Sapling membership at $3 per month.
A for-profit company sets a price floor at the cost-of-acquisition of a customer. We are not acquiring; we are accompanying. $3 is what it costs us to host one Portal account. Sapling is priced at cost.
The Foundation
Why a Foundation, in plain terms.
Holon could have been a for-profit landscape company. We chose a 501(c)(3) non-profit instead. The reason is structural, not ceremonial. Three things make this concrete: Sapling membership at $3 a month, Habitat as a monthly service rather than a capital install, and the first conversation, free. None of those would survive on a for-profit balance sheet. They survive on this one because the balance sheet was built differently.
Three answers you can hold in your hand
Each is a price or a practice you can see on the Vitality page. Each is the visible result of being a Foundation.
Habitat is a service, not a sale.
Irrigation as a Service runs against the financial logic of a for-profit installer. They want the capital expense to land once, large, and the maintenance to recur. Habitat reverses that. No company answerable to investors can sustain Habitat. We can.
The Site Conversation is free.
A landscape company's first move is to bill for the first visit, because the visit is the funnel. Our first move is to listen. The Site Conversation is the only honest way to start, so we made it the only way to start, and we made it free.
How the math holds together
Every paying member funds a Companion. The math is small enough to write on a card.
- Sapling
- $3 per month. Covers the platform cost of one Portal account.
- Grove
- $30 per month. Covers an active Custode relationship plus a Sapling at no cost to a household that needs it.
- Habitat
- $300 per month. Covers Irrigation as a Service plus several Sapling households at no cost.
- Direct donation
- Goes directly to the 3% Companion pool. No platform fees, no overhead skim.
When you become a member, you are not buying a service. You are buying that service AND a portion of someone else's. That is what the 3% Initiative is, in dollars.
What changes when the money flows the other way
A for-profit landscape company is not bad. It is shaped by who pays it back. The list below is what shape that takes, and what shape we take instead.
| What we compare | For-profit landscape company | Holon Foundation |
|---|---|---|
| How they make the math work | Recurring chemical maintenance, weekly mow, seasonal re-sod after summer kills the lawn. The product is billable recurrence. | Front-loaded transition; tapering maintenance over years. The product is a finished yard you eventually need us less for. |
| What plants get installed | Easy-care imports, turf grasses, anything the supply chain ships in volume. Whatever produces the next billable visit. | Native species, ecotype-matched, sourced through the Distributed Nursery. Whatever does the most ecological work for your specific block. |
| What customer loyalty looks like | A multi-year contract. Cancellation fees. The customer is a recurring revenue line. | Annual membership, pause or cancel anytime. The Steward is a partner; we want to need you less, not more. |
| Who else gets paid | An opaque chain of national supply, with markups at every layer. | Local artisans, neighbour-to-neighbour plant trades through the Distributed Nursery, named partners in our network. |
| Where pricing lives | Behind a sales call. Different number for each customer. | On the Vitality page. Same number for everyone. Same Compare table for the donor and the prospect. |
How they make the math work
For-profit landscape company
Recurring chemical maintenance, weekly mow, seasonal re-sod after summer kills the lawn. The product is billable recurrence.
Holon Foundation
Front-loaded transition; tapering maintenance over years. The product is a finished yard you eventually need us less for.
What plants get installed
For-profit landscape company
Easy-care imports, turf grasses, anything the supply chain ships in volume. Whatever produces the next billable visit.
Holon Foundation
Native species, ecotype-matched, sourced through the Distributed Nursery. Whatever does the most ecological work for your specific block.
What customer loyalty looks like
For-profit landscape company
A multi-year contract. Cancellation fees. The customer is a recurring revenue line.
Holon Foundation
Annual membership, pause or cancel anytime. The Steward is a partner; we want to need you less, not more.
Who else gets paid
For-profit landscape company
An opaque chain of national supply, with markups at every layer.
Holon Foundation
Local artisans, neighbour-to-neighbour plant trades through the Distributed Nursery, named partners in our network.
Where pricing lives
For-profit landscape company
Behind a sales call. Different number for each customer.
Holon Foundation
On the Vitality page. Same number for everyone. Same Compare table for the donor and the prospect.
What we will never do as a non-profit that a for-profit competitor would have to
These are the practices a for-profit landscape company must default to in order to survive. We are organised so we never have to.
