Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
I get this question a lot: why did you choose to make mothertree open source? How will you make money? So I thought I should explain my thinking.
mothertree is a self-hostable collaboration suite that bundles chat, docs, email, video conferencing, and file sharing into a single deployment. It is open source, licensed under the AGPL.
Who will pay for an open source tool?
First, the practical reality: running a collaboration suite like this is genuinely complex. You’re coordinating half a dozen services, managing DNS, TLS certificates, authentication, database backups, email deliverability, and keeping it all updated and secure. Most organizations would rather not take that on. Even technically inclined people who can run it themselves would — in most cases — prefer not to.
That is where mother-tree.org comes in. It is the hosted service that runs the mothertree code as a multi-tenant deployment. Organizations that don’t want the operational burden can pay to have mother-tree.org create a tenant for them and handle everything. So organizations are not paying for the tool but for the service — straightforward hosting.
But will this project still exist in two years? We believe hosting is a sustainable model precisely because the complexity is real. As long as mothertree is useful, most organizations will prefer to pay for reliable hosting rather than run it themselves. That isn’t a weakness; it’s a natural division of labor.
You can see for yourself
Start with the code itself. Because mothertree is open source, you can read every line of it. There is no mystery about what the software does with your data, how authentication works, or what gets stored where. Anyone can audit it.
Then there is the data. Chat in mothertree is end-to-end encrypted — the server never sees plaintext. Email is encrypted edge-to-edge, so messages are protected in transit and at rest. Even as the operator of mother-tree.org, we don’t have access to the content of your conversations or correspondence.
And if that still isn’t enough — if you simply don’t want to trust any third party, no matter how transparent — you can take the code and run the exact same services on your own infrastructure. Nothing is held back. There are no “enterprise features” behind a paywall, no proprietary add-ons that only paying customers get. The hosted service and the open source project run the same code.
Why AGPL
mothertree uses the AGPL, sometimes called a “copyleft” license. It adds one important protection on top of standard open source licenses: if someone takes mothertree, modifies it, and offers it as a service to others, their users still get access to that modified source code. They can download it, inspect it, and run it themselves.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to use the multi-tenant setup to host mothertree for others, and to charge for it. But AGPL ensures the code stays open — no one gets to build a closed fork on top of community work.
No gatekeepers
At the end of the day, software that people depend on for their daily communication and collaboration should be something they can own, inspect, and control. Making mothertree open source means that no single organization — including mine — gets to be a gatekeeper.
The hosted service at mother-tree.org is there for convenience, not lock-in. And if we ever stop earning your trust, you can take your data and your stack and walk away. That’s not a bug in the business model — it’s the whole point.
If you want to contribute — whether that’s code, bug reports, documentation, or just feedback — the project is on GitHub. We’d welcome the help.
mothertree is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform. Learn more at mother-tree.org.