18 ms·

Beeper acquired by Automattic

558 points by Belphemur 2y ago

jamesmunns 2y ago
I really like Beeper, and congrats to them for getting acquired, but my first reaction is "aw damn how long until the parts I love about Beeper get incredible journey'd away". 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.
- lagniappe 2y ago
  >incredible journey'd away I'm calling Webster's right now.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
    - Analemma_ 2y ago
      That link is probably more apropos than you intend, since Automattic also now owns Tumblr and has been a decent steward of it thus far, not shutting it down even though it undoubtedly loses lots of money. Instead, they made a good-faith effort to make it profitable, before putting it in minimal-cost maintenance mode when that didn't work out. If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
- rmccue 2y ago
  Automattic very rarely shuts down any products they acquire, so I'd certainly be less concerned with them as the buyer compared to another company. (Their failure mode for acquisitions tends to be underresourcing them and letting them stagnate, not actually shutting them down.)
- COGlory 2y ago
  Automattic rescued Pocket Casts from NPR, and made them open source. Tumblr from Verizon. In general they're very good stewards.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Oh wow, thank you for posting this! I did not realize that they open sourced Pocket Casts. That is really neat of them.
  - Mindwipe 2y ago
    "Rescued Tumblr" would certainly be news to the remaining users of Tumblr.
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  FWIW, Automatic has bought a few projects I use (PocketCasts, Simplenote) and seem to have been pretty good stewards. For Simplenote they actually reduced the monetization (although a decade after the acquisition they've started remonetizing in a lowkey way which is hopefully sustainable)
edude03 2y ago
Kind of surprising, 1- because Automatic is known for wordpress, what's the play with messaging? 2- They apparently acquired texts.com as well so clearly an area they are interested in. 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?
- basisword 2y ago
  Automattic owns a few properties other than Wordpress now. They also own Pocketcasts (podcast client), Tumblr, and Day One (journalling software).
  - artdigital 2y ago
    Oh TIL that Day One is also Automattic
kilroy123 2y ago
I hope they don't change the pricing after this. I've been using Beeper for a few years now.
- xenospn 2y ago
  I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?
  - jamesmunns 2y ago
    Yeah, having all of your messaging in one place is amazing. Especially since they support a decent long tail of DM services as well.
    - xenospn 2y ago
      I use iMessage, messenger/IG, WhatsApp, Snapchat and slack. Probably not much value for my specific use case.
      - mst 2y ago
        I have a paid irccloud account entirely for the goal of being able to talk to Slack users without dealing with the Slack client(s). 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)
  - bluish29 2y ago
    Not having to use multiple messaging apps. Some people would pay for this convenience. i.e They support several messaging apps so I don't have to tell peopl thag I don't use WhatsApp now.
    - 2y ago
Belphemur 2y ago
I wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com. 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.
- bluish29 2y ago
  Beeper is cross platform. They have an app for iOS and Mac.
  - ghostly_s 2y ago
    OP didn't day Mac. They were presumably referring to Apple's main platform, iOS.
    - bluish29 2y ago
      I replied before the OP edited the comment substantially.
  - batuhanicoz 2y ago
    Both of our apps are cross-platform. Both Texts and Beeper are available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Texts for iOS is in public beta, you can join the TestFlight: https://texts.com/install/ios https://texts.com/install/ios
- austinkhale 2y ago
  Seems that way. From the announcement: "This is a big bet. 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!"
- timdorr 2y ago
  The bottom line of the post says as such (sorry if it was edited in after you posted) "For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"
eugenekolo 2y ago
Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.
- theamk 2y ago
  I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (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.
  - mvkel 2y ago
    What makes automattic gullible?
    - wokwokwok 2y ago
      I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > 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.
      - afavour 2y ago
        > Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage 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.
jamesmunns 2y ago
[dupe]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
user_7832 2y ago
Honestly given how dim of a view Apple takes of others tearing down their artificial walls, having the (legal) backing of a large company might be a good thing... assuming they don't shut it down of course.
- misnome 2y ago
  Beeper does plenty besides PR stunts (which seems to have paid off)
  - user_7832 2y ago
    You mean the other chat apps, right? Or do they do something other than chat as well? 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)
KingOfCoders 2y ago
Oh noooooooooo. And I have two Beepy.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  Acquisitions go mostly wrong and the buyer usually kills of side projects - $200 gone.
BadHumans 2y ago
If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).
  - joenot443 2y ago
    I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
    - rchaud 2y ago
      WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace. Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.
      - joenot443 2y ago
        You’re right, that distinction’s very important. I’d never recommend WordPress.com, I’m just a fan of Wordpress the OSS.
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      In the past I would have argued against you, but the WP block editor has taken away most of the advantage that Wix/SquareSpace had. I've done the same as you now. You can buy a $3/mo Hetzner ARM box and run 100 WP sites on it.
philg_jr 2y ago
This is cool. I always knew that Matrix could theoretically support anything chat related, but I had no idea that Beeper existed and a company was formed around the idea. This is actually exciting to me. It sounds stupid, but I can't wait to ditch the Apple ecosystem.
- LorenDB 2y ago
  Ditching Apple is not stupid at all. There's plenty of options that are less hostile overall and provide more choice. See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8
diamondfist25 2y ago
I wonder how texts.com and the matrix apps will work together. 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
drkleiner 2y ago
Good for both products, Beeper and Texts, but seems like there will be layoffs coming
erohead 2y ago
Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
