“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

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,...

[Prescript: Yes, we paid someone $270 because this post was late (see blog.beeminder.com/blogdog). We think it was worth it and hope you’ll agree!] UPDATE 2014-07-17: This post now reflects the current prices. When it was published the prices were: Bee Lite $5/mo, Plan Bee $10/mo, Beemium $25/mo, Beekeeper...

Remember our elaborate SOS clause? It describes in excruciating detail what to do if unforeseen circumstances cause you to drive off your yellow brick road. Well, we’ve since realized it suffices to just believe people. If you don’t want us to “just believe you” — it does have the danger of defeating...

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually...

Let’s talk about some novel ways to use Beeminder! Whenever we hear about one of these I want to slap up a big smiling picture of the user in our “new favorite Beeminder” frame. First though, this entire post is a thinly veiled excuse to point out that OHMYGODGUYS Fog Creek likes us, they really really...

StickK popularized the idea of the anti-charity as a commitment device. Another [Update: former] Beeminder competitor, Aherk, offers to publish embarrassing photos of you on Facebook to ensure you don’t fall prey to akrasia. Another clever idea — proposed by Jennifer Hamon on Akratics Anonymous — is...

At the risk of launching a thousand rants from the old neckbeard guard, it’s hard to imagine what writing code was like before git and GitHub came along. GitHub has made it really easy for people to collaborate on projects, and gives you some nifty stats to boot. For some people, those shiny graphs are enough (and if that’s you, by all means, try out tenXer). But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that

UPDATE 2013 August: We decided this was so ingenious that we made it fundamental to Beeminder. There’s no longer such a thing as not precommiting to recommit. In other words, goals no longer freeze when you derail. Below is the post in its original form for posterity.   The First Great Beeminder Epiphany...

My first reaction to the idea of gratitude journaling — which I didn’t realize was a thing, until people started beeminding it — was, well, I’ll spare you my snark. Then I tried to articulate my knee-jerkery and came up with this: It seems to have a protesteth-too-much vibe. I mean, what’s not to be grateful for? Everything is amazing! Even the