Founded three years ago, Beeper is being snapped up by Automattic, the respected parent company of WordPress.com, the blogging and content management platform, as well as Tumblr, which it acquired in 2019. Beeper cofounder Eric Migicovsky said that the company will continue to exist as a stand-alone product within Automattic, and that all of Beeper’s 27 employees—who, like Automattic’s employees, are entirely remote—will be absorbed into the larger entity.
The standard version of Beeper used hundreds of Mac mini computers as relay points so that Android messages to iOS devices wouldn’t default to SMS. But Migicovsky and his team later created a forked “mini” version of their app that reverse engineered the way iOS notifications work and let the messages flow between the Beeper app itself and iOS Messages. The blue bubble was achieved. Migicovsky charged $2 per month for this Beeper Mini app at launch.