# ADR 0006 — Enterprise self-hosted first; SaaS only after we run it ourselves

**Status:** Accepted, 2026-09-02.

## Decision

The product is a **self-hostable server for enterprises, small businesses and
builders.** A hosted offering is not a v1 goal and may never exist. If it does,
it comes only after we have run OpenMail ourselves, in production, long enough
to have a deliverability track record worth selling.

## Why this ordering and not the reverse

- **Deliverability cannot be shortcut.** A hosted product's entire value is
  inbox placement, which is months of IP warmup, feedback-loop enrolment and
  suppression-list discipline. Selling that before we have it is selling
  something we do not own.
- **Self-hosted is the differentiator.** Every competing agent-mailbox product
  is hosted-only. Leading with a SaaS puts us on their ground, competing on the
  thing they have already spent years on.
- **Auditability is the purchase condition.** Enterprises will not point MX at
  a closed box. Public source under Apache-2.0 is why they can say yes, and the
  self-hosted path is the one that requires no trust in us at all.
- **We become our own first serious user.** The bugs that matter in mail —
  silent DANE downgrades, an MTA-STS policy cached wrong for a year — surface
  only under real traffic. Running it ourselves before selling it is how we
  find them on our own mail instead of a customer's.

## Consequences

- `pods` (tenancy) stays in the schema from v0.1 even though nothing uses it.
  It is the piece that keeps the SaaS path open without a migration. **Do not
  remove it as dead code.**
- No billing, no Stripe, no hosted control plane in the tree. When someone
  proposes one, this ADR is the answer.
- Docs, defaults and error messages are written for an operator running one
  box, not for a tenant of ours.
- The website (`website/`) sells self-hosting and links to the repo. It does
  not collect signups for a product that does not exist.