Beeper Relaunches with Enhanced Privacy and Premium Features

Beeper's all-in-one messaging app relaunches with an on-device model and premium upgrades | TechCrunch

Multi-service messaging app Beeper, which allows people to connect to all their chat apps from one interface, is relaunching its app on Wednesday to offer a more secure version that no longer requires use of its own cloud services. In addition, Beeper is introducing premium offerings that provide access to more accounts than its free tier, and include power-user features like reminders, the ability to send messages later, an incognito mode to read messages without marking them read, AI voice note transcriptions, and more. Now owned by WordPress.com maker Automattic, which bought Beeper for $125 million in 2024, the app has now almost entirely integrated with competitor Texts.com, which Automattic also acquired the year prior for $50 million. With a combined 30-person team (including contractors) and now operating under the Beeper brand, the messaging app supports WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, X, Telegram, Signal, Matrix, Slack, Google Chat, Discord, LinkedIn, and Google Messages (SMS/RCS). On Mac computers only, Beeper can also connect users with their iMessage chats, though Apple has shut down this access in prior versions. The overall goal, according to Automattic, is to simplify the problem of having too many messaging apps to keep up with, while also keeping those chats secure. The app previously first connected with Beeper Cloud before communicating with the messaging network, said Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria. While that system remains the default, users will now have the option of switching to Beeper on device, which will see the app connecting directly to the messaging network and skipping the middleman. "That ensures that end-to-end encryption is preserved and your privacy is as good as the official app," Bagaria told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the app's relaunch. Whether or not the companies involved will appreciate having their own apps bypassed, however, remains to be seen. "We have good relationships with some of these companies, and some of them are OK with this," Bagaria said. "Others, we have not really heard from much." To stave off any potential shutdowns by messaging network providers, Beeper aims to support the business models of the first-party apps whenever possible. For example, if Telegram is showing ads, those ads will be shown in Beeper, too. In addition, EU regulations requiring interoperable messaging platforms could put pressure on messaging app providers to leave a solution like Beeper's alone. Alongside the relaunch, there will now be an option to upgrade to a new $9.99 per month premium plan, Beeper Plus, which allows users to connect with 10 messaging services instead of just the five that free users have access to. In addition, Plus subscribers have the option to schedule messages to send later, can set reminders to follow up on chats, read messages in incognito mode so they don't feel pressured to respond immediately, access multiple accounts per network, view AI voice note transcriptions (processed via OpenAI's Whisper model with user consent), and swap out their app icon for a custom version. An even higher tier, Beeper Plus Plus, which starts at $49.99 per month, offers access to unlimited accounts and is designed with the needs of businesses or social media managers in mind. (Annual subscriptions are also available at a discounted price of $99.99 per year for Beeper Plus and $499 per year for Beeper Plus Plus.) Following Beeper's acquisition by Automattic, the company combined its team with Texts.com to develop a new product that offered the best of both services. With Wednesday's relaunch, those apps are now 99% integrated, Bagaria said, as only a few smaller features remain to be ported over. Eventually, Automattic's latest acquisition, the personal CRM Clay which may be later rebranded), will also be integrated with Beeper, though it will remain a standalone app. "It will mostly be built on top of the Beeper platform -- it'll stay complimentary," Bagaria said. "Clay is an amazing app [as it] works today. Then, with Beaver, it can just ingest more interactions and data, which will make it like two to 10x better. Once that is done, I'm sure Clay can be a very powerful product." Beeper today has millions of registered users, including those from Texts.com. A small portion of those who are still using Texts.com are now being offered the option migrate to Beeper, since it has added the on-device technology, which they prefer. Bagaria said there may still be some remaining issues around reliability when moving to the on-device model, but those are being worked out as edge cases pop up. At some later point, Beeper Cloud will be deprecated once the company is sure the on-device model is capable of being everyone's daily driver. Further down the road, Beeper aims to make its data available to other companies, with user permission and controls to protect privacy. For instance, an MCP Beeper one day could let users connect to chat apps via Claude or ChatGPT to ask it things like "summarize all my important messages from this evening." Those developments will take some time, as Bagaria says he's also a "very privacy-conscious user," and would want a solution that's very transparent about what data is accessed and when, and one that allows users to even manually say yes or no to data requests, perhaps. "We also don't want to have server farms where we have models trained on your data. That's a complete no, no," he said.

