Mercury Licensing Charges

Non-commercial use:  Mercury is free for non-commercial use. Individuals, families, non-profit organizations and charities may use the program without charge for any number of users. If you are entitled to use the program free, you are still welcome to make donations in support of the program's development if you wish to do so.

Commercial use:  For commercial users (including academic institutions and government bodies), the following fee table applies:

• Up to 15 users - US$75 per server (includes 1 support incident per year)
  
• 16-100 users - US$195 per server (includes 2 support incidents per year)
  
• 101 or more users - US$295 per server (includes 3 support incidents per year)
  
• Site license (unlimited numbers of servers and users) - US$695 (includes 10 support incidents per year)
  

For licensing purposes, a "user" is considered to be either a single mailbox to which mail can be delivered directly by the Mercury server (i.e, an "end point"), or a single mailing list.

We are happy to consider reasonable requests for reduced or special-rate pricing. Please contact David Harris if you would like to discuss this.

Commercial organizations may install and run Mercury for up to sixty days (to allow evaluation) before purchasing a license. What happens after sixty days? Nothing: the program will continue to run with no changes at all, whether or not you obtain a license. The requirement to license is a moral imperative, and at this stage is not directly enforced in the program itself, although if too many people abuse this easygoing approach, we may adopt stronger techniques in future.

Licenses are for the life of the major version of the program: so, if you purchase a license for Mercury v5.01, the same license will remain usable right up to v5.99, but as soon as you decide to upgrade to v6.0, you will need a new license. The Mercury installer will warn you if you are about to install an upgrade that will require a new license. If a new major version of the program is released within six months of your license purchase, you will automatically be entitled to an upgraded license free of charge.

Technical support: paid licenses entitle the licensee to a certain number of formal technical support incidents each year for two years from the date of original purchase. The number of incidents provided per year at each level is shown in the table of prices above. Please note that unused support incidents do not accrue to the following year.

Site licenses cover a single organization in a single metropolitan area: we are happy to negotiate site licenses with wider coverage - please contact David Harris for this.

Sites who have current subscriptions under the former Support Subscription licensing model are automatically entitled to Mercury licenses without charge. Please contact David Harris directly by e-mail to arrange supply of your license, quoting your subscription number in the subject line of your message.


To order a Mercury/32 license, please visit our ordering pages.