Beeper acquired by Automattic
blog.beeper.com
blog.beeper.com
Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of the WhatsApp/iMessage/Messenger walled gardens? And if that were to happen, do you foresee Beeper still existing as a standalone product? Do you foresee there actually being a need for Beeper versus, say, a rejuvenated (and very open) Pidgin?
Yeah, neither do I...although I do prefer to be optimistic.
Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
Is the added investment necessary to scale out specific features, or is it to address challenges related to profitability?
What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?
Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients.
It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.
Although I'm the plugin's developer, so I may be a little biased :D
Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?
Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...
Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.
The new android app is really good, the desktop app has always been a step up from other Element apps I've used (it is a distant fork, these days), I don't have iMessage, but it works great with Matrix and Signal and WhatsApp a ton of other "rarely used" apps I have.
I'm calling Webster's right now.
If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
They both look verify similar in their features. Maybe texts.com for the Apple Ecosystem and Beeper for the Android one ?
After all, Beeper just released their new version of the app for Android.
"For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"
EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.
You can. You run a "router" on your Mac, which allows iMessage interop without the protocol hacking that doomed Beeper.
One app for Apple and another for Android kinda defeats the purpose of "all in one platform", wouldn't it?
It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.
(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)
I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/
> Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging.
So we'll only have Beeper on every platform.
My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.
My own personal site is static HTML mirrored against Cloudflare, I do definitely see the advantage when it's there :)
It seems automattic is realizing that there is value in being "the established service that does what the giants are doing but isn't the giants". Personally and I think the HN crowd would agree with me, I see the value proposition in using Tumblr, beeper, WordPress over their competitors, simply because automattic has amassed a lot of consumer trust in not running things into the ground and making interesting things out of software that seems like it shouldn't be there.
Also they hire all around the world where $100k/yr is the exception and not the norm.
Some users on Reddit reported that they get suspended by Instagram because of Beeper.
UPDATE: To date, Beeper had raised $16 million in outside funding, including an $8 million Series A from Initialized. Other investors include YC, Samsung Next, Liquid2Ventures, and angels Garry Tan, Kevin Mahaffey, Niv Dror, and the group SV Angel. [1]
1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...
Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.
I agree with the sentiment of your comment. However, I'm not sure it answers: what's the justification of this purchase? What does the buyer know that others have not?
March 9, 2021: Paid $120
June 2, 2021: It's your turn to start using Beeper
June 10, 2021: Invite code for upcoming Beeper onboarding
July 2, 2021: totally locked up now
At which point, I had a few more back and forth emails (looks like about 27 from 7/2/2021 - 7/16/2021), and finally gave up.
Good for them to get that exit. They put a lot of work into it, but it seemed like an impossible problem to solve.
See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8
> Since then, Beeper has rolled out some security upgrades that change the way the app handles security and prevent Beeper itself from seeing unencrypted messages from Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted apps. Screenshots of Beeper’s desktop and mobile apps.
How?
I'd honestly be fine with accepting the compromise of hosted bridges, especially since they seem to offer the ability to self-host the bridges, while using Beepers' Matrix infra. Gives them some extra cred in my book.
Nothing innovative here that's crazy
Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!
I’ve dug deep into both products —- texts.com basically is browser in browser app that pulls in messages from your logged in session, while matrix you have to deploy bridges that pulls messages and sync to a db in the cloud, and app then syncs to that.
Matrix was a bit pain in the ass to work with, and texts.com was more straight forward
I also would prefer not to see consolidation but also I imagine it's hard to make money on this kind of product so maybe that drove the decision to merge?
1. WordPress.com - Hosted SaaS for building websites. Very cheap to run, includes ads on free sites, and they sell users upgrades like custom domains or removing ads from their sites.
2. Jetpack - Services for self-hosted WordPress sites, like backups, social media integration, image CDN, antispam - mostly paid services, again very cheap to run.
3. WooCommerce - Open source ecommerce service. They sell add-ons like payment gateways, and have their own with a percentage fee of each transaction.
4. WPVIP - Enterprise and high-scale hosting service. Expensive ($25k/yr+) but worth it for large companies who run their business off it, like newsrooms and marketing sites.
To my knowledge, they're each independently profitable. Automattic also has a lot of additional smaller services which support these, and various Other Bets.
(I don't work at Automattic, but have many friends there.)
