Apps that charge you money when you fail

The short answer

Four apps will charge you real money when you skip a habit: Beeminder, StickK, Forfeit, and Commit, which we make and which is still in public beta. They share one mechanic. You put money behind a promise, and the app collects when you break it. Underneath that they disagree about three things, and those three decide whether the app helps you or just quietly bills you: who ends up with the money, who checks whether you actually did the thing, and whether the amount grows every time you slip.

This guide sorts them on those three axes, with each figure linked to the company's own documentation. If you want the underlying idea first, read what a commitment device is, then come back and pick a tool.

At a glance

The rows below are the questions worth asking. Read down the first column and compare the answers, not the brands.

Beeminder figures from beeminder.com/faq, /premium and their pledge documentation; StickK from stickk.com/aboutus. Checked 12 August 2026. Forfeit is in prose below, because this table only carries figures we could trace to a primary source.

1. Beeminder: the one that keeps the money

Beeminder is the strictest option here, and the most honest about its own incentive. You define a goal as a slope on a graph, feed it data, and if your line crosses to the wrong side of the road you derail and get charged. Money you forfeit goes to Beeminder. Their FAQ addresses the obvious objection directly and answers that "collecting the fees is our business model", then argues the product still makes you fail less. That is a fair argument, made in the open, and worth more than a vague claim about "supporting the platform".

The mechanic that surprises new users is the escalator. Your first derailment on a goal costs nothing, and each one after that moves you a step up a fixed ladder, so three derailments on the same goal is $5, then $10, then $30. Left alone, the ladder tops out at $7,290. Set a pledge cap on day one.

The second thing to understand is that nothing checks your work. You type a number, or a connected service such as Strava, Fitbit or RescueTime types it for you. Where that integration exists the data is hard to fudge, and Beeminder's catalogue of automatic data sources is the deepest in this category. Where it doesn't, you are entering a figure into a box and only your conscience is auditing it.

Pick Beeminder if your goal is already a number something tracks, you want a stake large enough to frighten you, and you would rather be left alone than watched. Think twice if your problem is honesty rather than measurement, or if paying the referee bothers you: the charity split appears only on Beemium at $81 per month, and even then it is half. Our fuller breakdown is at Commit vs Beeminder.

2. StickK: the original, refereed by a human

StickK invented this category and still runs the cleanest version of the idea. It was founded in 2007 by the Yale economists Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres with Jordan Goldberg, off the back of the research showing that people will pay to constrain their future selves. You write a Commitment Contract, put money on it, nominate a referee, and invite supporters. There is no subscription fee.

Where the money goes is StickK's structural advantage. You can direct a forfeit to a friend, to a charity, or to an anti-charity, an organisation whose work you actively oppose. That last option is the sharpest idea anyone in this field has had: a mild loss becomes intolerable when the beneficiary is a cause you would campaign against. We borrowed it, so credit where it is due.

The weak point is the referee. That person is doing you an unpaid favour, indefinitely, on your schedule rather than theirs, and their enthusiasm rarely survives week three. There is also an awkwardness the design never resolves: you have asked a friend to be the person who takes your money away. Plenty of referees quietly stop enforcing instead of having that conversation.

Pick StickK if your goal needs human judgement that no camera can supply, if you already have one reliable person willing to adjudicate, or if you want the forfeit to land with a specific person. More detail in Commit vs StickK.

3. Forfeit: on the list, with a caveat we won't hide

Forfeit belongs in any honest version of this list, and we are deliberately not putting numbers next to its name. It is an accountability app built on the same premise as the others: money behind a commitment, and a charge when you don't follow through.

What we won't publish is its fee structure, its review process, or where forfeited money ends up, because we could not confirm those against Forfeit's own current documentation at the time of writing, and a competitor guessing at another company's pricing is how bad comparison pages get made. Those three details decide whether an app like this is worth using, so read them at forfeit.app and test the answers against the five questions below.

4. Commit: proof-verified stakes, and what it can't do yet

Commit is the option here that reviews evidence before a day counts, and the option you cannot download today. It is iOS-only and in public beta, with no App Store listing, so if you want to start this afternoon, one of the three above is your answer. That limitation is real and we would rather lead with it than bury it.

What is different when you do get in: every commitment names its proof type up front, from nine options. Photo, video, screenshot, file, GPS location, a live time-lapse, Apple Health, iOS Screen Time, or none, if the goal genuinely does not need one. Verification runs through friends you choose or through Commit AI, which scores the submission and escalates to a stronger model when it is unsure. If it gets you wrong, you can appeal, and appeals are judged at a deliberately lower bar than the original review, because a false charge costs us more trust than a missed catch costs us anything.

The money works differently from Beeminder's model in two ways. You set the stake between $1 and $500 in USD, CAD, GBP or EUR, and it does not escalate on its own. And you are charged per missed check-in rather than upfront: a hold goes on the card when you miss, and it is collected after 72 hours. You pick the recipient when you sign, from a charity, an anti-charity, or Commit.

