It has never been easier to launch a new media publication than it is today. The barriers to market entry have become extremely low. We are convinced that the way to launch a new medium is to build a community first. An engagement platform like beabee is a central, important tool for building community relationships from the start. In combination with a newsletter tool, beabee gives you everything you need to take the first steps.

In this guide, you will find instructions on how to start a new local medium by first focussing on community building and the role an engagement platform like beabee plays in this.

Yes, this is possible. beabee can be used purely as a payment tool for managing a membership model without using any more CRM functions or survey functions. 

beabee uses Stripe as a payment provider. As of January 2025 beabee supports payments via:

• Credit Card
• Direct Debit
• Paypal
• Google Pay
• Apple Pay
• iDEAL

If you have a specific requirement regarding payment methods, which are not supported yet, consult with the beabee at support@beabee.io. 

The CrowdNewsroom is our tool for day-to-day engagement with your audience and for running crowd investigations. 

Crowd investigations allow community newsrooms to digitally gather and analyse information on an issue provided by their community members. This could be about mapping places in a community where kids can’t get to school safely or experiences people have with their local administration. 

In a virtual dialogue citizens report on their personal experiences with social grievances and provide important evidence. Using this structured information, journalists start their investigations

The CrowdNewsroom is also your place to ask people for topics they care about right now, get feedback about your last event, or a topic you’re reporting on. You can get rid of other survey tools and ask all your questions to the community in the CrowdNewsroom.

When people give you permission to save their contact data or subscribe them to their newsletter, you can do so frictionless right inside your survey and synch the data GDPR-compliant with your contact database. 

Yes, that is possible. The integrated CrowdNewsroom, can also be used without using the CRM and payment functions. However, some functions, e.g. making surveys accessible only to paying members, are linked to the use of other parts of the software or only then develop their full scope. If you are really only looking for a survey tool, there may be better solutions. 

Feel free to book an appointment for a live demo of beabee to discuss your requirements.

If you have an idea for a one-off crowd research project, you can also contact the team at the CORRECTIV Crowdnewsroom.

Using beabee as open source is totally free of charge. 

The price for the Software-as-a-Service version of beabee hosted by us consists of a monthly paid package price based on the number of contacts and a revenue share. 

The following packages are available:

• Taster (up to 100 contacts): 0 € + 2% revenue share (first 20 paying members free) / month*
• Starter (up to 500 contacts): 29 € + 2% revenue share / month*
• Grow (up to 10,000 contacts): 49 € + 2% revenue share / month*
• Star (up to 30,000 contacts): 99 € + 2% commission / month*

If you manage more than 30,000 contacts, we offer an individual price.

Also consider extra fees charged by our payment provider Stripe or GoCardless. 

With our price calculator you can work out for yourself what beabee would cost you.

We also offer full onboarding support, including a workshop to develop your community-strategy and map out your workflows with beabee. The costs are 1.200 Euros. 

*all prices incl. 19% VAT

For custom versions and partnerships with beabee, please get in touch Julia.hildebrand@correctiv.org

beabee is designed to fit seamlessly into newsroom’s toolstacks. Therefore, beabee integrates with several tools that are typically used in newsrooms. Our aim is to recommend a toolstack to you that is privacy-focued and fully independent from big tech. 

As an engagement platform, beabee sits besides your CMS and is not integrated into it. This also means that we are not supporting any kind of paywalls or community access to the content on your website.

As of March 2026 beabee supports integrations with:

Payment:

• Stripe
• GoCardless

Newsletter:

• Mailchimp

Messenger:

• Telegram (for CrowdNewsroom only)

We decide together with our users which integrations to work on next. Our pipeline includes tools like Ghost, pretix and European email providers. To integrate further tools, beabee offers an open API. If you have specific requirements for integrations, please consult with the beabee team at support@beabee.io. 

Yes, emails can be sent with beabee. This includes transactional emails (e.g. for resetting passwords), automated emails to predefined segments, e.g. for marketing purposes and one-off-emails to segments.

Email newsletters cannot be sent directly with beabee. For this purpose, beabee integrates with newsletter platforms, as of March 2026 with Mailchimp.

beabee is used by community-builders at independent public interest organisations of different sizes, especially by media organisations. Our current group of users includes smaller community-centric local newsrooms such as the Bürgerportal Bergisch Gladbach in Germany,  Greater Govanhill in Scotland, or The Green Line in Toronto, as well as larger investigative media organisations such as CORRECTIV in Germany, Fumaça in Portugal,  IrpiMedia in Italy and Momus in the Netherlands. 

beabee is also being used by community builders like Goldspirit and Bonn Digital. 

You can read examples of how newsrooms are using beabee in our use cases.

You might have heard different terms over the last years for what we call community journalism. E.g. engaged journalism or people powered journalism. At the heart of this is a very simple idea: Journalism that responds to community needs and is created with community participation. For us, community journalism is an attitude that manifests itself in a variety of activities designed not only to report for the community, but with the community – with care and love for the people.

We talk about community journalism when we strive to better understand the needs of a particular community, meet them where they are and involve them in your reporting.
We also see community journalism as going beyond reporting. It is about opening up and moderating spaces where conversations can take place.
It’s about choosing a range of interactive and participatory formats to better understand people’s questions and involve them, for example, with their expertise.
Think of pop-up newsrooms in neighbourhoods, crowd investigations, hosting events for lots of people or just a story circle to deepen your understanding of a problem.

beabee started as a joint project by CORRECTIV, The Bristol Cable, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Vereniging Veronica. Today, beabee ist owned by the CORRECTIV – Recherchen für die Gesellschaft gGmbH.

The seed funding for beabee was granted by the State Chancellery of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for the years 2021 and 2022. Since the funding came to an end, CORRECTIV has financed the maintenance and further development of beabee. It also generates revenue from selling the software-as-a-service version of beabee.  In 2023, beabee received a grant from mibb – Medienkompetenz- und Innovationsförderung Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH for the project beabee for media in exile, a collaboration with Radio Sakharov .