I reject this idea completely. The "hacker spirit" in no way excludes doing business or making money. Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.

> charging for a service using another’s infrastructure

Beeper doesn't get any benefit from using Apple's infrastructure per se. The resource usage is trivial. If there was a way to go around Apple's infrastructure and communicate with Apple's iMessage users directly Beeper would be all over it and more than happy to replace all that "infrastructure" themselves at no cost to Apple.

Apple has inserted themselves between their users and the world, making it impossible for anyone to send proper group or video messages to their unchangeable default messaging app without going through Apple. Beeper is simply doing the only thing that will work to fix Apple's intentional crippling of communication with Android for their own benefit.