Two more parts matter in practice. Grace tokens exist because life happens: you start with ten and earn more at streak milestones, and one cancels a miss along with the charge. Squads of up to ten people share a group streak that only moves when everybody shows up, which is a different pressure from a solo graph.

The disclosure we are contractually and ethically obliged to make plainly: stakes are service fees paid to Cognitive Health Research LLC, Commit's parent company, not donations. There is no tax receipt, and operating costs come out before anything is disbursed. The accounting, including the lines that currently read $0, is on our Charitable Giving & Audit page, and the contract itself is the Commitment Agreement.

The pattern across all four: Beeminder solves measurement, StickK solves judgement, and Commit is aimed at people whose real problem is honesty with themselves.

Do these apps actually work?

Yes, modestly, for people who choose them on purpose. The best-known trial is Giné, Karlan and Zinman (2010) in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Smokers in the Philippines were offered CARES, a savings account they paid into for six months, settled by a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. Pass and the money came back; fail and it went to charity.

• 11% of those offered the product took it up.
• Those offered it were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the six-month test than the control group.
• The effect held in surprise tests at twelve months, which suggests real cessation rather than gaming the test date.

Three percentage points is a genuine effect and a small one. It is not "commitment contracts triple your success rate", and any app telling you otherwise is selling. What makes the result notable is durability: the behaviour survived the end of the contract, which most interventions cannot manage. The wider literature points the same way. These tools help some people meaningfully, and the people they help most are the ones who already suspected they needed one. More on that in our explainer on commitment devices.

Five questions to ask before you stake anything

Ask these of any app in this category, including ours, and the shortlist gets short quickly.

1. Who keeps the money if I fail? If the answer is the app itself, that is not automatically disqualifying, but you should know it, and you should prefer companies that state it as plainly as Beeminder does.
2. What counts as proof, and who decides? Self-reported numbers work if your failure mode is forgetting. They do not work if your failure mode is negotiating with yourself at 9pm.
3. Can the amount grow without me touching anything? Escalators are effective and expensive. If one exists, find the cap setting before your first miss, not after.
4. When exactly is my card charged, and can that be reversed? Look for the gap between the miss and the collection, and for an appeal route that a human being actually reads.
5. What happens during a legitimately terrible week? Flu, funerals, travel. An app with no forgiveness mechanism will punish the weeks you least deserve it, and that is usually the week people delete the app.

What we left off this list, and why

We kept the list to four because the other candidates are either a different mechanic or unverifiable. Two categories get lumped in with this search and shouldn't be. And this niche has a graveyard of half-maintained products with dead pricing pages and terms that no longer match the app; four entries we can source beat seven we cannot.

Pooled bets are not forfeits

Several fitness apps run pot-style games: everyone buys in, everyone who hits the target splits the pot, and the people who miss lose their entry. That is a wager against other participants, not a forfeit to a third party. It creates a different feeling, since your loss becomes someone else's win, and the deterrent is capped at your buy-in.

In-app penalties are not money

Gamified habit trackers, Habitica being the best known, penalise you in game terms: health, gold, lost progress. That motivates some people, and it is not the same thing as your card being charged.

Common questions

Which one costs least if I never miss?

StickK charges no subscription fee, so a contract you keep costs nothing. Beeminder is free for up to three goals, then $8 per month on Infinibee, $16 on Bee Plus, and $81 on Beemium. Commit charges per missed check-in rather than upfront, so a week you complete does not generate a charge. Verify all of these before you sign up, since pricing pages change more often than articles about them.

What if the app charges me for something I actually did?

Press this question hardest, because the answer differs sharply. Beeminder charges on the data as entered, since nothing reviews it, so the thing to research is what their support team will and won't reverse. On StickK, verification and any correction both run through the referee you nominated. On Commit, a hold is placed when you miss and collected after 72 hours, and you can appeal, with appeals judged at a lower bar than the initial review. Find this policy before you fund anything.

Should the money go to a charity or an anti-charity?

Choose the anti-charity if you want the stake to work as hard as possible. A forfeit that funds something you find agreeable is easy to rationalise; a forfeit that funds the opposite of your politics is not. It is uncomfortable by design, which is the entire point of a commitment device. StickK, Commit, and others offer the option.

Sources

• Beeminder FAQ, including the business-model statement: beeminder.com/faq
• Beeminder plan pricing: beeminder.com/premium
• Beeminder pledge escalator: help.beeminder.com
• StickK founding and model: stickk.com/aboutus
• Forfeit, for its own current terms: forfeit.app
• Habitica, as an example of in-app rather than monetary penalties: habitica.com
• Giné, X., Karlan, D. & Zinman, J. (2010). Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract for Smoking Cessation. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(4), 213–35. aeaweb.org

Third-party figures checked on 12 August 2026. If anything here is out of date or wrong about another product, write to [email protected] and we will correct it.

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