- gwerbret 2y ago
  > Exciting day for Beeper! 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.
  - erohead 2y ago
    If you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin. Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
    - okennedy 2y ago
      > 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?
      - Grustaf 2y ago
        What he meant was they were running out of money.
latchkey 2y ago
Here is my Beeper timeline: 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.
- throwitaway222 2y ago
  Sounds like that was a time period where it was vaporware?
gnicholas 2y ago
Does anyone know how much Beeper raised, or how the economics of this exit work out? Just curious how this stacks up for everyone. 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-automattic-acquires-multi-service-messaging-app-beeper-for-125m/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I wonder what the angle is here. Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices with locking down their computing devices and platforms? Do they even have the resources for that? Or is this just an acquihire and abandonment of that whole messaging thing?
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  > Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire
- regularjack 2y ago
  Beeper is a unified messaging app that supports multiple services, the iMessage thing was a separate app called Beeper Mini. 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.
kayson 2y ago
Bummer that you have to use and link Google messages for sms now. With the old app, it used the local sms database, though performance was never as good as other sms apps for some reason.
nikolay 2y ago
Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!
- glenstein 2y ago
  For me that is a positive, not a negative. They have kept it alive, have not messed it up, and have not upset the apple cart with wild changes resulting in loss of compatibility with past versions. There can be cases where it's a negative but I think Automattic has been a near-perfect steward of Simplenote. I suppose my only concern as ever is how they keep it alive at their expense without freemium'ing and paywalling it to death. I assume they are just footing the bill for its continued operation right now.
  - smcnally 2y ago
    Agreed re stewardship & hope for long-term viability. Operation + updates ~3x / year for the iOS, macos and Linux clients I use daily and also for Android and Windows. Freemium and paywalling hasn’t infringed on utility yet and they’ve kept the source code available and GPLv2 https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron
- luuurker 2y ago
  Many companies don't know when to stop and end up killing their products by introducing bloat which almost no one wants and costs money to develop/maintain. Simplenote works, is maintained, and does what it says on the name... more should be like them. 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.
- lioeters 2y ago
  > sometimes acquires companies and does nothing 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.
markx2 2y ago
"Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. " Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/ 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.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  How does Automattic make money? Do they get paid to look the other way when people’s Wordpress blogs get spammed by SEO links?
  - ecommerceguy 2y ago
    WooCommerce is one.
  - trickjarrett 2y ago
    They provide hosting for Wordpress blogs, and a number of their backend tools have premium versions, such as backups, etc.
  - RobotToaster 2y ago
    They run a proprietary SaaS called jetpack that injects a lot of tracking into otherwise self hosted wordpress blogs.
- Contortion 2y ago
  Plus your messages will no longer be fully E2E encrypted. As per their FAQ (emphasis mine): "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-encrypted-chat-networks-like-imessage-signal-whatsapp https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...
ein0p 2y ago
How does Automattic even survive and remain profitable (?) nowadays? What’s the niche?
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  Pretty sure plenty of small commercial websites still host on wordpress.com. That and selling their user data to OpenAI.
- throw_m239339 2y ago
  A big chunk of news media online use wordpress instead of a custom CMS. So it's kind of the square space / wix / ghost for news media. I imagine Wordpress offers managed website instances for these companies.
- rmccue 2y ago
  Automattic is primarily four core businesses: 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.)
  - krallja 2y ago
    I am on an old Premium plan for the Day One journaling app. It was recently acquired by Automattic. Happy to keep paying, but concerned that Apple recently Sherlocked it.
    - oarsinsync 2y ago
syntaxing 2y ago
Kinda sad. Beeper owns a ton of Matrix bridges. I wonder what will happen now.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  Sounds like they're planning to still run the Beeper service, perhaps merged with Texts. I'd bet they'll still use Matrix, it seems to be the very core of how Beeper works.
- luuurker 2y ago
  Matt/Automattic is good at keeping things open source. On top of the work on WordPress and their plug-ins, when they acquired PocketCasts, they made the apps open source: https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-apps-are-now-open-source/ https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-...
fareesh 2y ago
Their mini tech was built on weird hacks - is all their tech the same or is there something legit powering it?
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  Well if you consider private APIs/impersonating 1st party clients weird hacks then yes, none of these services have official 3rd party client support.
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    I was thinking about this after seeing the announcement. 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.
Usename1 2y ago
[flagged]
gnicholas 2y ago
I find it interesting that so many people want to unify all their messages. For me, I like having different apps that I can check with different frequency. I am glad that I can get my iMessages immediately but that LinkedIn messages don't get delivered to me until I open the app/website. I have literally never had an issue where I didn't get a message in time because it was sent via the wrong platform. People who need to reach me urgently know how to do so.
- kibwen 2y ago
  That's a perfectly valid workflow, but it would certainly be nice for people who do want a unified workflow to be able to have that option.
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    Such an app/service would not work towards the interests of message recipients - but the message senders. Those interests are not aligned.
    - mtlynch 2y ago
      Why are they not aligned? 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?
      - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
