I used Beeminder for a few months and found it extremely effective. However, a huge pain point of mine was forgetting to manually log the datapoints since a lot of my goals couldn't be logged automatically. This involved having to message their support e-mail each time. Eventually, this became such a huge friction point that I quit Beeminder.
Since then, I noticed that I haven't maintained my goals as much as I did on Beeminder. I believe that recording that I did X goal made Beeminder so effective for me, rather than the avoiding the punishment that comes when you don't do X goal. It was satisfying that I did X goal and seeing the graph change.
That being said, I want to find another solution like Beeminder without the punishment. Any ideas?
Good question and good answers! Someone mentioned that the fancy/expensive Beemium plan lets you cap pledges at $0. On the non-premium plan you can cap pledges at $5, so another conceivable solution is to combine that + a conservative slope on your graph + setting alarms or something? + chalking up occasional failures, if rare enough, as effectively the cost of the service.
Or like another person said, you can make the slope zero (no commitment at all), but that may defeat the point, with the graph offering no guidance on how much you'd like to be doing.