Beeping is a developer platform. From the first commit, every layer of it has been Apache-2.0 — the C++20 core, the HTTP server, every SDK, the example apps. There is no closed-source crown jewel held back for a paid tier.

This isn't a marketing posture. It's how we think the project has the best chance of surviving long enough to matter.

What "open source from day one" means here

Concretely:

beeping-core — the C++ library that does the encoding, decoding, FEC, frequency selection. The hard part.
beepbox — the HTTP server that wraps the core, plus the CLI built on the same library.
Every SDK — Flutter, iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), React Native (Nitro Modules), Node.js, Python, the WASM browser core and its React / Vue / Svelte / vanilla wrappers.
The example apps — Beepster across web, mobile, TVs, smart speakers.
The marketing site you're reading now.

If you want to fork it, run your own backend, ship your own apps on top of the SDKs without ever touching us, you can. That's the point.

Why we chose this

Three reasons.

Trust comes from being readable. Ultrasonic data exchange is a new primitive for most developers. The gap between "I read the marketing" and "I'd ship this in production" closes faster when the code is in front of you. Closed-source SDKs make that gap permanent.

The interesting business is the hosted layer, not the protocol. The protocol is a small, well-defined thing. The interesting work is operating a reliable cloud transport, observability, the developer portal, the analytics pipeline, the cross-platform release matrix. That's where we plan to make money — not by gating the encoder.

Ecosystems beat features. A binding for one stack covers some developers. A binding for thirteen stacks, all maintained against the same core, plus example apps shipped to eleven OS targets — that covers most developers most of the time. Open source is the only realistic way to keep that surface coherent without a hundred-person team.

What's free, what's paid (eventually)

Today, everything is free because nothing is at production scale yet. When the hosted beepbox server starts taking real traffic, we'll introduce usage-based pricing for it — same code as the open-source binary, just operated for you instead of by you. Self-hosting will remain fully supported.

Things we will not do:

Move features from the open-source build to a closed paid tier.
Add license restrictions retroactively to anything already shipped under Apache-2.0.
Require a Beeping account to use the SDKs against your own server.

Things we will do:

Sell hosted operation, support, and the parts of the developer portal that only make sense as a service (analytics, billing, key rotation, audit).
Ask for sponsorship from the companies that build on top of us.

What this means if you're a developer reading this

Pick a binding from the Build with Beeping in your stack section of the home page. Today they're all marked Coming soon because the underlying work is still landing — but the moment one ships, the source is on GitHub, the package is on the right registry, and the docs land alongside.

If you'd rather tinker with the protocol itself, beeping-core is already buildable on macOS, Linux and Windows, and the Holonet quest walks you through it.

There's no waitlist. There's no "sign up to get early access". There's an open repository, an Apache-2.0 license file, and a landing page. That's the whole stack.