Kolab Now

Kolab Now is operated by Apheleia IT AG, a Swiss software-freedom company headquartered in Bern. The legal entity was originally founded as **Kolab Systems** in Zürich in 2010 and was later renamed Apheleia IT AG. The Kolab Now consumer/SMB SaaS launched as a public beta in January 2013 and became a paid generally-available service on 1 August 2013. The product is a managed hosting of the **fully open-source Kolab groupware platform** that the same company develops and maintains — covering email, calendars, contacts, tasks, files, and notes via standard open protocols (IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV) so that any standard mail/calendar client can connect. The governance and pedigree are unusually strong for the privacy-email category. The Apheleia IT AG board includes **Georg Greve** (CEO; founding president of the **Free Software Foundation Europe**), CTO Jeroen van Meeuwen, **Michael Moser** (CCO; co-founder of **Adfinis**, Switzerland's leading open-source integrator), and **Philipp Koch** (co-founder of Swiss hosting company **Nine.ch**). That combination — a free-software figurehead plus a Swiss open-source integrator plus a Swiss hosting operator on the same board — is uncommon and translates into a structurally transparent posture: the product is open-source software run by people whose careers are documented free-software / open-infrastructure work. For an EU-sovereignty audit Kolab Now is a clean Swiss pick. The legal entity is Swiss-incorporated, the data is hosted in Switzerland, Switzerland holds an EU adequacy decision under Art. 45 GDPR (so EU↔CH transfers need no SCCs), and there is no US parent and no US-VC participation. The compliance score is held at 4/5 only because no public DPA / sub-processors URLs and no formal ISO 27001 attestation were surfaced at audit — a documentation gap rather than a structural concern. Pricing in CHF (per the public site / blog): the standard groupware individual account is **CHF 8.99/month**, the email-only individual account is **CHF 4.55/month**, and the on-site (self-host) Apheleia "Kolab on-site Email & Groupware" subscription starts at **CHF 2.25 per user/month** for fewer than 50 users. EUR equivalents recorded approximately. Best fit: privacy-conscious EU users who want Swiss-jurisdiction email/groupware on top of a transparent, fully-open-source software stack — and any procurement-grade buyer who specifically values FSF-Europe / Adfinis / Nine.ch governance over a brand-name marketing pitch.