Startpage
The company home screen IT actually controls — and employees actually keep.
A self-hosted, multi-tenant start page that replaces the default browser home page across an entire organisation. Administrators push mandatory application links, bookmark categories and branding to every desk, while users layer their own shortcuts, timezones and widgets on top. Both sets merge into one screen — no intranet project required.
3Tenancy levels
1JAR to deploy
4Built-in roles
6Colour themes
The problem
Every employee's first click is unmanaged.
The browser home page is the most-visited screen in any company and the least governed one. Staff bookmark the wrong URLs, keep links to systems retired two migrations ago, and never find the tools they were never told about. Meanwhile the intranet home page — the one IT spent a year building — is the page everyone skips.
01
Shadow bookmarks
Personal link collections that no administrator can see, correct or retire.
02
Onboarding drag
New joiners spend their first week asking colleagues for URLs and credentials.
03
Adoption gap
Licensed tools go unused because nobody can find the entry point.
04
Compliance blind spot
The security policy and incident line are two clicks away — on a page nobody opens.
The solution
One screen. IT owns half of it, the user owns the rest.
01
What IT owns
Organisation-wide default links and categories, pushed to every user account automatically; any of them can be flagged locked — impossible for a user to edit or delete. Branding, default theme, session policy and authentication method are set centrally per organisation.
02
What the employee owns
Their own links, categories, ordering, theme, timezones and widgets — all layered on top of the corporate set and merged at read time. Personalisation is never taken away to achieve governance.
03
Merged automatically, never a trade-off
Both sets live in one table, distinguished only by whether a link belongs to a user or to the organisation, and combined on every read — so governance and personalisation stop competing.
Capabilities
01The dashboard
- Full-width search bar with / and Ctrl/Cmd+K hotkeys
- Time-of-day greeting by display name
- Live clock with millisecond precision and a full date line
- Live weather card — temperature, feels-like, humidity, wind, pressure, condition icon, resolved city and country
- Categorised link grid with right-click edit and delete
- Modal create/edit for links and categories, with autogenerated icons
- Toast notifications and a global keyboard-shortcut map
02Links & bookmark governance
- Two link types from one model — application tiles and bookmark lists
- Organisation links and personal links merged transparently at read time
- Lock flag on links and on whole categories: mandatory, undeletable, uneditable by users
- Per link: title, URL, description, icon, colour, position, open-in-new-tab and active flag
- Drag-order reordering of the corporate set from the admin console
- Policy switches: allow users to add personal links, and to customise layout
03Multi-tenancy & organisations
- Three-level hierarchy: Tenant → Organisation → User
- Complete data isolation — every business table is tenant- and organisation-scoped, with cascade deletes
- Usernames and e-mail addresses are unique per tenant, so client companies never collide
- Per-tenant and per-organisation JSON settings for independent configuration
- Soft deactivation at every level instead of destructive deletes
- One deployment can serve many client companies — the MSP shape, out of the box
04Personalisation & widgets
- World Clock — home timezone plus two additional zones
- Stopwatch with millisecond precision
- Calendar month grid with navigation
- Calculator with expression input and persisted history
- Six colour themes — Gold, Ocean, Purple, Forest, Rose, Teal — applied instantly and stored server-side
- Light, dark and system theme modes; dark is the default
- Per-organisation widget policy: enable, disable, mark required, set default size
05Administration & operations
- Dashboard tiles: users, active sessions, organisation links, system health, memory
- Tenant, organisation and user management with role assignment
- Default-link management with reorder and lock toggle
- Live session list with revoke-one and revoke-all-for-user
- Shareable link sets — cryptographically random token, seven-day expiry, one-click import, tenant-scoped
- Log viewer with live tail, full-text search, and runtime log-level changes — no restart required
- Memory & retention console — live heap stats, scheduled cleanup, per-task enable/disable
06Security & governance
- Four-role RBAC enforced at page and method level
- Tenant isolation on every table, with per-tenant uniqueness constraints
- Server-side session registry recording IP address, user agent and expiry — revocable individually or per user
- Audit trail of logins, logouts, creates, updates and deletes with actor, entity, IP and timestamp
- Configurable retention and scheduled purge for logs and sessions
- Refresh tokens stored hashed; raw tokens never persisted
- HttpOnly, SameSite-strict, secure-flag cookies
- All secrets supplied by environment variable
- Dependency vulnerability scanning built into the build, gated at CVSS 7
■Java / Spring Boot, single executable JAR, no CDN required
■PostgreSQL with a Flyway-versioned schema
■REST API under /api, stateless JWT auth with BCrypt password hashing
■On-premise, private cloud or partner-hosted deployment, port 8484
■Four-role RBAC enforced at page and API method level
■Server-side session registry with per-session and per-user revocation
Industries
Who it works for
Managed service providers
One deployment serves many client companies with complete isolation, operated across tenants from a single superadmin account.