Beeper's all-in-one messsaging app relaunches with an on-device model and premium upgrades | TechCrunch

Multi-service messaging app Beeper, which allows people to connect to all their chat apps from one interface, is relaunching its app on Wednesday to offer a more secure version that no longer requires use of its own cloud services. In addition, Beeper is introducing premium offerings that provide access to more accounts than its free tier, and include power-user features like reminders, the ability to send messages later, an incognito mode to read messages without marking them read, AI voice note transcriptions, and more. Now owned by WordPress.com maker Automattic, which bought Beeper for $125 million in 2024, the app has now almost entirely integrated with competitor Texts.com, which Automattic also acquired the year prior for $50 million. With a combined 30-person team (including contractors) and now operating under the Beeper brand, the messaging app supports WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, X, Telegram, Signal, Matrix, Slack, Google Chat, Discord, LinkedIn, and Google Messages (SMS/RCS). On Mac computers only, Beeper can also connect users with their iMessage chats, though Apple has shut down this access in prior versions. The overall goal, according to Automattic, is to simplify the problem of having too many messaging apps to keep up with, while also keeping those chats secure. The app previously first connected with Beeper Cloud before communicating with the messaging network, said Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria. While that system remains the default, users will now have the option of switching to Beeper on device, which will see the app connecting directly to the messaging network and skipping the middleman. "That ensures that end-to-end encryption is preserved and your privacy is as good as the official app," Bagaria told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the app's relaunch. Whether or not the companies involved will appreciate having their own apps bypassed, however, remains to be seen. "We have good relationships with some of these companies, and some of them are OK with this," Bagaria said. "Others, we have not really heard from much." To stave off any potential shutdowns by messaging network providers, Beeper aims to support the business models of the first-party apps whenever possible. For example, if Telegram is showing ads, those ads will be shown in Beeper, too. In addition, EU regulations requiring interoperable messaging platforms could put pressure on messaging app providers to leave a solution like Beeper's alone. Alongside the relaunch, there will now be an option to upgrade to a new $9.99 per month premium plan, Beeper Plus, which allows users to connect with 10 messaging services instead of just the five that free users have access to. In addition, Plus subscribers have the option to schedule messages to send later, can set reminders to follow up on chats, read messages in incognito mode so they don't feel pressured to respond immediately, access multiple accounts per network, view AI voice note transcriptions (processed via OpenAI's Whisper model with user consent), and swap out their app icon for a custom version. An even higher tier, Beeper Plus Plus, which starts at $49.99 per month, offers access to unlimited accounts and is designed with the needs of businesses or social media managers in mind. (Annual subscriptions are also available at a discounted price of $99.99 per year for Beeper Plus and $499 per year for Beeper Plus Plus.) Following Beeper's acquisition by Automattic, the company combined its team with Texts.com to develop a new product that offered the best of both services. With Wednesday's relaunch, those apps are now 99% integrated, Bagaria said, as only a few smaller features remain to be ported over. Eventually, Automattic's latest acquisition, the personal CRM Clay which may be later rebranded), will also be integrated with Beeper, though it will remain a standalone app. "It will mostly be built on top of the Beeper platform -- it'll stay complimentary," Bagaria said. "Clay is an amazing app [as it] works today. Then, with Beaver, it can just ingest more interactions and data, which will make it like two to 10x better. Once that is done, I'm sure Clay can be a very powerful product." Beeper today has millions of registered users, including those from Texts.com. A small portion of those who are still using Texts.com are now being offered the option migrate to Beeper, since it has added the on-device technology, which they prefer. Bagaria said there may still be some remaining issues around reliability when moving to the on-device model, but those are being worked out as edge cases pop up. At some later point, Beeper Cloud will be deprecated once the company is sure the on-device model is capable of being everyone's daily driver. Further down the road, Beeper aims to make its data available to other companies, with user permission and controls to protect privacy. For instance, an MCP Beeper one day could let users connect to chat apps via Claude or ChatGPT to ask it things like "summarize all my important messages from this evening." Those developments will take some time, as Bagaria says he's also a "very privacy-conscious user," and would want a solution that's very transparent about what data is accessed and when, and one that allows users to even manually say yes or no to data requests, perhaps. "We also don't want to have server farms where we have models trained on your data. That's a complete no, no," he said.

