BeaconA Continuis Labs ExperimentYour hardware ships a product. Ship a portal that feels like one.
Describe your fleet — in English or YAML. Beacon emits a branded, multi-tenant customer portal with auth, charts, alerts, and a customer-facing API in 15 minutes. Six months of dashboard work, deleted.
Every hardware company builds the same portal. Every one of them hates the result.
Your customers don't want a generic monitoring tool — they want something that looks like your product, signs in with their account, and shows them their devices. Not 47 dashboard panels they have to learn.
So you build it. A framework, a charting library, a few weeks of auth glue. Then someone asks for multi-tenant isolation. Then alerts. Then mobile. Then white-label for the OEM channel. Six months later you have a half-finished portal that nobody on your team wants to own.
Or you outsource to a generic dashboard vendor and your customers wonder why they're being charged for someone else's branding.
- 73%
- of hardware startups build their own customer portal from scratch
- $45K
- average cost to build a basic IoT portal in-house
- 6mo
- average MVP → customer-ready dashboard
industry estimate
industry estimate
industry estimate
Six layers. One YAML file. Fifteen minutes.
Beacon is the boring, reliable, opinionated layer between your devices and your customers. You describe what you have; Beacon ships the rest. The AI authoring layer is optional — every Beacon portal is configured by a YAML file you control.
- 01
Devices publish, however they already publish
Point your existing MQTT broker (or our hosted bridge) at Beacon. MQTT, MQTT-SN, CoAP, LoRaWAN. JSON, MessagePack, your own protobuf.
- MQTT
- CoAP
- LoRaWAN
- Protobuf
- JSON
- 02
Describe your fleet — in English, or in YAML
Talk to Beacon like you would a colleague: tell it what your devices are, what readings matter, and what should alert. The model emits a Beacon YAML schema you can read, edit, version, and check into your repo. Power users skip the chat and write the schema directly.
- AI authoring
- Versioned YAML
- Diff-able
- 03
Multi-tenant ingest, validated against your schema
Every message is parsed, tenant-routed, validated, and tagged. Bad payloads land in a dead-letter queue you can inspect instead of being silently dropped.
- Schema validation
- Tenant isolation
- Dead-letter inbox
- 04
Time-series store, hot + cold
TimescaleDB hot store keeps the last 90 days at second resolution. Older data tiers to S3 in Parquet — queryable, cheap, not deleted.
- TimescaleDB
- S3 cold tier
- Parquet
- 05
Portal renders, multi-tenant, white-label
Your customer logs in, sees only their devices, in your brand. Time-series charts, threshold alerts, device groups, audit log. Same auth surface they already trust.
- Multi-tenant auth
- Charts
- Threshold alerts
- Audit log
- 06
Ships under your domain, not ours
Point a CNAME at Beacon. Customer types portal.yourcompany.com, sees your logo, your colors, your support email. We are invisible by design.
- Custom domain
- CNAME
- Your branding
Describe your fleet. Get a portal.
Beacon's AI converts a sentence into a Beacon schema, then the same pipeline that powers every paid Beacon portal renders the result. The YAML is the contract — readable, diff-able, version-controlled. The chat is the on-ramp.
Chat
You
Generated YAML
beacon.schema.yamlPortal preview
Waiting for schema…
Whatever the AI proposes is editable YAML, not a black box. Power users skip the chat and write the schema directly.
The demo above is scripted for this page. The shipping product makes the same call against a fine-tuned schema model.
What your customer actually sees.
Click any device in the list — the chart re-renders against that device's feed. Real chart, synthetic data, real product layout.
Bridge — North Span
temperature · last 24h · alert 78°C
↑ Click any device in the list to swap the chart.
The features your customers expect, day one.
Standard equipment on every Beacon portal — Hobby tier through Enterprise. No upgrade tax for the basics your competitors charge extra for.
- 01Multi-tenant
Per-customer device isolation
Each tenant sees only their devices. Row-level isolation enforced in the data layer, audit-logged per tenant, configurable retention.
- 02Charts
Real-time time-series, second-resolution
Hot store keeps 90 days at full resolution; older data tiers to S3 in Parquet — queryable, cheap, not deleted. Standard chart library for time-series, gauges, heatmaps.
- 03Alerts
Threshold + anomaly alerts, customer-configurable
Email, SMS, and webhook delivery. Customers set their own thresholds and channels in the portal — no support ticket needed to add an alert.
