What you need before you start
On your own Mac: the Mac, one agent subscription, an account. Away from it: a machine, a Tailscale account and a phone. Two lists, and the first one is short.
Two lists, and which of them is yours depends on where you want the machine to
be. Nothing on either costs anything beyond what you already pay — including
the machine, if there is one under your desk.
Everything in the first list is also in the second. Nothing in the second is
needed for the first, and that is the point of writing them apart: the page
used to open with "a machine, a Tailscale account and a subscription", which
told somebody about to install a free app on their laptop that they needed a
server and a private network. They do not.
On your own Mac — Local
1. A Mac
macOS, Apple silicon or Intel. The one you are reading this on will do.
[!NOTE]
A machine with 2 GB of memory runs one or two agents. They spend most of
their time waiting on a network, so this is less demanding than it sounds —
but if you plan to run several at once, give it 4 GB.
2. At least one agent subscription
beafk runs the real tools — Claude, GPT, Grok, Kimi — so you sign in to them
as yourself, on the plan you already have with their maker. One is enough to
start. You can add the others later, and having more than one is where a
crew starts to pay for itself.
Which four, who makes each, and what each signs in with:
which agents beafk runs.
3. An account here
A beafk account, which is how the panel knows which machines are yours.
It is one press in the app, it takes no card, and the free plan has nothing at
the payment processor to charge.
And that is the list
No terminal. No admin password. No Tailscale. No server. The app unpacks the
binary itself, the machine runs as you, and your browser and the machine are
the same computer — beafk on your Mac is the whole
of it, in two presses.
Away from that Mac — afk
A machine you are not sitting at, reached from a phone. Three things are added
to the list above.
4. A machine you own
Any of these will do:
- a cheap VPS — Contabo, netcup, Hetzner, DigitalOcean; the smallest tier is
enough to start;
- a box in your office;
- an old laptop with the lid shut;
- the same Mac as above, now reachable from somewhere else.
It needs to be Debian or Ubuntu (anything with apt and systemd) or
macOS, on Apple silicon or Intel. On Linux you need to be able to ssh
into it as a user who can run sudo; on a Mac, the install is run by the
person logged in at it. That is the whole requirement.
A Mac is a machine. The few things that are not the same are named on
what the install does, at the moment they
matter, rather than as a shopping-list footnote.
We never touch your server's bill. You bought it, your provider charges
you, and nothing in beafk can stop it, resize it or delete it.
5. A Tailscale account
Tailscale is a free service that puts your devices on
a small private network of their own. beafk uses it so that your phone can
reach your machine without opening a single port to the internet. Linux
puts the package on during the walk; login is a second screen after that.
This is the one for reaching a machine, and only that. A free machine
opened from the Mac it is on needs none of it: the browser and the node are
the same computer and the app dials 127.0.0.1.
You need one thing: an account. The free tier covers this completely, and
signing up takes a minute.
There is no key to make and nothing to prepare. After the walk, a second
screen shows you a link, and a QR code of the same link; you open it on a
device you are signed in on, and the machine joins the network that device
belongs to. Your Tailscale credentials never touch beafk. If you would rather
set Tailscale up yourself first, press ⏎ at that login and the install carries
on with no address at all.
If you cannot finish that login on the device in front of you — a Tailscale
account behind a company sign-in, usually — press k at the same screen and
paste an auth key instead.
On a Mac, you install the app yourself
Linux gets Tailscale from Tailscale's own signed repository, as a step of the
walk. A Mac does not: beafk looks for the app, and will not install a daemon
as a side effect on somebody's Mac.
The paste can come first. If the app is missing after the walk, the connect
screen mints
Get Tailscale on the App Store.
Homebrew is the other path, not the first: brew install --cask tailscale-app
then open -a Tailscale. Preparing the app first is still fine:
- Get it from the App Store (or Homebrew) and open it.
- Sign in to the account that owns your network — the tailnet your phone
will be on.
- Click the icon in the menu bar and turn the switch on, so it says
Connected. Installed-but-off is the ordinary way a Mac never gets an
address.
The same three things apply on the phone you will open the panel from:
install the app, sign in to that same account, turn it on.
The two tailnet-wide settings that no machine can turn on for itself, and the
one switch worth changing afterwards, are on
your first machine, at the moment the install stops
to ask.
6. A phone
That is the point of the thing. Any modern phone browser, with Tailscale
installed and signed in to the same network as the machine.
A laptop works exactly as well — the screens are just built phone-first.
Ready?
If the machine is the Mac in front of you:
beafk on your Mac, and there is nothing to pay.
If it is a box somewhere else: your first machine
is three steps, one of which is a line you paste — or go straight to
connect a machine. Your first machine
is free for seven days, with no card, and the week does not start until the
machine actually connects. The terms of that week, and what a machine costs
after it, are in what it costs.