Beacon is built in Canada, for communities that care where their data lives - especially when those communities are lakes, cottages, towns, and organizations across the country.
To ship quickly and iterate with real users, Beacon currently runs on:
These are interim choices, not our destination. They let us validate the product with real alerts and real places while we architect a migration path.
Our goal is 100% Canadian infrastructure for production data and hosting - aligned with data residency expectations for community organizations, municipalities, and anyone who asks "where does this go when I hit send?"
That migration is intentional, not accidental. The Safety Net architecture (PWA + local Lighthouse + LoRa) is designed so critical paths degrade gracefully even when cloud uplink is impaired - and so cloud dependencies can be swapped without rewriting the product.
Beacon is citizen reporting first - lost pets, broken docks, wildlife on the road. But when something serious happens, local life and local institutions overlap: your lake association, the municipality, local news, and emergency services are all trying to inform the same people about the same place.
We think Canadian communities deserve tools whose data stays in Canada - not because we're anti-institution, but because trust works both ways:
| Who | Why Canadian hosting matters |
|---|---|
| Places & associations | Member reports about docks, campsites, and wildlife shouldn't live in a foreign cloud by default |
| Cities & municipalities | Local notices and place-based alerts should align with public-sector data residency expectations |
| Local news & community media | A platform for "what's happening here" should be storable and auditable under Canadian jurisdiction |
| Police & emergency services | We're not a replacement for 911 - but when citizens share situational awareness, that data shouldn't surprise anyone on sovereignty grounds |
Beacon isn't asking anyone to choose between community self-reporting and institutional response. We're building so a lake can run its own feed and - when appropriate - Canadian institutions can participate on infrastructure that matches how Canadians expect public and community data to be handled.
That's the same principle as everyday use: show up on Tuesday (sunsets, litter, lost cats) so the system is trusted when institutions and neighbors both need it.
| Phase | Focus |
|---|---|
| Now | Ship and learn on managed US cloud; be explicit about it |
| Next | Canadian database region and data residency policies where available |
| Then | Canadian application hosting and operational runbooks |
| Ongoing | Lighthouse local storage - alerts survive at the edge when uplink fails |
Exact providers and dates will follow feasibility work. We won't announce "Canadian hosted" until it's true in production.
Canadian sovereignty and offline resilience pull in the same direction:
If infrastructure sovereignty matters to your community or your municipality, we'd rather have that conversation early - especially for Lighthouse pilots.