- 04White-label
Your domain, your logo, your support email
Point a CNAME at Beacon. Customer types portal.yourcompany.com and sees your brand, not ours. We are invisible by design — that's the whole product premise.
- 05Authoring
AI or YAML — same valid output, every time
Describe your fleet in English or write the schema directly. Either path produces a valid Beacon runtime config; the AI can only emit what the runtime already knows how to ship.
- 06API
REST + webhooks for your customers to integrate
Every Beacon portal exposes a customer-facing API: read device state, push device commands, subscribe to events. Your customers integrate Beacon into their own tools without writing portal code.
Pricing that scales with devices, not seats.
Pricing locks in the day the product ships. Reserve the early-access tier now to lock in 50% off for life — see below.
Hobby
For tinkering, hackathons, evaluating Beacon.
$0/mo- 5 devices
- 7-day data retention
- Beacon branding
- Community Discord support
- Most popular
Startup
For hardware startups going to first 100 customers.
$99/mo- 50 devices
- 30-day data retention
- Custom domain
- Email support
Growth
For companies shipping to thousands of endpoints.
$499/mo- 500 devices
- 90-day data retention
- Full white-label
- SSO, priority support
Enterprise
Dedicated infra, SLA, on-prem options.
Talk to us- Unlimited devices
- Dedicated infrastructure
- Custom SLA
- Procurement-friendly contracts
Reserve a Startup plan for $49/mo — 50% off, forever.
First 100 reservations only. No charge until launch — refunded if Beacon doesn't ship within 6 months.
What ships after v1.
In rough order of how often hardware teams have asked for it.
- Q1 after launch
Customer-facing alert rules editor
Let your customers set their own thresholds and notification channels without filing a support ticket.
- Q1 after launch
White-label mobile app builder
Generate a branded iOS/Android app from the same YAML schema. PWA-first, native shell optional.
- Q2 after launch
Webhook + Zapier integrations
Push events to your CRM, ticketing system, or PagerDuty. Replace your custom Lambda glue.
- Q3 after launch
On-prem deployment
Single-tenant deployable for regulated industries (utilities, defense, healthcare).
The earlier you join, the more you shape v1.
I'm Tom — a database/data engineer with 4 years building production IoT customer dashboards. If you've ever shipped this layer yourself, your input changes what gets built.
Honest answers.
When will it launch?
Honestly: depends on the validation signal from this very page. If the waitlist hits critical mass in the next two weeks, I start building full-time and ship v1 in 8–12 weeks. If not, I respect your time and don't keep you on a list for vaporware.
Is the AI doing anything beyond writing the YAML?
No. The AI's job is exactly one thing: translate your description into a Beacon schema. From there the same deterministic pipeline that powers every Beacon portal takes over. The model is bounded by a strict output schema so it can't propose anything Beacon's runtime doesn't already know how to do.
Will you train AI models on my customers' device data?
No. Your tenant data stays in your tenant. The authoring model is trained only on Beacon's schema spec and synthetic conversations — never on telemetry. The business model is per-device pricing, not data resale.
How is Beacon different from the off-the-shelf dashboard tools?
Most existing options were built as internal-ops dashboards, not customer-facing products. That bleeds through: dashboard-editing UI exposed to your customers, generic theming, per-user pricing that punishes you for scaling. Beacon is opinionated about being the *customer-facing* layer — white-label by default, schema-driven, priced per device.
Can I self-host?
Yes — the Enterprise tier ships a single-tenant deployable for customers in regulated industries (utilities, defense, healthcare). Hobby/Startup/Growth are cloud-hosted; that's how the unit economics work.
What protocols do you support at v1?
MQTT (3.1.1 and 5), MQTT-SN, CoAP, and LoRaWAN payloads forwarded through a bridge. Webhook ingestion for legacy HTTP-posting devices. Custom protocols supported via a small Rust connector SDK.
What does the YAML schema actually look like?
A device-type declaration with telemetry fields, units, ranges, optional thresholds, customer-visibility flags, and alert rule presets. ~30 lines for a typical sensor. The chat example on this page is a real example of the format. Full schema reference ships before v1.
Is the Hobby tier really free forever?
Yes, for 5 devices. The point is that you can prototype against a real Beacon portal during the design phase of your hardware product without writing me a check.