: We Use That; or, WeUseThat: Beeminder

Thursday, August 9th, 2012
Beeminder: We Use That; or, WeUseThat: Beeminder

We were interviewed by WeUseThat today. Here’s what we said! We are Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule, co-founders of Beeminder. We make people more awesome via the threat of taking their money. Specifically, we plot... »

Press Roundup: What’s the Buzz?

Saturday, June 30th, 2012
Press Roundup: What’s the Buzz?

In the beginning of the year we covered our coverage on Quantified Self and Mark Forster’s Getting Things Done blog. There’s been a lot more since then. Here are the highlights... »