What actually happens after you click sign up: why you pay first, the idempotent provisioning checklist that builds your workspace across five systems, and the two-step domain switch that means your mail is never in the air.
The signup form at email.eu takes about a minute: company name, your domain, a plan, an email code, a payment method. What happens in the seconds after you submit it is the closest thing this series has to a finale, because it's where every pillar from the previous six parts has to perform at once, automatically, for someone we've never met. Part 7, the last of the series.
There's no free tier and no "add a card later". A payment method is part of signup, before anything is created. We know that costs us signups, and we chose it anyway, for a reason that's really about the neighbourhood: free mailboxes attract spammers the way an open door attracts weather, and a platform that tolerates them poisons the sending reputation of every legitimate customer on it. The deliverability we described in part 3 is partly built here, at the front gate. Paying customers on a clean platform is the product.
The same logic runs at the back of the funnel: abandoned half-signups are swept out automatically after a grace period, so stale accounts never accumulate into an attack surface.
The moment your payment method is confirmed, the control plane starts working through a checklist on your behalf:
File storage arrives as its own isolated instance for your company, spun up alongside the rest. By the time you land in the dashboard, you have a working workspace on a temporary basis of our domain, before your own domain has moved an inch.
The engineering property that makes this trustworthy is not speed, it's repeatability. Provisioning talks to five systems over a network, and networks fail; sooner or later some step times out halfway. So every step is idempotent, safe to run again: the checklist can be re-run from the top and each completed item says "already done" instead of failing or, worse, duplicating. Recovery from almost any provisioning hiccup is therefore the safest operation we have: run it again. Boring, repeatable steps beat clever fragile ones, in provisioning as everywhere else in the series.
Attaching your domain is deliberately split into two moments, which is the entire trick behind the weekend migration.
Verification is one TXT record that proves you own the domain and changes nothing about your mail flow. From then on you can create mailboxes on your domain, invite your team, and copy years of mail across with the built-in migration engine, which reads from your old provider over IMAP (or from an archive file), copies every folder and flag, and can be run by an admin for the whole team. The credentials it uses are encrypted, used for the copy, then deleted.
Go-live is the real switch, and it's one click plus one paste: the dashboard generates your MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, you publish them at your DNS provider, and the control plane watches your DNS until it sees the change, then flips the domain to Live. Until that moment your old provider delivers your mail exactly as before. There is no day where your email hangs in the air.
A workspace provider's billing behaviour tells you a lot about them, so here's ours in plain terms. If a renewal payment fails, we tell you and retry over the following week. If it keeps failing, your workspace gets locked, and locked means locked, not deleted: sign-in is suspended, your mail, files and history stay intact, and settling the invoice turns everything back on. Deleting customer data over a failed card is exactly the kind of irreversible act our infrastructure rules exist to prevent.
Support runs on the same philosophy of few moving parts: tickets live in the dashboard, replies also go out as ordinary email, and answering that email lands your reply back in the ticket. No portal password required from you, and the whole exchange stays on infrastructure we run.
Seven posts ago this series started with one sentence: EU suppliers only, no US vendors anywhere. Everything since has been the consequences. The rule forced us to run the stack ourselves; running it ourselves forced us to get serious about mail, identity, infrastructure and reliability; and all of it together is what lets the sixty seconds in this post exist: a European workspace, on European suppliers, that a small company can join in a minute and move into over a weekend.
If you've read this far, you're probably the person in your company who'd be doing that weekend. We wrote the guide for you, and if your situation is bigger or stranger than the guide covers, talk to us first. We'd rather scope it with you than surprise you.