        When you send an SMS text message, there's a understanding (and therefore, an expectation) that it goes directly to the recipient's phone/smartwatch and that they can reply immediately; i.e.: it's a system for high-priority (and therefore highly-intrusive) communications - this is why people generally don't give-out their mobile-phone number to strangers. 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.
languagehacker 2y ago
I've said this before, but Automattic's catalogue of products reads like an elephant graveyard of past internet fads. 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.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  > elephant graveyard of past internet fads. This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.
- rwbt 2y ago
  That's unfair to Automattic I think. I think they're really good to maintaining the products with less relative harm. Yes, I know the recent change in terms to feed their data to AI (you can pay them to avoid it). I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.
  - chiefalchemist 2y ago
    I think what they're saying is, Automattic buys products that are on the way out, not on the way up. So while Automattic might be great stewarts of has-beens, is that a good fit for Beeper, a company in a market that demands up and comer-ness?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gmays 2y ago
Congrats! Matt and the team at Automattic are a good group of folks. It seems like a great fit, and I'm excited to see what you guys do together.
- photomatt 2y ago
  Thank you!
jacksonhacker 2y ago
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boomskats 2y ago
The hopeless romantic in me is hoping the real reason Automattic acquired them was actually to get some useful developer documentation written for the Beepy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  Given how bad the WordPress documentation is, it's a weird hope to have from that company.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Interesting, I think the WordPress docs are pretty decent. There's always room for improvement, but I love how it links and shows you the source code. They could definitely expand documentation coverage for plugins and stuff though, that's a little lacking.
alberth 2y ago
Pidgin Reminds me of why I used https://pidgin.im https://pidgin.im 20-years ago. It was an aggregator chat app.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rw_grim 2y ago
  We're still here and still supporting tons of stuff... https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
- smashah 2y ago
  Pidgin is great
duxup 2y ago
>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. 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?
- garbageman 2y ago
  Not a user but I imagine it's like the blackberry model where texts, messenger, whatsapp, and whatever else all go to the same inbox rather than having to check 40 different apps. I really wish that idea would come back.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    I wish that idea came back with some sort of iron hard contract protecting user data in perpetuity.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  yes and sales and regular users too linkedin, fb, ig, slacks, google stuff and so on - it adds up quickly
- saynay 2y ago
  I would imagine most people are not using all 14, but some subset. If you have friends and family that are not all on the same services, having a unified inbox to talk to them all without having to remember who you talk to on what is convenient.
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  Rarely a single user would use 14 different chat networks. For example for me, I have two WhatsApp accounts (number for my current country + home country), Twitter, Instagram to chat with old friends, Facebook for some relatives, LinkedIn for networking, Signal to chat with my lawyer, Telegram for hobby communities. 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.
joelhaasnoot 2y ago
I just hope they don't kill Beepberry/beepy
kujl8 2y ago
[dead]
starik36 2y ago
I am using Beeper desktop app on Windows for the express purpose of being an iMessage client. Their press release (https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/ 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.
alalani1 2y ago
Automattic basically consolidated the messaging aggregator market for $175M - I don't have any data but given they had 40 FTE between the two companies, I would guess not more than $10M in revenue across the two. Anyone understand the business rationale for wanting to own this market?
- xmprt 2y ago
  No matter what, as long as we continue to communicate with each other, messaging will never die. Individual messaging platforms will come and go but the idea of instant messaging has existed for about as long as the internet. $175M might be a steal if Beeper gets more mass market appeal.
  - alalani1 2y ago
    Yeah, my first response was going to be that the paid messaging app business model hasn't worked that entire time. But what we've learned from Whatsapp is that there may be other ways to monetize (Whatsapp Business). Still not an obvious bet IMO but you're right that owning the messaging layer is valuable.
    - smashah 2y ago
      These apps are a gateway drug onto the Matrix protocol thereby eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies like WhatsApp (Meta).
      - Grustaf 2y ago
        What is the market size of people who care about "eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies"? And how will you monetize them? Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.
  - chiefalchemist 2y ago
    Yes. Messaging will never die. Given that, why has it been so difficult for so many to get a toe-hold - and be sustainable - for so long? 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?
k8svet 2y ago
The Verge reports: > 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?
- btseytlin 2y ago
  Probably on device encryption before anything is sent through their servers
  - k8svet 2y ago
    I'm sorry, but that's not an answer. WhatsApp encrypts the message E2E, and then Beeper is bridging it into Matrix. The only way this would make any sense is if they've bridged E2E all the way through to ... the clients? Like, it doesn't make any sense.
    - iLoveOncall 2y ago
      It's a journalist's take, they probably mean that Bleeper doesn't phone home the messages from the client.
    - k8svet 2y ago
      Well, now I regret that this comment sounds a bit dismissive, if another reply is true and they run the bridge locally. That's... impressive, and still surprising to think about. 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.
    - talhah 2y ago
      They actually reverse engineered Apple's iMessage and released a POC. At the time it worked and demonstrated on device bridges being a possibility. The runs locally and then encrypts it client side before it reaches beeper services. This can be enabled for Signal under experimental settings already. https://blog.beeper.com/2023/12/05/how-beeper-mini-works/ https://blog.beeper.com/2023/12/05/how-beeper-mini-works/
