Isn't it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)

StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people's commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here's why we think it could make more sense in our case:

1. The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You're starting with a small amount at risk after you've already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)

2. I think we're fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.

As for where the money is going, well, it's still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:

http://beeminder.com/meta/atrisk http://beeminder.com/meta/paid

We'd love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?