The only “innovative” feature the Apple Journal app has is access to private data that other apps don’t, to be able to come up with ML-based journalling recommendations. However, this feature is also exposed via an API, for other journalling apps to implement too.
So… if you’re not actually a journaler, the Apple Journal app is probably good enough for you.
If you actually journal, you’ll probably use Day One, because the set of compromises it makes best aligns with the majority of active journalers.
It upset me when they turned off iCloud sync in favour of their proprietary server sync, because they’re effectively asking me to trust them with my data. They finally implemented E2EE though, and it looks like it’s been implemented properly, so it’s less bothersome again.
It’s just a shame that Diarium refuses to implement high resolution images, or they’d actually be a viable competitor with the ability to self-host your E2EE DB sync.
Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/
"Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future."
Reminder: wordpress.com shares data with 851 other companies.
"For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the bridge, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol."
Directly underneath that they also say:
"Using native end-to-end encrypted chat apps independently may be more secure than connecting to them to Beeper"
https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...
if I'm running the bridges local-to-the-client (I am, on my McBook) it's not meaningfully any less e2ee. encryption happens in the matrix client (running on the laptop), the encrypted message is sent to the homeserver on localhost, the bridge (on localhost) grabs the encrypted message and decrypts it, then the bridge re-encrypts it and sends it to Whatsapp (or wherever). the content of the message is as secure over the wire with this approach as using first-party apps directly
if one hosts their own bridges they're person-in-the-middling themselves and should take all the necessary precautions. if they're using beeper's hosted options they have to delegate read/write ability to beeper (though I think the signal and imessage bridges might be device-local), and beeper is clear about that.
They usually call it E2B (end to bridge)
Another application is resource-constrained devices. I love the netbook form-factor, but my little Intel N200 machine buckles under the strain of running what amounts to six web browsers simultaneously (because everything is Electron now) in order to receive notifications from all the chat networks I have people on.
It can also be nice to have a kind of buffer layer in between you and the chat network, which doesn't necessarily have your interests in mind. For example, Facebook Messenger's Android app somehow managed to wake up my phone's screen every time it received a notification, despite my turning off every related setting and permission I could find. So I put it behind Beeper and the problem is gone.
Their press release (https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/) says "Beeper does not currently support iMessage". Does that refer to the Android client?
I hope they continue to support iMessage on the desktop.
If all they do is keep Beeper running reliably and add new services as needed, then I'd say that's a good thing for most users.
Honestly, Automattic is probably one of the best exit routes for them. They have a history of being a good steward of their acquisitions. Compared to other companies that either shut them down or enshittify their products as a manner of course, it's valuable when a company can simply maintain their acquisitions alive and keep them running, at least giving them a chance to grow.
Kidding of course, but on a serious note what's the strategic value of Beeper here to Automattic?
From the post:
> Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans! I’m really excited about the future of chat
Why? Are they trying to eliminate a competitor (standard big tech co move)? Do they think texts.com doesn't have a bright future? I'm not trying to be negative (in fact I have a high opinion of Automattic due to their great open source work), just trying to figure out why this makes sense for them.
Is chat a diversification effort for Automattic, or does it tie into their overall strategy somehow?
(to clarify, I don't mean "elimination of a competitor" with a value jodgment on it btw. It isn't inherently a good or a bad thing, just depends on lots of variables)
(1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time.
(2) Generate lots of press visibility.
(3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.
> Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper
It certainly sounds like…
Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and early investor CEO of Automattic saved their failing personal investment by bailing them out and letting automattic foot the bill.
Nice having a friend CEO, huh?
I mean, you’ve got to hope/believe the other folk at automattic did their due diligence, but it does look like automattic is paying the bills for their CEO to bail out their friends.
That would make them gullible and seems pretty shady unless they really do have some astonishing reason to expect this to pay off… or they got it dirt cheap, in my opinion.
I don't think that's true at all. I'd never heard of Beeper before their integration with iMessage and the fact that it was disabled by Apple was seen as a negative on Apple, not Beeper. They raised their profile, now they're cashing out.
A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face.
Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on.
How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m.
Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this would need board approval, and a good board needs ... rigorous dd.
Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000
Matt promised targets.
Every target was missed and financially the deal was a failure.
The board then stopped any further acquisitions.