bhearu 2y ago
[flagged]
Andrex 2y ago
I trust Automattic implicitly. This seems like a good move.
- markx2 2y ago
  Oh, you really should not. - Never trust ANY money-making company IMPLICILTY. - Go to https://apple.wordpress.com 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?
  - photomatt 2y ago
    I dislike that third-party advertising network stuff too, hopefully we can get rid of it soon and replace with Blaze, no calls to third-party ad networks.
deleted 2y ago
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xinayder 2y ago
Do you plan on continuing contributing to open source, or is Automattic going to dictate your business plan and Beeper will be enshittified?
- jtbayly 2y ago
  “We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
  - xinayder 2y ago
    That's a pessimistic take to say that Automattic will close up Beeper and make it a worse a product.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      I think it's more of a criticism of asking the question as if that was ever going to be given as an answer, regardless of what the actual answer is. in what scenario do you see anyone giving the negative answer truthfully?
      - wpietri 2y ago
        I think the flavor of the answer says a lot. A vague negative answer will make me suspicious, as will one based in good intentions and moonbeams. But a negative answer rooted in principle and mentioning specific choices is one I'll take more seriously. Enshittification is the default path for leaders with MBA brain, but some still manage to avoid it.
    - compootr 2y ago
      that's a naive take to think there's no chance they will every. company. wants. money. it's the SAME, EVERY.SINGLE.TIME
      - askonomm 2y ago
        That's indeed what a purpose of companies are. Organizations that do not want money are registered as non-profit.
deleted 2y ago
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max_ 2y ago
What's the acquisition amount?
thoughtpeddler 2y ago
How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?
- freedomben 2y ago
  I'm sure that's a non-zero factor. Plus Beeper has a lot of name recognition due to their epic standoff
- xinayder 2y ago
  Is it really anti-trust if you reverse engineered something (deliberately breaking the ToS of said service - Apple can suspend your accounts for doing so) while said service ToS, a contract you sign when you use their service, explicitly forbids reverse engineering?
  - dqv 2y ago
    A more succinct question would be "can antitrust laws override the ToS?" The answer is "yes". The FTC can even make Apple change its ToS through a consent decree (and possibly through other mechanisms as well). A ToS can't shield you from antitrust enforcement. In this case, it might even hurt Apple, especially if it can be shown that Apple doesn't consistently apply this rule. 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.
- smashah 2y ago
  I'm surprised Whatsapp hasn't gone after them yet. They are famous for going after small independant open source maintainers for similar projects.
- Grustaf 2y ago
  It would be very surprising if they forced Apple to let competitors use their protocol and servers. Worst case scenario they might force them to let any chat app on the iPhone include SMS, that's the only real advantage that the first-party Messages app has over competitors.
freedomben 2y ago
and they're rewriting Beeper in PHP as a WordPress plugin! 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?
- flexagoon 2y ago
  Automattic also acquired Pocket Casts, so they don't only own things that fit into the WP ecosystem.
- photomatt 2y ago
  Our three missions are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. This fits in the third.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Thank you! What does Beeper bring to the table that texts.com doesn't or can't? Is this elimination of a competitor or is it a merging of two mostly complementary things? (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)
imwillofficial 2y ago
I don't see the win for Automattic here. Beeper seems to be a dead product with its main use case gutted. Are there other capabilities that I'm missing? Either way, congrats to the team!
throwaway6e8f 2y ago
This is an odd match, and at a time when the strategic value of Beeper seems to be very low. > 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?
- gkoberger 2y ago
  Sure, but Automattic also bought Texts.com... this seems to be part of a bigger strategy on their part. 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.
  - Grustaf 2y ago
    The $150M figure is just hearsay though, isn't it? Or has either party officially mentioned it?
    - gkoberger 2y ago
      Whoops, I was a bit off, it's actually $125M https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/technology/beeper-messaging-app-automattic.html 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)
      - Grustaf 2y ago
        I can't read the story, is the number official?
andrewstetsenko 2y ago
At some point, it makes sense to join forces for Beeper and texts.com to create a unified messaging app. The idea was realized a number of times, but I hope we’ll see the best it’s iteration now.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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brianjking 2y ago
Congrats to Beeper, but I think that means I'll end up having to pay $25 or something to keep using it. How will this differ from https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ which is also owned by Automattic?
pedalpete 2y ago
That's an acquisition price of $1,086/user, note that isn't active user! Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!
- pjerem 2y ago
  For once, they are probably not acquiring users but the tech & the brand (fighting with iMessage was a genius marketing move).
  - Grustaf 2y ago
    Isn't the important part of the tech open source?
dankwizard 2y ago
Isn't this the joke from The Office with WOOPH or whatever it was... and an old program called Pidgin? Nothing innovative here that's crazy
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  Haha I was thinking about that, but the joke is actually the reverse of this. When someone sends you a WUPHF, you receive it on every medium. Phone, email, fax, text. Beeper does the opposite, anytime you receive something on one of these platforms, it consolidates it to the Beeper app
  - egman_ekki 2y ago
    So a FHPUW, then.
idk1 2y ago
Might be a bit late to the debate, but is Beeper secure enough to use? I'm apprehensive about installing it.
philippgerard 2y ago
I guess it's good to join forces on this. However, I really hope the Texts app on Mac will survive this merge as it is lightyears ahead of the UI insult that Beeper is. I migrated away from Beeper to get rid of the ugly interface and in order to not depend on bridges on some server somewhere (yes, I can host them myself, but who wants to?) anymore.
mahmoudimus 2y ago
Congratulations Eric! Super happy for you and the team!

