Renting my online life
Every time I close a tab on another subscription notification, I notice the pattern. Nothing I've built online actually belongs to me.
Every few months I open my link page (one of those Linktree-style things — won't name names, you know which one) to update something, and every few months I notice the same thing. The price has crept up again. The free tier has been quietly shrunken: fewer links, a worse layout, a watermark I didn't remember agreeing to. I close the tab and try to remember when I opted into any of this.
I never really did. I'd just shown up one day, years ago, and gotten an account because I needed a thing to put in my Instagram bio. By the time I noticed, they had been the landlord of a piece of my online presence for longer than I could remember, and I had been a tenant who never read the lease.
This is not a rant about that one product. I have the same tab-closing moment every week now. The newsletter platform that quietly added a paid tier. The website builder whose "free forever" plan now charges extra for SSL. The CMS that kept shipping "AI features" and the bill that kept growing. The cloud storage I joined when it was independent and that now belongs to whoever bought them.
I work in corporate America. I know how this happens. Every company eventually optimizes for whatever its board needs it to optimize for, and you, the user, are not on the board. I don't even hold it against most of them. They're playing the only game their funding lets them play. But I didn't sign up to be a permanent tenant of every part of my own internet life.
Okay, fine: names. Linktree raised prices across the board last November. The Pro plan, their most popular tier, jumped 67%. The announcement said it was to fund new features. None of this is unusual; it's just how the math works when "growth" has to keep meaning something to a board.
The dollars barely register. $9 here, $12 there, and nobody's actual budget breaks on a link-in-bio tool. What I lose is ownership. If any of these companies decides tomorrow to pivot, sunset, raise prices, get acquired, or just go away, I lose the thing I built there. My only remedy is to start over somewhere else, in someone else's house, with someone else's lease.
If you've shaped your work around making things instead of working for someone else, you opted out of this pattern offline on purpose. It's strange to recreate it online by accident, one signup at a time.
The alternative is older than the platforms it replaces. You buy software, once. You run it on hosting you control. The thing you build with it is yours: the URL, the database, the design. If the company that made the software disappears tomorrow, your work doesn't.
This used to require being an engineer. It increasingly does not. The technical bar now is closer to "have you deployed a static site?" than "can you write code?" A lot of people who'd never call themselves technical are clearing that bar without thinking about it.
I'm building Beacon because every time I closed one of those tabs in resignation, I thought: I want my link page to be a file I own, not a row in someone else's database. I figured I couldn't be the only one.