How does Honey Money work?

• What is honey money, exactly?
• How do I get honey money?
• If I use honey money as my payment method, what happens if I run out?
• Can I withdraw honey money if I never use it (like because I never derail on my goals)?
• Why is this useful?
• Do I earn interest on my balance?

Honey Money started as premium credit, which it still is, but now you can also use it to pay for derailments.

What is honey money, exactly?

It’s basically store credit at Beeminder. It can only be used within Beeminder, or transferred to our partner Manifold for their on-site "mana" currency.

Your honey money balance can cover anything Beeminder might charge you for: by default, it covers premium payments (apart from $1 you always need to pay by card for accounting reasons), and you can opt into using it for other charges too by choosing honey money as your payment type.

How do I get honey money?

You can buy it in $10 chunks on the payments page, using your payment card. You may also receive honey money for other reasons, e.g. refunds, student discounts, helping us test things, etc.

If I use honey money as my payment method, what happens if I run out?

If you have a charge to pay, your honey money will go negative. Several times a day, we check to see if anyone's gone negative on honey money. If you have, then we'll charge your card for the amount needed to bring you back to a $0 balance. This is pretty much the normal state unless you want to pre-pay for derailments by buying honey money in advance.

Can I withdraw honey money if I never use it (like because I never derail on my goals)?

No, you definitely can’t cash it out. There are a bunch of legal and accounting reasons for that. See also our old glutton-for-punishment blog post on why, even philosophically, we don’t like the idea of depositing money and getting it back if you stay on track.

We also want to discourage the mindset that Beeminder is a game where the objective is to never pay anything. That sounds self-serving but we strongly believe that Beeminder works better if you don’t view derailing as failing. So putting in honey money up front should not feel particularly onerous. You’ll use it eventually! If not, you’re doing it wrong.

Why is this useful?

See our blog post for background and a dozen different reasons we wanted to do this.

It's especially useful for users in India, because of the legislation there that prevents Beeminder charging Indian cards via the method we use for the rest of the world. One-time purchases of honey money are still possible, so a member in India can buy honey money in order to cover derailments.

We can also arrange for users who only use PayPal to purchase honey money. For more info on that, contact support.

Do I earn interest on my balance?

Yes, currently 2% per year, compounded continuously. Of course no one cares about this, nor do most people ever really carry a balance long enough for it to matter. It’s just the mathematically right thing to do.

Keywords: premium credit, beeminder credit, mana, beeminder's currency, pre-paying for derailments, depositing money with Beeminder