One message, held.

How it works

1. You write one message for one person — what you'd want them to have if you couldn't say it yourself.
2. Beacon stays in touch with you on a quiet rhythm you set.
3. If you stop responding, the message you wrote reaches them.

About Beacon

Beacon is a subscription service for people whose deadline was not chosen for them. You write one message for one person. We check in daily on your terms — and the message only goes if you stop responding. Your words are encrypted at rest and in transit. We designed the service so we can't read what you wrote, and we publish a warrant canary and subpoena protocol (see Security, below). It is available in English and Spanish and can be completed in under five minutes.

Why a public benefit company

This service comes from a public benefit company, not a startup. The Milkweed Foundation is a public benefit LLC, and Beacon is the first product we built. We chose this form because the things people write into a Beacon do not belong inside the obligations a venture-backed company takes on — quarterly growth, advertising-driven engagement, the eventual pressure to find another revenue stream when the original one stops growing. A public benefit company can hold the same product the same way for as long as the people using it need it to be held.

What we built it for

We built Beacon for one specific moment: when someone is told their time may be shorter than they planned. The first thing many people want to do is write something to one person they love. The second thing is realize that getting it to them — at the right moment, with the right context — is harder than it sounds. Beacon is the technology that holds that letter and decides when to send it, on the daily check-in rhythm you set. Nothing else. We are not building a feature platform. We are building one tool, well, for one moment that matters.

How we hold what you wrote

What you write into Beacon is encrypted in transit and at rest. Foundation staff cannot read message content through normal operational tools — only the delivery pipeline, at the moment of delivery, decrypts the payload. We publish a warrant canary alongside our security page so that, if we ever receive a national-security letter we cannot disclose, the silence itself is a signal. We do not sell data, run advertising, or use any part of what you write to train models. Our infrastructure provider (Cloudflare) is named in our privacy notice; nothing happens out of view. If a sentence above raises a question, write privacy@milkweed.foundation — a human answers.

How Beacon actually works

Beacon checks in with you daily and delivers a single pre-written message to one recipient if you stop responding. Standard delivery is about 36 hours after a missed check-in; Rapid Response mode delivers in about 12 hours. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest in Cloudflare R2.