What pricing? I've been on Beeper for a few months and i've not seen any.

Ironically i joined because of iMessage, which got almost immediately ripped from me because Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple (... sorry, annoyed). When i joined the service was great, but the last couple months (basically since the iMessage drama) it has been weirdly unstable. I see a lot of encrypted messages (as in, the message doesn't receive properly and all the receiver sees is "message encrypted"), images failing, gifs failing, generally bad behavior when connection is poor, etc.

I was interested when i joined because i thought they were just going to offer a service i could pay for, like Kagi. Yet now this feels like another enshittification just waiting to happen.

> Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple…

Publicity stunt to raise their visibility in hopes of acquisition. Today’s news shows it worked.

I paid $120 up front. I'm worried they'll switch to a monthly subscription after this.

Since texts.com has subscription and rumor says that they are merged, just a matter of time.

> Our teams and products will merge

From the article, not a rumor.

I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?

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.

> so I don't have to tell peopl thag I don't use WhatsApp now

Because you actually are using WhatsApp?

> Some people would pay for this convenience

Some remember when this used to be widespread and free: https://www.pidgin.im/

Yes, and you can get most of the Matrix bridges that Beeper uses and host the service yourself.

Beeper is just a skin over Matrix, and they are hosting and managing the bridges for you. So that when any of protocols they support breaks because the other company changes something (or intentionally breaks things to stop connections from clients they don't want), Beeper fixes it rather than you having to wait for the open source community to do so and you implement that fix. Which who knows how long either scenario will take.

Paying for Beeper is not having to manage the self hosting, which many are not willing to do. Because as with most open source solutions, it's not very simple and is intimidating for many. Not to mention having some box open to the internet, and having to maintain security updates for that box.

I would love for libpurple to come back and make these things relatively simple. But the reality is that companies have walled off their gardens to control the experience, and many other reasons ranging from greed to security to spam mitigation.

Yeah, having all of your messaging in one place is amazing. Especially since they support a decent long tail of DM services as well.

I use iMessage, messenger/IG, WhatsApp, Snapchat and slack. Probably not much value for my specific use case.

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)