Because renting your email from a company whose incentives point the other way was never going to end well.
And the reason for this is clear: Free services rely on advertising. Advertising monetizes your attention. Monetizing your attention requires manipulating your nervous system to always keep you engaged. Companies are not inherently evil, they just do evil things because they respond to incentives. Your inbox and digital life have become a place to sell attention, data to train on, and a reason you cannot leave.
That produces the same three outcomes everywhere, regardless of intent:
No amount of good behavior fixes this, because the problem is not behavior. It is who holds the server.
Joinery is what the alternative looks like when somebody actually builds something they would personally use: the whole suite — mail, calendar, drive, contacts, and many more plugins coming — installed on a machine that belongs to you, with the parts that genuinely need outside help (getting outbound mail delivered) handled honestly.
Joinery doesn't want your data. We don't want to sell advertising. We don't want to train AI on your data.
Specific and checkable. Every one of these is something you can verify rather than take on faith.
Every line that touches your data is published and inspectable. If you want to know what any feature of Joinery does, the answer is in the source, not "trust us".
Self-hosting is our product, not a downgraded version of it. Anything we ever run as a service, we make every effort to ship as something you can run yourself... and if we cannot, we will say why in public.
Files are stored as ordinary files. Everything else is in a standard Postgres database. Export is standard formats, not a proprietary blob. Leaving Joinery is easy, if you want to.
Your install does not report to us. We do not see your usage, your members, or your mail. We also can't shut it off.
Individuals, households, students and nonprofits self-host the whole suite at no cost. This is not a trial, a tier, or a seat-capped edition. It does not expire and it will not be withdrawn.
Where content is end-to-end encrypted we say what that covers and what it does not. Where it is not, we say so. Encryption is not another marketing claim, it is really important to us.
Joinery is free for noncommercial use. Period. Forever. The code is published under the PolyForm Noncommercial license: free to read, run and modify for personal, household, educational and nonprofit use. Running it commercially needs a paid license.
We know why you are asking. The fear is the rug-pull ...a project that is generous until it is acquired, and then is not. The only useful answer is a clear one: personal use is free permanently, and that is not conditional on how the business does. If you self-host for yourself or your family, nothing you install today can be taken back or put behind a paywall later.
What actually protects you is not our promise, though. It is that the software runs on your hardware, it doesn't check in with our servers, the data is in standard formats, and you can walk at any time.
Joinery is funded by business licenses, paid plugins, and hosting referral fees. We are firmly and loudly rejecting any business models that are coercive, extractive, or manipulative. No ads, no data harvesting, and no subscription without a self-hosted alternative — anything we charge monthly for, you can run yourself instead. If that ever stops being true of something, we will say so plainly and explain why.
We want to charge a fair price for good software written with the user as the customer.
We want to be transparent: if you deploy on Linode from a link on this site, you get two free months and Linode pays us a referral fee. We use Linode and recommend it, but you are free to use any server hosting company you like.