I love the idea of private whitelabeled communities. The problem is that many of them, Beam included, don't have real customization (in their defense, because they're saving us from a lot of work!). Ultimately, these types of tools end up as just another newsfeed. And that's where Beam.gg is right now.

It doesn't have memberships (it's on the roadmap, but shouldn't have hit AppSumo without the feature) and the layout is fixed and the same for all Beam sites. It begs the question as to why someone would really utilize Beam (or anything similar) when the free community tools like Discord, Slack, Telegram, etc. often often at least the same functionality.

Truly, it is great having your own CNAME and integrating into the web2 experience, but as the title and opening sentence present, Beam and others ultimately are just another newsfeed that we're paying to control when Facebook Groups or something more "cutting edge" like Gather Town could be used without any upfront costs.