Beacon
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Product Overview

What Beacon is

Beacon is the SMS API built for AI agents. Most SMS products are built for humans operating a dashboard. Beacon is being built for agents operating through APIs, threads, and tool calls.

The core promise is simple:

Give my agent a phone number it can text from and manage threads through.

Beacon is an ApexCode product. Current release: 0.3.3-beta.

Who buys it

  • Self-hosted (Tier 1): developers or small teams that already have Twilio and want to run Beacon themselves — Docker Compose or Composer from your license portal
  • Hosted (Tier 2): agent builders who do not want to manage infrastructure or Twilio directly — waitlist
  • Source access (Tier 3): companies that want source access for white-labeling or internal compliance needs — contact ApexCode

Core tenets

  1. Agent-native — designed for API calls, tools, and automation
  2. Thread-native — conversations are first-class
  3. Simple first — easy to call from curl, scripts, and agent runtimes
  4. Predictable — stable request and response shapes with explicit error codes
  5. Portable — self-hosted deployment remains a core part of the offer

How you get it

Paying customers install from the license portal. There is no private GitHub clone.

  • Docker: Compose bundle pulling ghcr.io/apxcde/beacon:0.3.3-beta
  • Composer: composer create-project apxcde/beacon from https://packages.apexcode.dev
  • Runtime license: a signed beacon.license file at storage/app/beacon.license

See Quickstart and Licensing.

What exists today

Beacon currently includes:

  • SMS sending
  • inbound SMS processing
  • threads and message history
  • reply polling
  • OTP generation and verification
  • contacts, tags, notes, merge, duplicate review, and phone number management
  • business phone number management
  • OpenAPI spec delivery
  • team-scoped authentication, idempotency, rate limiting, and licensing

For the exact shipped API, use API reference. For the MCP surface, use MCP reference.

Teams stay in the product even on a single-tenant install because they isolate API keys, contacts, business numbers, opt-out lists, and agent workflows.

Product shape being built around the current core

These are part of the product direction, not all shipped functionality today.

Self-hosted product

The target self-hosted offer is:

  • current API surface
  • polished dashboard for setup and monitoring
  • MCP server for agent integrations
  • Docker-based deployment
  • first-run onboarding flow
  • licensing for paid distribution

Hosted additions

The hosted layer adds:

  • billing
  • usage metering
  • Twilio provisioning
  • public signup and onboarding
  • managed hosting experience

Delivery model

Outbound and inbound SMS are built around Twilio.

  • Current implementation: Twilio-backed Laravel API with team-scoped credentials and webhooks
  • Self-hosted model: bring your own Twilio account
  • Hosted model: managed provisioning layered on top

Deliberately skipped in the near term

These are intentionally not core to the first sellable version:

  • websockets / SSE
  • batch sending
  • multi-provider support
  • WhatsApp
  • 10DLC tooling
  • media / MMS

How to read the docs

Raw markdown · llms.txt