Beeper Relaunch Lets You Link Your Chat Apps Without the Cloud, but Still No iMessage

Expertise Phones |Texting apps | iOS | Android | Smartwatches | Fitness trackers | Mobile accessories | Gaming phones | Budget phones | Toys | Star Wars | Marvel | Power Rangers | DC | Mobile accessibility | iMessage | WhatsApp | Signal | RCS Beeper, which was once known for attempting to provide access to the iMessage network on non-Apple devices, is relaunching itself Wednesday with a continued focus on being a texting hub for bringing together conversations from many other services. This app first launched last year after the company was acquired by Automattic and was merged with the similar Texts.com service. The biggest difference with the new launch is that Beeper is adding the ability to link your chat apps together using just your phone. Previously, Beeper relied on a cloud service for accessing each chat app and backing up your texts. While that cloud service provided the ability to sync your texts in the event you lost your device, it also led to concerns over the loss of end-to-end encryption since copies of your texts are still being saved by a third party. Beeper's new ability to cut out the cloud will mean that messages will be sent directly to your device over whichever chat network your texts are being sent, but Beeper itself will still need to be authorized to log in to networks like WhatsApp, Signal, Slack and others to connect to those networks. Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria said in an interview with CNET that this more direct connection should make these conversations as secure as using the chat apps directly, but notes that Beeper isn't meant to fully supplant those apps. "For something like Instagram, for example, technically we will not support the feeds, so if you want the feeds data or you want the profile data, you go back to the official app," Bagaria said. Bagaria said the relaunched app's focus is on people who are "super online" but too busy to manage chat apps. Beeper is also launching two premium tiers, which add additional features or offer features more tailored to social media managers who may be managing multiple texting services. Beeper Plus at $10 a month or $100 a year adds features like the ability to send later, set reminders to return to conversations, use an Incognito Mode for previewing messages without them getting marked as read, and AI voice note transcriptions. Some of these features are natively available in some of the chat apps that Beeper connects to, but could provide organizational help when wanting to collate together presences across multiple networks. Beeper is also offering a $49-per-month "Plus Plus" tier, which Bagaria said provides unlimited access for professional use. Beeper's current rendition is reminiscent of the service Trillian, which at one point interconnected instant messenger services like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat and others. However, as those services either shut down or disabled integration, Trillian has instead become its own instant messenger service with free and premium tiers.

Beeper 'Plus' subscription adds scheduled messages, AI voice transcription, more

Beeper, the app that infamously tried (and briefly succeeded) in bringing iMessage to Android, is getting a big update with improved privacy as well as a subscription that unlocks a bunch of new features. Since its acquisition by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) last year, Beeper has been relatively quiet. The app has remained free and functional, though without much to say in the way of the iMessage support that put it on the map. That's not changing for the time being, but Beeper does have some news to share as the app "relaunches" again. The first big update is that, starting now, Beeper users have the option to sever cloud connections entirely. The new Beeper has a big upgrade to security, following our commitment to the utmost privacy. Users now have the option to run the connections entirely on their device without Beeper Cloud. This means end-to-end encryption is now preserved. This means that some services won't work, including Slack and Discord, but the majority currently support on-device connections. Meanwhile, the big news is "Beeper Plus," a subscription on top of the existing app that adds a lot more functionality. As promised, Beeper's existing features are remaining free, but this new subscription will expand on what the app can do. New features include "Send Later," which acts as a scheduled message option for any of your connected services. "Reminders" will help you revisit a chat later in the day. "Incognito Mode" will let you preview messages without triggering read receipts. "AI Voice Note Transcriptions" will be able to transcribe a voice message, even if the app itself doesn't support that. Beeper Plus also unlocks custom app icons, as well as the ability to use multiple accounts for the same network (i.e. two WhatsApp accounts), but only up to 3 per network, with a maximum of 10. The standard Beeper Plus tier will cost $9.99/month or $99.99/year (the latter effectively giving 2 months free). Meanwhile, an upgraded "Plus Plus" tier costs $49.99/month or $499.99/year and supports "unlimited accounts and Priority support." This comes after Beeper has also been testing its redesigned app across iOS and Windows/Mac.