Email, calendar, files and contacts for the whole company, on a server you own. One licence, bought once. Every user, every feature, every update, and nothing charged per seat.
Hosted suites are priced so that growing costs you. Joinery is priced so that it does not.
Add the new hire, the contractor, the shared inbox for sales and the one for support. Nothing changes on the bill, because nothing on it is per person. A hosted suite charges you for every one of those, every month, and charges you again when they leave and their mailbox has to be kept.
There is one version of Joinery. Mail, calendar, drive, contacts, mailing lists and the admin tools are all in it. Nothing is held back for a higher tier, and there is no “Standard” you outgrow into a “Plus”. The store plugin has no cap on products either.
The business licence is a one-time purchase and includes every future version. It is not an annual renewal wearing a disguise. Whatever you paid in month one is what you have paid in year five.
Three line items. None of them is per person.
Published list prices, per person per month on annual billing, as of September 2026.
| Entry plan | Mid plan | Ten people, per year | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace | $7 Business Starter | $14 Business Standard | $840 to $1,680 |
| Microsoft 365 | $7 Business Basic | $14 Business Standard | $840 to $1,680 |
| Proton for Business | $6.99 Mail Essentials | $12.99 Business Suite | $839 to $1,559 |
| Fastmail | $5 Standard | $9 Professional | $600 to $1,080 |
| Zoho Workplace | $3 Standard | $6 Professional | $360 to $720 |
Total spend on the mid plan, against the Founder licence plus server and mail delivery.
| 5 people | 10 people | 25 people | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace Business Standard | $2,520 | $5,040 | $12,600 |
| Microsoft 365 Business Standard | $2,520 | $5,040 | $12,600 |
| Proton Business Suite | $2,338 | $4,676 | $11,691 |
| Fastmail Professional | $1,620 | $3,240 | $8,100 |
| Zoho Workplace Professional | $1,080 | $2,160 | $5,400 |
| Joinery: licence, server, mail delivery | $1,471 | $1,471 | $1,903 |
Read the bottom row left to right. It barely moves, because nothing in it is per person. Every other row doubles when the company doubles, and the extra money buys permission to keep using what you already had.
At five people, Zoho’s cheapest plan costs less for the first few years. From ten people up, nothing hosted is close, and past that the gap is a salary.
Hosted prices are US list prices on annual commitment, checked September 2026. The Joinery row is the $499 Founder licence plus $27 a month for a server and Mailgun up to ten people, and $39 a month at twenty-five. A domain is left out because every option needs one. Taxes excluded throughout.
The admin side is built for the one person who has to look after everyone else’s accounts.
Create an account in the admin, put it in the right groups, and it has mail, calendar and files that afternoon. When someone leaves, their account is closed and their mailbox is still yours to read or hand on. Log in as any user when they say something is broken.
Aliases and mailing lists at your own domain, managed from the same admin. Newsletters and announcements go out from the mailing list tools you already own, with no per-contact tier.
Passkey sign-in and two-factor are built in, and you can make enrolment mandatory for every account. An admin can reset a locked-out user’s second factor without a support ticket to anyone.
Each user can keep a sealed vault for the files and mail that must not leak even if the server does. The optional AI assistant runs on your hardware and cannot send sealed content anywhere.
The question a business has to be able to answer is “what happens when the server dies?” Here is the answer.
Every Joinery install backs itself up: encrypted, on a schedule you set, uploaded to any S3-compatible bucket you own, with old copies pruned automatically. Configured once from the admin, then it runs whether or not anyone remembers it. Restore is onto a fresh server with one command.
The Server Manager plugin adds a dashboard for every Joinery server you run: status at a glance, one-click upgrades, and fleet backups pushed with write-only keys, so a compromised server cannot delete its own history. Included with the Founder licence, $149 once otherwise.
Self-install on a stock Ubuntu VPS, deploy on Linode, or pay $39.99 to have it done on your own server with the root password handed to you.
Setup prints the exact DNS records. Outbound mail goes through a delivery provider such as Mailgun or Amazon SES, so your server’s IP reputation is never the thing standing between you and a customer’s inbox.
Create the accounts, set the backup schedule and bucket, make two-factor mandatory. From here it is a few minutes a month, and nothing in the months you forget it.
Not yet. Joinery does not serve IMAP, so third-party mail clients cannot connect. Staff read mail in the web client or the Joinery apps for phone and desktop. If your company’s working life runs through a specific desktop client, this is a genuine blocker and you should wait.
One production install, any number of users, every feature, every future version. Development and staging copies are free. The Founder licence adds every first-party paid plugin, now and later. The Joinery Business License is the document you receive.
Community support is free. Premium support is one of the ways Joinery is funded and is sold separately, so a company that wants someone on the phone can have one without it being baked into every licence.
Mail exports as standard mail files, contacts as vCards, calendars as .ics, and files are ordinary files in a directory. There is no export fee and no retention period, because there is no account with us to close.
Someone has to be the administrator, in the same sense that someone is the administrator of your Google Workspace today. Upgrades are one click, backups are automatic, and adding a person is a form. It does not need to be a full-time job, and for most small companies it is not a job at all.
One licence for the whole company. No seats, no renewals, and a server that answers to you.