Beeminder
👤 Daniel Reeves & Bethany Soule (A game-theory PhD (ex-Yahoo Research) and his CS-dev wife built the commitment device they'd used to finish his thesis.)🌐 sitedreev.es𝕏LinkedIn
Track any goal on a bright red line. Cross it, Beeminder charges your card up to $810 — it earns when you slip.
Will it work? · our read
Monetize the miss. A beautifully aligned niche machine: 16 years profitable on a cult community and the trust to hold your card. But 'pay when you fail' caps the market — it wins deep, not wide.
01How the money moves
Set a goal, pledge on a $5-$810 ladder
→
Report daily; hug the bright red line
→
Miss it - card charged; Premium subs add MRR
02The numbers
about $1M
ARR (2024 est.)
getlatka
$5-$810
Pledge ladder
beeminder
2010
Bootstrapped since
beeminder
Founders signed the Open Company Initiative and blogged exact revenue for years; the recent figure is Latka's estimate. getlatka
about $1M ARR (Latka est., 2024); founders open-booked about $20K/mo in the mid-2010s.
🔒
The facts are free. The judgment is for members.
You've seen how the money moves, the numbers, and every source — free, on all 365 cases, always. Members get the part you can't look up: why it won · where the moat really is · how it dies · how it beats its rivals — plus the 🚀 launchpad prompt that turns any case into a plan for your business.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Beeminder — pricing & pledge mechanic (first-party)Blog: 'Derailing Is Not Failing / revenue proportional to user awesomeness' (first-party)Blog: quantified-self origin story (first-party)Latka: about $1M revenue est., 2024 (estimate)Founder Daniel Reeves (@dreev)
Revenue is EST: Latka pegs about $1M ARR (2024, up from about $460K in 2023) - not a fresh founder statement, so not independently confirmed. But Beeminder is unusually transparent: an Open Company Initiative signatory that blogged exact revenue historically (about $3K/mo in 2012, near $20K/mo by 2014-15). The origin, pledge mechanic ($5-810 ladder), quantified-self roots, and the 'revenue proportional to user awesomeness' defense are all first-party (beeminder.com + blog). 'Bootstrapped' is near-true - they took only a small Portland Seed Fund check early on. No fabricated drama: the perverse-incentive tension is documented in their own /defail/ post. We never score you.