Eric Migicovsky had built two smartwatch companies before he started worrying about chat apps, and the frustration that became Beeper came straight out of the second one. As he told Hacker News, while working on Pebble the team kept hitting the same wall trying to send messages from the watch: "we never figured out how to send an iMessage or WhatsApp reply." He parked the thought. Then he found Matrix, an open source, federated, end to end encrypted chat protocol with an API for building bridges into other networks, and the parked thought came back.

On 9 July 2020 he published a post on his own blog called "the universal communication bus". Most of it is a long complaint about having to remember which app each friend lives in. The last paragraph is the first public trace of a company: a few Matrix developers and he, he wrote, were "building an app called Beeper".

Before Beeper was a product, he was paying other people to build the parts that were missing. He put bounties on open source Matrix bridges, "$500 or more per bridge", and funded the ones for Hangouts, Slack, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Through the Matrix community he met Tulir Asokan, who wrote most of those bridges, and Tulir joined the team.

What he showed the public 195 days later was not a prototype. He had been running Beeper as his own main chat client for almost two years.

On 20 January 2021 he posted it to Hacker News as Show HN: Beeper, all your chats in one app. One client, 15 networks, a unified inbox, self hosting for anyone who wanted it. And one line that matters more than the rest for this database: "Beeper is a paid service because I think it aligns interests between us and our users. We make a featureful and secure app, in exchange you pay us money." The archived Beeper site from that period gives the number: a $10 monthly fee.

That gives us the anchor. From the 9 July 2020 post where Eric first named Beeper in public to the 20 January 2021 Show HN where he described it as a paid service is 195 days, and that is the date recorded here as the first customer milestone. Beeper had been running as an invite only beta under its earlier name, NovaChat, before that, so an earlier first payment is possible. 20 January 2021 is simply the first date the founder himself publicly described Beeper as something people paid for.

The iMessage part of the product was held together with tape. Beeper's answer in 2021 was to mail each customer a jailbroken iPhone that sat on a shelf relaying messages, or to have you point the Beeper Mac app at a Mac you left online. Several commenters assumed the FAQ entry was a joke. Eric replied: "Not a joke."

Growth after that was deliberately slow. Beeper stayed in waitlist mode for years. In March 2023, more than two years after the launch, Eric was still writing "we are currently still in waitlist mode" and setting a goal of clearing the queue within three months. By then the app itself was free, and the paid subscription of 2021 had given way to a free product with paid extras on top.

The loud chapter came on 5 December 2023 with Beeper Mini, a standalone Android app that spoke Apple's iMessage protocol directly, with no relay Mac in the middle, at $1.99 per month after a seven day trial. It went to the top 20 of the Play Store. Six days later Eric wrote that "in the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than 100,000 people" and that as far as the team could tell it was "the fastest growing paid Android application launch in history". On Hacker News he added that conversion from download to paid subscription was "hovering around 50%".

Apple cut off access that Friday. Beeper shipped a fix, Apple broke it again. On 11 December the team stopped charging: "Things have been a bit chaotic, and we're not comfortable subjecting paying users to this." Ten days later Eric published the retreat, and he did not dress it up: "we can't win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth."

Beeper had just over 115,000 users and was still, formally, in beta when Automattic acquired it on 9 April 2024. Eric was blunt on Hacker News that day about why the deal happened: "We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper." He took the role of Head of Messaging at Automattic, Beeper left beta and dropped its waitlist the same day, and the model stayed where it had landed: "We build a fantastic free chat app, then charge for additional premium features."

The useful part for anyone reading this is the shape of the pricing decision. Beeper charged from its first public day in a category where essentially nothing is paid, which meant the first users were people who wanted the problem solved badly enough to hand over $10 a month for a beta with a jailbroken iPhone in the loop. That bought honest signal early. It did not buy protection from the one dependency Beeper never owned, and twice the price had to come back off: once because the product was not ready to sell to a queue of waiting users, once because Apple made it unreliable.