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Beeminder ♥ YNAB: Announcing the YNAB Autodata Integration
2024-05-27 • by bsouleThe Beeminder YNAB integration is officially launched! YNAB is, certainly for the kind of people who read this blog, the best tool for budgeting. Beeminder is the best tool for getting you to use your budget. It’s a match made in money heaven. (YNAB is short for You Need A Budget and is pronounced “why-nab”.)...
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Beeminder Featured on Humble Bundle!
2024-02-28 • by bsouleWe’re excited to be featured in a Humble Bundle! If you’re already familiar with Humble Bundle you might associate them pretty heavily with gaming and therefore be slightly confused right now. So first off, no, we’re not pivoting into games; we’re still leaving that up to Habitica. But when Humble Bundle...
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Psychological Pricing
2022-09-29 • by dreevesThe other day (a Very Other day, because I’ve pulled this from the bottom of Quite A Pile of blog post drafts) we were musing idly amongst ourselves about what the psychological effect would be if Beeminder pledges were amounts like $4.99. The answer is it doesn’t matter because I can’t stand so-called...
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Beeminder But On The Blockchain?
2022-05-26 • by dreevesLet us start by saving you a lot of time: No. Beeminder does not need to or want to be on the blockchain. Are you still here? We figured we’d write about this now because a new Beeminder competitor called STEPN has been getting lots of buzz lately. The idea with STEPN is that you ante some hundreds...
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Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is Pledge-Focused
2021-01-22 • by dreevesSince we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim: Howdy my sweet bee people, We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over...
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By coincidence the global Quantified Self conference is in our own hometown of Portland this year, September 22-23. Some of you will recall it was in Amsterdam last year and San Francisco before that. As announced on the Quantified Self blog, Beeminder is proud to once again support the Quantified...
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Beeminder Is Sixy!
2017-10-19 • by bsouleThe last year has flown by like a swarm of bees. We do one of these blog posts every year and they’re kind of a mix between a family Christmas letter and a state of the union address. We’ll spend a while congratulating ourselves on the charming new babies we made this last year, we’ll show you some...
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Fifth Anniversary of Beeminder
2016-11-18 • by bsouleIt’s hard to believe it’s been 5 whole years since we were slamming red bull on dirty couches in a college-town garage, with our friends Sergei and Mark, moving fast and breaking things on our scrappy little startup, dreaming big about how we were going to change the world(wide web) with … Oh wait. I...
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What It Means To Give Beeminder Your Credit Card
2016-05-09 • by dreevesOne of the main things we’re working on right now is making Beeminder more comprehensible to newbees. We’ve even hired a web designer, Josh Pitzalis, to help us with a big redesign. Writing blog posts explaining (sometimes obscure) things about Beeminder is very much not furthering that objective. But...
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Death To Freebees; Or, Freebees Für Alles
2016-04-02 • by dreevesNews! We scrapped the overcomplicated concept of Freebees. But don’t panic! By scrapping it we mean that you don’t need to know the term “freebees” or worry about buying them: All goals can now be created with an initial pledge of $0. Can we get a hallelujah? (If you want to cap your pledge at $0, you...
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Cyber Monday:
2015-12-01 • by dreevesOK, FineNever Again[UPDATE 2021: This is strictly for historical interest. Beeminder premium just costs what it costs now.] Of the roughly 6,000 active Beeminder users, we’re approaching 1,000 who like us so much that they’ve opted in to more frequent beemails. If you love us so much that you want to hear from us daily...
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Smoking Sticks and Carrots
2015-05-20 • by dreevesThis is crossposted on Messy Matters. Let’s talk about science! Beehavioral science. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week has been all over the news. It’s much better than previous studies and statistics I’ve seen on the efficacy of commitment devices. Not because...
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Pomodoro Poker
2015-01-20 • by dreevesLast week Bee talked about Tocks. That’s our neologism for 45-minute pomodoros, as well as our characteristically over-engineered system for minding them. She listed some gamification-y tips for effective tocking and assured everyone that all our other ideas involved money. That of course included beeminding tocks, as discussed last time, and certainly includes
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Beeminder Turns Three!
2014-10-28 • by bsouleYo Yo Yo and a buckle of gold, Beeminder just turned three years old! This time last year we were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Quantified Self global conference, excited about our year of autodata integrations, exponential revenue growth, and being featured in the Wall Street Journal....
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Freebees: Not Actually Free
2014-10-04 • by dreeves[UPDATE 2016-03-25: This whole post is completely obsolete! That’s a wonderful thing. We made everything simpler and better. In short, all goals can now start at $0 pledged and there’s no need for a concept of freebees at all. So don’t read on except out of historical interest!] So many changes lately...
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New Feature: Pledge Caps
2014-09-24 • by dreevesThe exponential pledge schedule is a key part of the, dare we say it, genius of Beeminder. It means you quickly reach a pledge that’s highly motivating and keeps you on track for a long time. But one more exponential step beyond “highly motivating” was often “OMG too scary I quit”. That outcome is...
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Ringcycles Wins Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Contest!
2014-07-07 • by dreevesThis is crossposted on the Fat Cyclist blog. Greetings not-so-fat cyclists! We’re pretty much beside ourselves with how the first annual (oh presumption!) Beeminder Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition turned out. When we say we’re beside ourselves we mean that literally — Beeminder is a husband-and-wife...
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Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts
2013-05-13 • by dreevesYou 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?...
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Auto-Canceling Subscriptions
2013-05-04 • by dreeves“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
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Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper
2013-04-12 • by dreeves[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...
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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...
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Socially Efficient Commitment Devices
2013-03-05 • by dreevesStickK 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...
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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 $
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Perverse Incentives and the Paradox of Beeminder's Sting
2012-08-19 • by dreevesPeople 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...
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Innocentive $10k Challenge: Increasing People's Ability to Start and Stay on Task
2012-05-03 • by dreevesI recently won $1000 (sharing a $10k prize) for the following essay on how to solve what people in healthcare call the adherence problem, which costs the healthcare system "billions of dollars in unnecessary hospitalizations and nursing home and rehab costs". My prize-winning essay in its entirety follows. (I gave the actual money to
About
Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money.
The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various friends.
Start Here
Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.
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Beeminder Community
Most of the action is in the Beeminder forum. Or if you want to be slightly social without risking getting distracted arguing on the internet, you can do pomodoros online in sync with other Beeminder users and productivity nerds in the Beeminder coworking room on Complice.
Akrasia
Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.