Because renting your email from a company whose incentives point the other way was never going to end well.
The companies that hold most of the world's email are not run by villains. They are run by people responding to incentives — and the incentives say your inbox is an asset. It is a place to sell attention, a corpus to train on, 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 it: the whole suite — mail, calendar, drive, contacts — installed on a machine that belongs to you, with the parts that genuinely need outside help (getting outbound mail delivered) handled honestly instead of pretended away.
Ownership is not an ideology here. It is a mechanism. If the server is yours, no policy change can reach it, no automated flag can close it, and no acquisition can degrade it. Even if this project disappeared tomorrow, your install keeps running.
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 happens to a message when it arrives, the answer is in the source, not in a support article.
Self-hosting is the product, not a downgraded edition 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 Postgres database. Export is standard formats, not a proprietary blob. Leaving is copying a directory, and nothing in the design is there to make it harder.
Your install does not report to us. It runs air-gapped if you want it to. We do not see your usage, your members, or your mail, because there is no channel by which we could.
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 It does not expire and it will not be withdrawn.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. You will not find breathless encryption adjectives on this site, because they mean nothing — you will find the mechanism, so you can judge it yourself.
Joinery is not open source, and we will not use the phrase. 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 blunt 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, your data is in standard formats, and you can walk at any time. Judge us on those, not on a license label.
Joinery is funded by business licenses, the $39.99 automatic install, two paid plugins, and hosting referral fees. You pay us; that is the whole model. No ads, no data, no investors to satisfy.
Every one of those is money for a service rendered or a recommendation made — never for access to what you store. There is no venture capital, no pressure to maximise engagement, and no growth target that some quarter will require us to betray. The aim is to be here in twenty years, not acquired in three.
The referral fee is worth naming out loud: if you deploy on Linode from a link on this site, Linode pays us. We tell you that on the page where the link appears, because finding out later is worse than being told now.