The product Beeper is selling is essentially access to “blue bubbles” and iMessage without having to pay the price of admission (i.e., owning an iDevice and working with Apple). That’s the part that’s shady and sus. What they are paying or saving on infrastructure cost is irrelevant - they are basically still running a counterfeit operation, doesn’t matter what their costs are.

The push servers are required for beeper Mini, because it acts as a gateway between GCM and ANP.

Beeper Cloud uses Mac Minis, and Beeper posted the software on github so you can self host it.

The two apps work very differently.