Charge for a first visit.
Sell you a yard you cannot afford to maintain.
Recommend a plant because it produces a higher follow-on margin.
Lock you into a multi-year service contract.
Ship in plant material that does ecological harm because it is what the supply chain has on the truck.
Hide pricing behind a quote process designed to extract willingness-to-pay.
What it costs us to be a non-profit
Honest disclosure. The structure has tradeoffs.
No investor capital. We grow at the speed our members and donors fund. That is slower than a venture-backed competitor would scale.
A board of directors with fiduciary duty to the mission. We answer to that board before we answer to any single steward.
Annual public financial filings (Form 990). Donors and members can read where every dollar goes. We are accountable in a way a private company is not.
We cannot pivot to a more profitable adjacent service even if it would grow revenue. The 501(c)(3) charter binds us to the mission as written.
We think these are good costs to bear. They are also why the Vitality table looks the way it does.
On our aesthetics
Two registers, held as peers.
We operate in two visual registers. Neither is more sophisticated than the other.
The first register is the earth-pastel base of moss, cream, and sage. It does connective tissue. Calm, grounded, scientifically literate. It belongs at the front door because it lowers the temperature of a conversation that asks people to rethink their yard.
The second register is the cultural-saturated palette: Cochineal Red from Mesoamerican dye, Rosa Mexicano from Mexican folk vibrancy, Turquoise Stone from inlay traditions, Inti Yellow from the Andean sun and the marigolds of cempasúchil, Mesoamerican Green from the quetzal feather and jade. Each hue carries a named provenance. There is no generic “festive pink” here.
We hold these registers as peers. We refuse to treat the first as Design and the second as decoration.
Why this matters
The Western art-and-craft hierarchy that reads minimalism as sophisticated and ornamented saturated color as primitive is not a neutral aesthetic preference. It is a colonial inheritance. It dismisses the output of the Global South as “artisanry,” “folklore,” or “ethnic craft,” and reserves the words “Design,” “Art,” and “Fashion” for muted European geometries.
We reject this hierarchy at the level of the design system.
A backstrap-loomed Andean textile or a chemically complex Malian Mudcloth possesses the exact same intellectual rigor, conceptual depth, and design intelligence as a piece of minimalist European furniture.
— Sosnik, Art, Craft, and Cultural Hierarchy, 2026
The pattern grammar of a Saltillo serape, the dye chemistry of Cochineal, the symbolic geometry of the Andean Chakana. These are technical disciplines with centuries of refinement behind them. Naming them as such is what credit looks like.
How that shows up
Earth-pastels do the connective work: the chrome of headers, footers, body grounds, ambient surface. Cultural-saturated hues carry identity: the logo dots, the section dividers, the calls to action. We do not desaturate cultural hues to fit a “house style.” We do not use them as small accents on beige; that is the chromophobic containment device this brand was built to refuse.
We credit traditions by name when we use them. We route a percentage of relevant revenue to artisan stewards or community funds. We do not repackage as “bohemian,” “tribal,” or “ethnic.” We do not call this approach a celebration of culture; it is a refusal to inherit a hierarchy.
This is what we mean by maximalism as a peer register. The garden, like the design system, holds both quiet ground and saturated bloom, and treats them as equally serious.
How to help us hold this
Three doors. Pick the one that fits your life.
One story, three doors
Vitality. Relationships. Solidarity.
What you feel in your front yard is made real by how we see it, and kept honest by how we are structured to deliver it. The three are the same story.
Vitality
What you feel.
A place of wellness, lifestyle, and health for your household.
Cooler mornings. Returned birdsong. Quieter air at the front door. A yard the children come back to and the block begins to recognise. The felt experience Holon is composing for your family.
The Membership →
Relationships
How we see.
A garden of sciences. Many disciplines held in relationship.
Nutrition, neuro-aesthetics, ecology, mycology, horticulture, sociology, hydrology, economy. Every yard is a relationship between disciplines. Systems engineering is how we hold them together.
The Science →
Solidarity
How we sustain.
A 501(c)(3) Foundation, because the money has to flow the other way.
The for-profit landscaping industry is structured to produce repeat maintenance revenue. A vitality yard requires the opposite logic. A Foundation is the only delivery structure whose financial obligation points at the household and the block, not the service contract.
You are here.