Public sector & defence
A self-hosted single JAR without mandatory outbound calls or telemetry, deployable in restricted and air-gapped networks.
Healthcare
Shared clinical workstations where the patient system, incident reporting and on-call rota must be on every session.
Financial services
Locked compliance links, an activity audit trail, configurable retention and session revocation, on-premise for risk approval.
Education
Universities and school groups push LMS, mail, library and timetable links per faculty or campus, with cohorts kept apart.
Manufacturing & logistics
Shared shop-floor and warehouse terminals get a fixed, kiosk-like home screen with only the tools the shift needs.
Professional services
Agencies and consultancies keep a dozen SaaS tools visible in categorised tiles, so onboarding a new consultant takes minutes.
Distributed teams
Remote-first companies across timezones share one surface with a world clock, per-user timezones and shared link sets.
Internal IT & digital workplace
The direct replacement for a neglected SharePoint landing page: faster to set up, cheaper to maintain, and kept by employees.
Use cases
Example scenarios
01 · Healthcare
The same mandatory links on every shared ward workstation
- Challenge
- Nurses and doctors log on to shared workstations all day, and each machine carries its own bookmarks. The link to incident reporting or the on-call rota is missing on half of them, or points to a system that was replaced.
- Approach
- The organisation administrator defines the patient system, incident reporting and on-call rota as organisation-wide default links and flags them locked, so users cannot edit or delete them. Staff can still add personal links on top, and administrators can revoke sessions server-side from the live session list.
- Result
- Whoever logs on, on whichever machine, sees the same mandatory set first. Retiring or correcting a link is one change in the admin console instead of a round of the wards.
02 · Managed service providers
One start page deployment for every client company
- Challenge
- An MSP looks after a few dozen small and mid-sized clients, each with its own application set. Links were spread over group-policy shortcuts, wiki pages and browser bookmarks per client, and nobody at the service desk knew which list was current.
- Approach
- A single Startpage deployment gets one tenant per client, with organisations underneath and complete data isolation; usernames and e-mail addresses are unique per tenant, so clients never collide. Each organisation gets its own branding, default links and widget policy, and the superadmin switches between client companies from one account.
- Result
- Onboarding a new client becomes creating a tenant and its default links rather than building another intranet page. The service desk works from one console for every client.
03 · Professional services
New consultants find the whole toolchain on their first login
- Challenge
- A consultancy works across CRM, time tracking, project management, file sharing and client portals. New joiners spent their first week asking colleagues for URLs, and some licensed tools were barely used because nobody knew where to find them.
- Approach
- IT publishes the toolchain as organisation-wide categories of application tiles and bookmark lists, pushed automatically to every user account. Teams share extra link sets through a tenant-scoped token that expires after seven days and imports in one click.
- Result
- A new consultant opens the browser and sees every tool the firm uses, grouped by category, next to their own shortcuts. Adding a new tool to the stack means adding one link centrally.
Licence
Per deployment. Never per seat.
Startpage is licensed per organisation with unlimited internal users, or per tenant for service providers, as a perpetual licence with annual maintenance or an annual subscription — both on-premise or hosted. The annual fee follows a marginal schedule based on your own turnover, from a €900 minimum with any yearly increase capped at 25%; hosting, hardware, consultancy, setup, migration and training are quoted separately.
Annual licence by turnover, ex VAT
| Turnover | Per year |
|---|
| Up to €500k | €900 |
|---|
| €1M | €1,500 |
|---|
| €5M | €2,500 |
|---|
| €25M | €5,500 |
|---|
| €100M | €13,000 |
|---|
| €500M | €37,000 |
|---|
| €1B | €52,000 |
|---|
Illustrative: a portal at €5 per user a month bills a thousand-person organisation €60,000 a year; at €5M turnover this is €2,500.
What it does
- 01One screen where IT's mandatory links and each user's own shortcuts merge automatically.
- 02Self-hosted, multi-tenant JAR — one deployment can serve many client organisations with full data isolation.
- 03Ships its own log viewer and memory console — observability other portals sell separately.
At a glance
CategoryDigital Workplace
LicencePer deployment, unlimited users, from €900 a year
For whomIT & digital workplace teams · MSPs · Public sector · Regulated industries
See it on your own links.
We will stand up a tenant with your organisation's real application set, locked where it should be, and hand you the URL.Start the conversation →