Show HN: Amber – better Beeper, a modern all-in-one messenger
I’ve tried every all-in-one messenger out there (Beeper included) but they always fell short. No real folders, no AI, clunky UI, no CRM features… As a founder who speaks with hundreds of people every quarter, I needed something better. So I decided to rebuild the entire experience from ground up.
Thoughts from one of our users: "The app I've been searching for for a looong time."
Check it out for free today!
Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8b5bc80b9893436b9190ae41fc3f0f50
Features: - All messages (Whatsapp, Telegram, iMessage) unified in a beautifully crafted interface. - Split inboxes (folders) to effortlessly focus on work, friends, a particular project.. whatever matters the most right now. - Mark read – no read receipts (even on Whatsapp and Telegram), mark done only when you’re done. - Personal CRM: a lightweight private database of knowledge about each person with (optional) AI pulling important facts straight from conversations. (the latter is coming soon) - Command bar + shortcuts. - Send later + reminders.
Everything is securely stored on-device. All messages are end-to-end encrypted and go straight from your device to the network of choice – never touching our servers.
You obviously have different needs than what Beeper provides, but claiming it's better when you only support a fraction of the networks is a bit steep imo.
Curious what other networks you plan to support and what are your monetization plans?
I really like the addition of folders and CRM features compared to Beeper.
The networks I'm interested in are Telegram (you already got that), Signal, Instagram, Matrix, Threema, Slack and Teams (in that order).
> Secure Connection Failed
> An error occurred during a connection to useamber.app. PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
Seems like a DNS issue. Are you using VPN? We used Framer to host the site.
Also the fact is that I don't need AI included into this software.
Its nice that it never touches your server but beeper is also moving forward in that direction and beeper is also open source and uses the matrix protocol so you can actually be free to use any matrix clients.
What about yours? As someone who uses beeper for talking with insta chats with my friends, I have no regrets picking beeper.
Yup, the fact that every new service now is AI-first is troubling... it's literally the first thing said about Amber when going on their website. My tab says "Amber — AI-enabled all-in-on...". It's like the only thing they want you to know about their service.
with that being said, good luck!
Besides Beeper, the only consumer bridge hosting service I'm aware of is Element One, but it's only barely maintained, so I'd definitely recommend self-hosting over that.
* Where's your privacy policy?
* What/how are you handling the different customer protection laws? What juristictions are you working in? Where's the data hosted?
* Where's the design description?
* What encryption are you actually using? If you rolled your own, then well.. good luck.
* How could you ensure end-to-end encryption over multiple protocols, without either completely reverse engineering said protocols? If your answer here would be that you're using a central server where messages get passed between services (and thus decrypted), it isn't end-to-end.
The site is also very flaky. Sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't. There are so many questions, and zero answers.
- Signal: E2EE
- Telegram: by default, nah
- Discord, nah
That's probably the HN front page effect to be fair.
Good luck!
Pidgin at least supports service plugins and many more protocols, and doesn't have AI, which is a big plus when we're talking about private messaging.
Or if it uses a local model, enjoy the warmth and sound of your GPU while it consumes all of your system resources for instant messaging on, well, as you put it, three random services
but you know he tried Beeper!!!
However, you can turn off the AI features if you're into full privacy. :)
I think marketing for AI should always start off with "Includes opt-in AI features should you want them" instead of just "HEY WE HAVE AI" I feel like it would make a lot of people close the browser tab much later than expected.
Just because the messages themselves aren't proxied doesn't mean a service can't steal the content on the end device. I'm obviously not saying you _are_ doing that, but the trust issue is my biggest issue here.
Interesting to hear I'm not the only one who's found the need to write something like this.
I first thought to share Clay (https://clay.earth) but I see they were acquired by Automattic recently.