558 points by Belphemur 2y ago

I really like Beeper, and congrats to them for getting acquired, but my first reaction is "aw damn how long until the parts I love about Beeper get incredible journey'd away". 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.

lagniappe 2y ago
>incredible journey'd away I'm calling Webster's right now.
- Philpax 2y ago
  Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
  - Analemma_ 2y ago
    That link is probably more apropos than you intend, since Automattic also now owns Tumblr and has been a decent steward of it thus far, not shutting it down even though it undoubtedly loses lots of money. Instead, they made a good-faith effort to make it profitable, before putting it in minimal-cost maintenance mode when that didn't work out. If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
rmccue 2y ago
Automattic very rarely shuts down any products they acquire, so I'd certainly be less concerned with them as the buyer compared to another company. (Their failure mode for acquisitions tends to be underresourcing them and letting them stagnate, not actually shutting them down.)
COGlory 2y ago
Automattic rescued Pocket Casts from NPR, and made them open source. Tumblr from Verizon. In general they're very good stewards.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Oh wow, thank you for posting this! I did not realize that they open sourced Pocket Casts. That is really neat of them.
- Mindwipe 2y ago
  "Rescued Tumblr" would certainly be news to the remaining users of Tumblr.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
FWIW, Automatic has bought a few projects I use (PocketCasts, Simplenote) and seem to have been pretty good stewards. For Simplenote they actually reduced the monetization (although a decade after the acquisition they've started remonetizing in a lowkey way which is hopefully sustainable)

edude03 2y ago

Kind of surprising, 1- because Automatic is known for wordpress, what's the play with messaging? 2- They apparently acquired texts.com as well so clearly an area they are interested in. 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?

basisword 2y ago
Automattic owns a few properties other than Wordpress now. They also own Pocketcasts (podcast client), Tumblr, and Day One (journalling software).
- artdigital 2y ago
  Oh TIL that Day One is also Automattic

kilroy123 2y ago

I hope they don't change the pricing after this. I've been using Beeper for a few years now.

xenospn 2y ago
I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?
- jamesmunns 2y ago
  Yeah, having all of your messaging in one place is amazing. Especially since they support a decent long tail of DM services as well.
  - xenospn 2y ago
    I use iMessage, messenger/IG, WhatsApp, Snapchat and slack. Probably not much value for my specific use case.
    - mst 2y ago
      I have a paid irccloud account entirely for the goal of being able to talk to Slack users without dealing with the Slack client(s). 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)
- bluish29 2y ago
  Not having to use multiple messaging apps. Some people would pay for this convenience. i.e They support several messaging apps so I don't have to tell peopl thag I don't use WhatsApp now.
  - 2y ago

Belphemur 2y ago

I wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com. 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.

bluish29 2y ago
Beeper is cross platform. They have an app for iOS and Mac.
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  OP didn't day Mac. They were presumably referring to Apple's main platform, iOS.
  - bluish29 2y ago
    I replied before the OP edited the comment substantially.
- batuhanicoz 2y ago
  Both of our apps are cross-platform. Both Texts and Beeper are available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Texts for iOS is in public beta, you can join the TestFlight: https://texts.com/install/ios https://texts.com/install/ios
austinkhale 2y ago
Seems that way. From the announcement: "This is a big bet. 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!"
timdorr 2y ago
The bottom line of the post says as such (sorry if it was edited in after you posted) "For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"

eugenekolo 2y ago

Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.

theamk 2y ago
I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1: (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.
- mvkel 2y ago
  What makes automattic gullible?
  - wokwokwok 2y ago
    I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics… > 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.
    - afavour 2y ago
      > Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage 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.

jamesmunns 2y ago

[dupe]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

user_7832 2y ago

Honestly given how dim of a view Apple takes of others tearing down their artificial walls, having the (legal) backing of a large company might be a good thing... assuming they don't shut it down of course.

misnome 2y ago
Beeper does plenty besides PR stunts (which seems to have paid off)
- user_7832 2y ago
  You mean the other chat apps, right? Or do they do something other than chat as well? 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)

KingOfCoders 2y ago

Oh noooooooooo. And I have two Beepy.

KingOfCoders 2y ago
Acquisitions go mostly wrong and the buyer usually kills of side projects - $200 gone.

BadHumans 2y ago

If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.

rchaud 2y ago
Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).
- joenot443 2y ago
  I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
  - rchaud 2y ago
    WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace. Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.
    - joenot443 2y ago
      You’re right, that distinction’s very important. I’d never recommend WordPress.com, I’m just a fan of Wordpress the OSS.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    In the past I would have argued against you, but the WP block editor has taken away most of the advantage that Wix/SquareSpace had. I've done the same as you now. You can buy a $3/mo Hetzner ARM box and run 100 WP sites on it.

philg_jr 2y ago

This is cool. I always knew that Matrix could theoretically support anything chat related, but I had no idea that Beeper existed and a company was formed around the idea. This is actually exciting to me. It sounds stupid, but I can't wait to ditch the Apple ecosystem.

