Receive a Data Breach Notice in the Mail? Here’s How to Act Next

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 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.

Image Credits:Automattic/Beeper

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 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.”

Image Credits:Automattic/Beeper

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 that messaging platforms be interoperable 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.)

Image Credits:Automattic/Beeper

After Automattic acquired Beeper, 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 stand-alone 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 2x 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 to migrate to Beeper, since it has added the on-device technology, which they prefer.

Image Credits:Automattic/Beeper

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 (model context protocol) 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.