Consultancies pay for software the way they bill clients: per head. HubSpot Sales Professional lists at about £85 per seat per month in the UK (verified); Salesforce starts from £20 per user per month (verified); Notion runs around £8 to £10 a seat and Dropbox around £12 (both reported). Then in 2025 Harvest, newly acquired by Bending Spoons, restructured its pricing to $9 to $14 per seat per month plus usage fees on invoices and projects (verified, getharvest.com), and a lot of firms started shopping for alternatives to the whole model.
What the per-head stack costs
| Capability | Per-head stack | On Node (flat) |
|---|---|---|
| Billable time | Harvest: $9-14/seat + usage fees on invoices & projects | Kimai (Small): £25 |
| Pipeline & CRM | HubSpot Sales Pro: ~£85/seat = ~£850 | EspoCRM (Medium): £45 |
| Client deliverables & portals | Dropbox at ~£12/user (reported): ~£120 | Nextcloud (Large): £75 |
| Methodology & knowledge base | Notion at ~£8-10/seat (reported): ~£80-100 | BookStack (Small): £25 |
| Invoicing | Per-seat or per-invoice fees | Invoice Ninja (Medium): £39 |
| Identity, SSO, audit | Spread across the above | Included with your apps: £0 |
A typical per-head stack runs £50 to £115 per consultant per month, so the flat Node column crosses over at two to three consultants; a ten-person firm keeps roughly £4,000 to £10,000 a year. And the billing model is the opposite of usage anxiety: Node meters by the hour so you carry no commitment, but each app's rate is capped by its tier. More invoices, more projects and more busy months cost exactly nothing more. These are list prices; ask for a like-for-like figure.
What your firm runs on Node
Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal and n8n deploy self-serve, in minutes, from the signup portal; the rest is managed setup, deployed and connected by our engineers.
Billable time - Kimai (managed setup): time against clients, projects and activities, exportable for invoicing, flat at £25 per month equivalent however many consultants and associates log hours. Kimai's published reviews include CodeWeavers, the firm behind CrossOver.
Pipeline - EspoCRM (self-serve): opportunities, proposals and relationships in one pipeline instead of a partner's inbox and a spreadsheet.
Deliverables and client portals - Nextcloud (self-serve): a private, branded share per client for deliverables and working files, with versioning, expiring links and activity logs, under your own domain. Other organisations using Nextcloud include the German federal administration and the French Ministry of National Education, in vendor-documented deployments of hundreds of thousands of seats.
Methodology - BookStack (managed setup): frameworks, templates and past-project know-how, searchable, without Notion's per-seat meter.
Invoicing - Invoice Ninja (managed setup): invoices and payment tracking with no per-invoice fee. Utilisation - Metabase (managed setup): dashboards over Kimai's data for billable percentage and recovery rates. Glue - n8n (self-serve): timesheet nudges, proposal-to-project handoffs, invoice chasing. Metabase's case studies include N26 and Dribbble.
Confidentiality you can put in the proposal
Consultancy work is NDA'd by default, and clients in defence, infrastructure and the public sector ask hard questions about where their material sits. Your Node tenant is an isolated private network on hardware we own in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, with access through your own single sign-on realm and sign-ins and admin actions fully audited. A UK GDPR Article 28 DPA is standard: generate a completed copy now. The direction of travel is on your side: European governments are moving the same way, with Schleswig-Holstein rolling Nextcloud out to 25,000 public employees and the French Ministry of the Interior scaling toward 300,000 users (both vendor-published figures). Every app is open source and your data stays in open formats: leaving is an export, not a negotiation.
AI on client work, without it leaving the UK
First drafts, research summaries, meeting notes: exactly the material your NDAs cover. The AI gateway labels every model UK-hosted or partner-routed; UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own in our UK data centre, so prompt content never leaves our infrastructure. Metered per token in GBP on the same invoice: see the model catalogue.
Price your stack against the rate card
Deploy Nextcloud or EspoCRM yourself in minutes with £25 of free credit, or tell an engineer what your firm pays per head today and we will do the honest comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Where do client deliverables and NDA'd material actually live?
Inside your own tenant: an isolated private network on hardware Node owns and operates in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction. For consultancies serving defence, infrastructure or public-sector clients, that is a materially better answer than a US collaboration suite, and a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement is standard; you can generate a completed copy on our website.
How is this different from Harvest's new usage fees?
Harvest, since its 2025 acquisition by Bending Spoons, restructured to 9 to 14 dollars per seat per month plus usage fees on invoices and projects (verified, getharvest.com pricing). Node bills hourly against a published rate card with no minimum term, and the hourly meter is capped by the app's tier: Kimai at Small is at most 25 pounds per month equivalent however many timesheets, projects or invoices you run through it. Hourly billing here means no commitment, not a fee that grows with your busyness.
Is Kimai a full Harvest replacement?
For time capture and billable reporting against clients and projects, yes. Kimai's reporting is plainer than Harvest's, and we will not pretend otherwise; for polished margin dashboards we put Metabase over the same data as a managed setup. There is also no per-seat fee, so contractors and associates can log time without a licensing conversation.
What about resource planning and capacity?
Honest gap: there is no Float or Productive-class resource-planning tool in the stack. Firms that live on capacity heatmaps keep that tool. What Node covers is time, pipeline, deliverables, knowledge and invoicing, which is where the per-seat fees usually accumulate.
What does it cost for a ten-person consultancy?
From the published rate card, with no platform fee: Kimai (Small) is 25 pounds per month equivalent, EspoCRM (Medium) 45 pounds and Nextcloud (Large) 75 pounds. That is 145 pounds per month equivalent plus VAT, billed hourly. A typical per-head stack at 50 to 115 pounds per user per month costs a ten-person firm 6,000 to 13,800 pounds a year; the flat equivalent here is about 1,740, and it does not move as you hire.
Can we try it before moving client work?
Yes. Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal and n8n deploy self-serve from the signup portal in minutes, with 25 pounds of free credit and single sign-on wired. Billing is hourly with no minimum term: stop an app and the meter stops, so trying it costs pennies, not a contract.