LorenDB 2y ago
Ditching Apple is not stupid at all. There's plenty of options that are less hostile overall and provide more choice. See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8

diamondfist25 2y ago

I wonder how texts.com and the matrix apps will work together. 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

drkleiner 2y ago

Good for both products, Beeper and Texts, but seems like there will be layoffs coming

erohead 2y ago

Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

gwerbret 2y ago
> Exciting day for Beeper! 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.
- erohead 2y ago
  If you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin. Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
  - okennedy 2y ago
    > 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?
    - Grustaf 2y ago
      What he meant was they were running out of money.

latchkey 2y ago

Here is my Beeper timeline: 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.

throwitaway222 2y ago
Sounds like that was a time period where it was vaporware?

gnicholas 2y ago

Does anyone know how much Beeper raised, or how the economics of this exit work out? Just curious how this stacks up for everyone. 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-automattic-acquires-multi-service-messaging-app-beeper-for-125m/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I wonder what the angle is here. Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices with locking down their computing devices and platforms? Do they even have the resources for that? Or is this just an acquihire and abandonment of that whole messaging thing?

micromacrofoot 2y ago
> Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire
regularjack 2y ago
Beeper is a unified messaging app that supports multiple services, the iMessage thing was a separate app called Beeper Mini. 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.

kayson 2y ago

Bummer that you have to use and link Google messages for sms now. With the old app, it used the local sms database, though performance was never as good as other sms apps for some reason.

nikolay 2y ago

Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!

glenstein 2y ago
For me that is a positive, not a negative. They have kept it alive, have not messed it up, and have not upset the apple cart with wild changes resulting in loss of compatibility with past versions. There can be cases where it's a negative but I think Automattic has been a near-perfect steward of Simplenote. I suppose my only concern as ever is how they keep it alive at their expense without freemium'ing and paywalling it to death. I assume they are just footing the bill for its continued operation right now.
- smcnally 2y ago
  Agreed re stewardship & hope for long-term viability. Operation + updates ~3x / year for the iOS, macos and Linux clients I use daily and also for Android and Windows. Freemium and paywalling hasn’t infringed on utility yet and they’ve kept the source code available and GPLv2 https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron
luuurker 2y ago
Many companies don't know when to stop and end up killing their products by introducing bloat which almost no one wants and costs money to develop/maintain. Simplenote works, is maintained, and does what it says on the name... more should be like them. 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.
lioeters 2y ago
> sometimes acquires companies and does nothing 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.

markx2 2y ago

"Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. " Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/ 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.

PaulHoule 2y ago
How does Automattic make money? Do they get paid to look the other way when people’s Wordpress blogs get spammed by SEO links?
- ecommerceguy 2y ago
  WooCommerce is one.
- trickjarrett 2y ago
  They provide hosting for Wordpress blogs, and a number of their backend tools have premium versions, such as backups, etc.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  They run a proprietary SaaS called jetpack that injects a lot of tracking into otherwise self hosted wordpress blogs.
Contortion 2y ago
Plus your messages will no longer be fully E2E encrypted. As per their FAQ (emphasis mine): "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-encrypted-chat-networks-like-imessage-signal-whatsapp https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...

ein0p 2y ago

How does Automattic even survive and remain profitable (?) nowadays? What’s the niche?

ghostly_s 2y ago
Pretty sure plenty of small commercial websites still host on wordpress.com. That and selling their user data to OpenAI.
throw_m239339 2y ago
A big chunk of news media online use wordpress instead of a custom CMS. So it's kind of the square space / wix / ghost for news media. I imagine Wordpress offers managed website instances for these companies.
rmccue 2y ago
Automattic is primarily four core businesses: 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.)
- krallja 2y ago
  I am on an old Premium plan for the Day One journaling app. It was recently acquired by Automattic. Happy to keep paying, but concerned that Apple recently Sherlocked it.
  - oarsinsync 2y ago

syntaxing 2y ago

Kinda sad. Beeper owns a ton of Matrix bridges. I wonder what will happen now.

danpalmer 2y ago
Sounds like they're planning to still run the Beeper service, perhaps merged with Texts. I'd bet they'll still use Matrix, it seems to be the very core of how Beeper works.
luuurker 2y ago
Matt/Automattic is good at keeping things open source. On top of the work on WordPress and their plug-ins, when they acquired PocketCasts, they made the apps open source: https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-apps-are-now-open-source/ https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-...

fareesh 2y ago

Their mini tech was built on weird hacks - is all their tech the same or is there something legit powering it?

ghostly_s 2y ago
Well if you consider private APIs/impersonating 1st party clients weird hacks then yes, none of these services have official 3rd party client support.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  I was thinking about this after seeing the announcement. 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.

