Thanks for your feedback!
1. Right now we offer up to one million messages for free. After that, we charge per each initiated million messages delivered. Meaning, if you send 900 000 you will be charged for 1 MM. Much how Amazon bills hours on EC2.
2. Well, sure. Our endpoint server (where all browsers connect) is written in Java. We're using the Netty framework, which we are incredibly happy with. Highly recommend it for doing high-performance networking in Java. Also, using the JVM instead of, say node.js, makes it very easy to utilize all our CPUs.
The user-facing website is implemented in our own framework called Planet. Developed in-house using Python with focus on real-time web sites. Both Beacon and Planet share the same underlying push technology and we have some major customers using it. You can read more about it at http://www.esn.me
The REST API is also implemented in Python and coordinates the message sending among our end-point servers. It's quite simple actually, just 200 lines of code.
3. Sounds like a good idea. It's just a few lines of code that's needed to integrate it.
But yeah, a simple chat app hosted on GitHub would be helpful for newcomers.
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Carl