I would guess that texts / beeper were cheap and that Matt is looking at a very very long time to profit. He was once a fan of the 'pizza/team' ratio that Bezos/Amazon pushed, so maybe that's where he is looking.
It is a magical way to turn “anybody” into a successful founder or VC if they’ve got the right connections and in fact you can create both ex-nihilo in one transaction.
If you read the newspapers you’d never find out that 70% of acquisitions achieve their goals. A lot of that is you hear more about the ones that fail and not the ones that succeed. The ones that fail give many people the impression that there is nothing rational at all about how acquisitions happen in corporate America.
There are a lot friend and family members of so-and-so who are "worth" a few million dollars and that money was largely a gift. They largely spend a lot of time pretending to be "founders", "advisors" and "angels" but no, they got lucky.
Not everything is like that, but there's quite a lot of that within the billions of someone else's money's ocean that flushed SF during the last +20 years.
When a similar acquisition was made a year ago? And it perfectly aligns with a their stated thesis that texting becomes a CLI in the future?
The more successful an entrepreneur, the more allergic they are to spending money
My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.
Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.
Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost useless.
It's a business model that works to get to some point, and then exit as soon as possible, IMO.
The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won.
Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire
I think Beeper will continue to be useful to people, regardless of whether it supports iMessage or not. Obviously, supporting iMessage would be a big plus, but from what I gather, many people use it for other services.
I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.
What are people using that for?
Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?
linkedin, fb, ig, slacks, google stuff and so on - it adds up quickly
I simply wouldn't talk to a lot of people in my life if I had to use a different app for each.
We also aim to be the best chat app, period. So even if you are using only a single account on a single network, we want to supercharge your chat experience with AI, snippets, good search, labels, advanced notification options, and much more.
I use SMS for talking to friends in the US. I use WhatsApp for talking to most international people. I use Telegram to talk to Australians. I use Line to talk to some people in Asia.
That's the point, the vision is that you should only have to be on Beeper.
Just real quick off the top of my head I can name a bunch: FB Instagram Twitter WhatsApp Telegram Signal Gchat/whatever google calls the chat in gmail these days kik sms Irc Discord
This is just a matter of keeping all those separate apps, or consolidating them into one single one. Back in the early 2000s when I did indeed have friends across AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc... I did use an all in one app to consolidate everything.
Also looks like it no longer connects to multiple networks, but uses their own now.
You do not need to be on all 14 to find Beeper useful! Even if you only use a few you might still want them to be together in a single app. As to why you might be on several different chat networks, you might have different friend or family circles that use different chat networks and may have failed to convinced them to move to a single one or, like me, may think it is a bad use of time to even attempt to convince them to. I'm using Beeper for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Discord and it's great!
Because you actually are using WhatsApp?
> Some people would pay for this convenience
Some remember when this used to be widespread and free: https://www.pidgin.im/
Beeper is just a skin over Matrix, and they are hosting and managing the bridges for you. So that when any of protocols they support breaks because the other company changes something (or intentionally breaks things to stop connections from clients they don't want), Beeper fixes it rather than you having to wait for the open source community to do so and you implement that fix. Which who knows how long either scenario will take.
Paying for Beeper is not having to manage the self hosting, which many are not willing to do. Because as with most open source solutions, it's not very simple and is intimidating for many. Not to mention having some box open to the internet, and having to maintain security updates for that box.
I would love for libpurple to come back and make these things relatively simple. But the reality is that companies have walled off their gardens to control the experience, and many other reasons ranging from greed to security to spam mitigation.
My IM situation is only currently tolerable because all of my frequent contacts are either via WhatSapp or twitter DM.
Even having the handful you do would be enough to make -me- want to consolidate.
(this is not at all meant to be an argument that -you- should want it, but I think is at least a good case that there will be people out there in your -situation- that will)
Ironically i joined because of iMessage, which got almost immediately ripped from me because Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple (... sorry, annoyed). When i joined the service was great, but the last couple months (basically since the iMessage drama) it has been weirdly unstable. I see a lot of encrypted messages (as in, the message doesn't receive properly and all the receiver sees is "message encrypted"), images failing, gifs failing, generally bad behavior when connection is poor, etc.
I was interested when i joined because i thought they were just going to offer a service i could pay for, like Kagi. Yet now this feels like another enshittification just waiting to happen.
Publicity stunt to raise their visibility in hopes of acquisition. Today’s news shows it worked.