Usename1 2y ago

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gnicholas 2y ago

I find it interesting that so many people want to unify all their messages. For me, I like having different apps that I can check with different frequency. I am glad that I can get my iMessages immediately but that LinkedIn messages don't get delivered to me until I open the app/website. I have literally never had an issue where I didn't get a message in time because it was sent via the wrong platform. People who need to reach me urgently know how to do so.

kibwen 2y ago
That's a perfectly valid workflow, but it would certainly be nice for people who do want a unified workflow to be able to have that option.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  Such an app/service would not work towards the interests of message recipients - but the message senders. Those interests are not aligned.
  - mtlynch 2y ago
    Why are they not aligned? 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?
    - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
      When you send an SMS text message, there's a understanding (and therefore, an expectation) that it goes directly to the recipient's phone/smartwatch and that they can reply immediately; i.e.: it's a system for high-priority (and therefore highly-intrusive) communications - this is why people generally don't give-out their mobile-phone number to strangers. 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.

languagehacker 2y ago

I've said this before, but Automattic's catalogue of products reads like an elephant graveyard of past internet fads. 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.

gnicholas 2y ago
> elephant graveyard of past internet fads. This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.
rwbt 2y ago
That's unfair to Automattic I think. I think they're really good to maintaining the products with less relative harm. Yes, I know the recent change in terms to feed their data to AI (you can pay them to avoid it). I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  I think what they're saying is, Automattic buys products that are on the way out, not on the way up. So while Automattic might be great stewarts of has-beens, is that a good fit for Beeper, a company in a market that demands up and comer-ness?
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gmays 2y ago

Congrats! Matt and the team at Automattic are a good group of folks. It seems like a great fit, and I'm excited to see what you guys do together.

photomatt 2y ago
Thank you!

jacksonhacker 2y ago

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boomskats 2y ago

The hopeless romantic in me is hoping the real reason Automattic acquired them was actually to get some useful developer documentation written for the Beepy.

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iLoveOncall 2y ago
Given how bad the WordPress documentation is, it's a weird hope to have from that company.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Interesting, I think the WordPress docs are pretty decent. There's always room for improvement, but I love how it links and shows you the source code. They could definitely expand documentation coverage for plugins and stuff though, that's a little lacking.

alberth 2y ago

Pidgin Reminds me of why I used https://pidgin.im https://pidgin.im 20-years ago. It was an aggregator chat app.

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rw_grim 2y ago
We're still here and still supporting tons of stuff... https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
smashah 2y ago
Pidgin is great

duxup 2y ago

>If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks. 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?

garbageman 2y ago
Not a user but I imagine it's like the blackberry model where texts, messenger, whatsapp, and whatever else all go to the same inbox rather than having to check 40 different apps. I really wish that idea would come back.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  I wish that idea came back with some sort of iron hard contract protecting user data in perpetuity.
wahnfrieden 2y ago
yes and sales and regular users too linkedin, fb, ig, slacks, google stuff and so on - it adds up quickly
saynay 2y ago
I would imagine most people are not using all 14, but some subset. If you have friends and family that are not all on the same services, having a unified inbox to talk to them all without having to remember who you talk to on what is convenient.
batuhanicoz 2y ago
Rarely a single user would use 14 different chat networks. For example for me, I have two WhatsApp accounts (number for my current country + home country), Twitter, Instagram to chat with old friends, Facebook for some relatives, LinkedIn for networking, Signal to chat with my lawyer, Telegram for hobby communities. 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.

joelhaasnoot 2y ago

I just hope they don't kill Beepberry/beepy

kujl8 2y ago

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starik36 2y ago

I am using Beeper desktop app on Windows for the express purpose of being an iMessage client. Their press release (https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/ 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.

alalani1 2y ago

Automattic basically consolidated the messaging aggregator market for $175M - I don't have any data but given they had 40 FTE between the two companies, I would guess not more than $10M in revenue across the two. Anyone understand the business rationale for wanting to own this market?

xmprt 2y ago
No matter what, as long as we continue to communicate with each other, messaging will never die. Individual messaging platforms will come and go but the idea of instant messaging has existed for about as long as the internet. $175M might be a steal if Beeper gets more mass market appeal.
- alalani1 2y ago
  Yeah, my first response was going to be that the paid messaging app business model hasn't worked that entire time. But what we've learned from Whatsapp is that there may be other ways to monetize (Whatsapp Business). Still not an obvious bet IMO but you're right that owning the messaging layer is valuable.
  - smashah 2y ago
    These apps are a gateway drug onto the Matrix protocol thereby eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies like WhatsApp (Meta).
    - Grustaf 2y ago
      What is the market size of people who care about "eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies"? And how will you monetize them? Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  Yes. Messaging will never die. Given that, why has it been so difficult for so many to get a toe-hold - and be sustainable - for so long? 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?

k8svet 2y ago

The Verge reports: > 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?

btseytlin 2y ago
Probably on device encryption before anything is sent through their servers
- k8svet 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but that's not an answer. WhatsApp encrypts the message E2E, and then Beeper is bridging it into Matrix. The only way this would make any sense is if they've bridged E2E all the way through to ... the clients? Like, it doesn't make any sense.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    It's a journalist's take, they probably mean that Bleeper doesn't phone home the messages from the client.
  - k8svet 2y ago
    Well, now I regret that this comment sounds a bit dismissive, if another reply is true and they run the bridge locally. That's... impressive, and still surprising to think about. 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.
  - talhah 2y ago
    They actually reverse engineered Apple's iMessage and released a POC. At the time it worked and demonstrated on device bridges being a possibility. The runs locally and then encrypts it client side before it reaches beeper services. This can be enabled for Signal under experimental settings already. https://blog.beeper.com/2023/12/05/how-beeper-mini-works/ https://blog.beeper.com/2023/12/05/how-beeper-mini-works/

bhearu 2y ago

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Andrex 2y ago

I trust Automattic implicitly. This seems like a good move.

markx2 2y ago
Oh, you really should not. - Never trust ANY money-making company IMPLICILTY. - Go to https://apple.wordpress.com 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?
- photomatt 2y ago
  I dislike that third-party advertising network stuff too, hopefully we can get rid of it soon and replace with Blaze, no calls to third-party ad networks.

