Pick this board
Use this board for a launch you can point at. One stake, one date, 2–21 days. We fetch the live page. Success refunds most of the money and puts you in that week's pool. Failure is binary: the stake dies into the pool.
vs Beeminder
Beeminder graphs a habit. This settles a ship date.
Beeminder is the quantified-self commitment device: a graph, a yellow brick road, and a pledge that gets more expensive every time you derail. Perfect when the work is steps, words, or hours. A ship date is not a time series.
Beeminder keeps you on a datapath. ShipOrDie.lol asks whether a public product URL existed by the end of a UTC day. Beeminder
Side by side
AxisBeeminderShipOrDie.lol
Job
Beeminder
Stay on a quantified goal graph
ShipOrDie.lol
Ship a live product by a public UTC date
Stake
Beeminder
Pledge that escalates after each derail
ShipOrDie.lol
$25–$2000 charged once up front. No ladder
Proof
Beeminder
Integrations and self-entered data
ShipOrDie.lol
Live https fetch. Parked and empty pages fail
Public
Beeminder
Your graph, unless you share it
ShipOrDie.lol
The book is public. Friends can watch or dare you on
Window
Beeminder
Ongoing; the road does not end
ShipOrDie.lol
2–21 days, one active commitment
Miss
Beeminder
You pay Beeminder; the pledge steps up
ShipOrDie.lol
Full stake funds makers who shipped that week
Pick Beeminder
Use Beeminder when the goal is a number you can plot — writing, Anki, running — and you want automatic derail charges that escalate. Do not use it as a fake ship board; it will not fetch your site.
Beeminder questions
All comparisonsIs ShipOrDie a Beeminder alternative?
Only if you were stretching Beeminder into a launch deadline. Beeminder is for datapaths. This is for a product URL. If you need both, keep Beeminder for the daily graph and put the ship date here.
Why not escalate the stake like Beeminder?
Because a ship is one event. You pick a number that already hurts ($25–$2000) and you pay it before the clock starts. There is no "next derail costs more." Miss once and that stake is gone into the weekly pool.
Does ShipOrDie import GitHub commits or step counts?
No. Commits are not a product. Proof is a live public https URL after the stake has sat on the board. Repos, social posts, and localhost do not count. Loom or GitHub is extra proof at $250+, not a substitute for the live page.
Can I use Beeminder and ShipOrDie together?
Yes. Graph the daily work wherever you want. When the work has to become a URL on a date the internet can see, stake that date here.