From the article, not a rumor.
How will this differ from https://texts.com/ which is also owned by Automattic?
But let's say it's not antitrust, which is what your question is trying to imply. Apple will still need to answer to the other ways it makes third-party messaging apps worse on iOS - automatic offloading and share extensions being two examples.
Are there other capabilities that I'm missing?
Either way, congrats to the team!
It's fine for open integrations like Matrix/IRC but all other are with proprietary services provided by for-profit companies.. that usually doesn't go well in the long run (e.g. Twitter clients).
It seems to be a really high risk investment. I wonder how they plan to pull this off if/when they start to grow and attract more attention.
- Never trust ANY money-making company IMPLICILTY.
- Go to https://apple.wordpress.com
See the cookie banner
Click View Partners in the bottom left
Browse that list, check the details
Find the company that Matt has sold your data to for over 11 years.
The data Matt sells is for every user and every visitor not just on wordpress.com (who clicks Agree, but we know most people do)
Are you still happy?
In any case I'm not sure if I'd call their iMessage thing a PR stunt (okay, the tweets were likely PR), I'm just happy they support as many standards as they can. (I'm also not sure if my original comment was seen as wrong or controversial judging by the downvote)
> Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years
Could it perhaps be a favor for a friend to give a plausible reason for ejecting from the business without admitting failure?
Even friends don't spend $150M on friends for no reason. Automattic is doing well, but they don't have $150M to drop (plus future salaries, hosting, etc) just to help someone save face.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/technology/beeper-messagi...
(Obviously a lot of that is likely stock, but that's true about most acquisitions)
I view an acquisition like this as a relative death knell, but only insofar as we have seen unified messaging attempted time and again only to fail due to combinations of social pressures and anticompetitive technical choices. Beeper will be absorbed into another also-ran messaging platform that won't be able to compete with whatever communities already have critical mass.
However, as far as exits go, it sort of seems like the best possible outcome for the folks at Beeper, so congrats.
This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.
I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.
So long as iMessage is sold as "better SMS" then that's fine, as it inherits SMS's limitations (above) - but it isn't a portable, platform-agnostic, geography-neutral, messaging platform, and I'd rather people didn't try to use it as such.
If I send someone a text and they receive it in their email inbox because that's their preference, what difference does it make to me as the sender?
Unless you go to the effort to tell people that you route your SMS messages to e-mail and therefore reply in-your-own-time (hours/days/weeks delay), the people trying to contact you aren't going to expect that: they're going to expect you to reply much sooner. I'd be out of a job if my boss' panicked SMS messages about how our prod website is down went to email instead of my phone.
-------------
Any kind of "universal" messaging platform that anyone can use to send anyone a message needs to allow recipients to set how maximially intrusive those messages are - but senders might also want a way to set how minimally intrusive those messages are. Those requirements cannot be easily reconciled in a way that protects privacy and prevents abuse while also allowing anonymous and unsolicited messages or senders. So far the "best" way to do that today is by segregating senders (not recipients) by system (e.g. private SMS for high-intrusive; less-private-but-guarded e-mail for low-intrusive; public social-media, etc).
Consider services that tried to work-around that, such as LinkedIn's paid messaging feature - which didn't exactly go very well.
For me, my unified workflow is my phone, which I have tuned to receive notifications from various platforms in various different ways (push, pull, manual). Even if I could tune Beeper to do the same, I would prefer not to have to duplicate my effort in setting preferences, which I've already set at the OS level.
It's not that you don't receive messages but that you need to keep installed 14 different applications on your phone or get used to 14 different UIs to do the same thing.
The major problem is the WhatsApp vs Telegram split for me, if all my friends were on Telegram I wouldn't really need it.
Self hosted Matrix sounds like a good solution and I'm happy with managing my own server - but the UI quality (Elements) is just not on par with Telegram, so I'm still there.
I agree with you, it's nice to relegate spam to Linkedin / Email, but that can be achieved with marking contacts as friends vs random people and having a unified messaging platform.
Reminds me of why I used https://pidgin.im 20-years ago.
It was an aggregator chat app.
in what scenario do you see anyone giving the negative answer truthfully?
Enshittification is the default path for leaders with MBA brain, but some still manage to avoid it.
every. company. wants. money.
it's the SAME, EVERY.SINGLE.TIME