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xinayder 2y ago

Do you plan on continuing contributing to open source, or is Automattic going to dictate your business plan and Beeper will be enshittified?

jtbayly 2y ago
“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
- xinayder 2y ago
  That's a pessimistic take to say that Automattic will close up Beeper and make it a worse a product.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    I think it's more of a criticism of asking the question as if that was ever going to be given as an answer, regardless of what the actual answer is. in what scenario do you see anyone giving the negative answer truthfully?
    - wpietri 2y ago
      I think the flavor of the answer says a lot. A vague negative answer will make me suspicious, as will one based in good intentions and moonbeams. But a negative answer rooted in principle and mentioning specific choices is one I'll take more seriously. Enshittification is the default path for leaders with MBA brain, but some still manage to avoid it.
  - compootr 2y ago
    that's a naive take to think there's no chance they will every. company. wants. money. it's the SAME, EVERY.SINGLE.TIME
    - askonomm 2y ago
      That's indeed what a purpose of companies are. Organizations that do not want money are registered as non-profit.

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max_ 2y ago

What's the acquisition amount?

thoughtpeddler 2y ago

How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?

freedomben 2y ago
I'm sure that's a non-zero factor. Plus Beeper has a lot of name recognition due to their epic standoff
xinayder 2y ago
Is it really anti-trust if you reverse engineered something (deliberately breaking the ToS of said service - Apple can suspend your accounts for doing so) while said service ToS, a contract you sign when you use their service, explicitly forbids reverse engineering?
- dqv 2y ago
  A more succinct question would be "can antitrust laws override the ToS?" The answer is "yes". The FTC can even make Apple change its ToS through a consent decree (and possibly through other mechanisms as well). A ToS can't shield you from antitrust enforcement. In this case, it might even hurt Apple, especially if it can be shown that Apple doesn't consistently apply this rule. 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.
smashah 2y ago
I'm surprised Whatsapp hasn't gone after them yet. They are famous for going after small independant open source maintainers for similar projects.
Grustaf 2y ago
It would be very surprising if they forced Apple to let competitors use their protocol and servers. Worst case scenario they might force them to let any chat app on the iPhone include SMS, that's the only real advantage that the first-party Messages app has over competitors.

freedomben 2y ago

and they're rewriting Beeper in PHP as a WordPress plugin! 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?

flexagoon 2y ago
Automattic also acquired Pocket Casts, so they don't only own things that fit into the WP ecosystem.
photomatt 2y ago
Our three missions are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. This fits in the third.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Thank you! What does Beeper bring to the table that texts.com doesn't or can't? Is this elimination of a competitor or is it a merging of two mostly complementary things? (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)

imwillofficial 2y ago

I don't see the win for Automattic here. Beeper seems to be a dead product with its main use case gutted. Are there other capabilities that I'm missing? Either way, congrats to the team!

throwaway6e8f 2y ago

This is an odd match, and at a time when the strategic value of Beeper seems to be very low. > 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?

gkoberger 2y ago
Sure, but Automattic also bought Texts.com... this seems to be part of a bigger strategy on their part. 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.
- Grustaf 2y ago
  The $150M figure is just hearsay though, isn't it? Or has either party officially mentioned it?
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    Whoops, I was a bit off, it's actually $125M https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/technology/beeper-messaging-app-automattic.html 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)
    - Grustaf 2y ago
      I can't read the story, is the number official?

andrewstetsenko 2y ago

At some point, it makes sense to join forces for Beeper and texts.com to create a unified messaging app. The idea was realized a number of times, but I hope we’ll see the best it’s iteration now.

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brianjking 2y ago

Congrats to Beeper, but I think that means I'll end up having to pay $25 or something to keep using it. How will this differ from https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ which is also owned by Automattic?

pedalpete 2y ago

That's an acquisition price of $1,086/user, note that isn't active user! Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!

pjerem 2y ago
For once, they are probably not acquiring users but the tech & the brand (fighting with iMessage was a genius marketing move).
- Grustaf 2y ago
  Isn't the important part of the tech open source?

dankwizard 2y ago

Isn't this the joke from The Office with WOOPH or whatever it was... and an old program called Pidgin? Nothing innovative here that's crazy

owenpalmer 2y ago
Haha I was thinking about that, but the joke is actually the reverse of this. When someone sends you a WUPHF, you receive it on every medium. Phone, email, fax, text. Beeper does the opposite, anytime you receive something on one of these platforms, it consolidates it to the Beeper app
- egman_ekki 2y ago
  So a FHPUW, then.

idk1 2y ago

Might be a bit late to the debate, but is Beeper secure enough to use? I'm apprehensive about installing it.

philippgerard 2y ago

I guess it's good to join forces on this. However, I really hope the Texts app on Mac will survive this merge as it is lightyears ahead of the UI insult that Beeper is. I migrated away from Beeper to get rid of the ugly interface and in order to not depend on bridges on some server somewhere (yes, I can host them myself, but who wants to?) anymore.

mahmoudimus 2y ago

Congratulations Eric! Super happy for you and the team!