A four-adviser firm buying software meets a wall of quote-only pricing. Intelliflo Office is reported at £130 to £135 per user per month; Iress Xplan is quote-only with minimums; Plannr is reported around £140 per licence; mortgage CRMs (Acre, Smartr365, eKeeper) are all quote-only. Adviser Cloud at least publishes: £150 per month for the first user, then £30 per user. Add onboarding fees and annual contracts, and the back-office alone runs a reported £520 to £540 a month for four advisers, before the firm has bought file sharing, e-signing or an MI dashboard. Meanwhile Consumer Duty demands evidence of everything, and PS21/3 asks you to account for every third party in the chain.
What the stack around the back-office costs
Keep the back-office; it does a regulated job. This table is about the satellite tools billed per adviser around it, where DocuSign lists at £20 to £33 per user per month and everything else quotes.
| Capability | Per-adviser SaaS | On Node (flat, hourly billed) |
|---|---|---|
| Introducer & prospect tracking | Adviser Cloud: £150 first user + £30/user (or back-office seats at reported £130+) | EspoCRM (Small): £25 |
| Secure client document exchange | Email attachments, or per-seat portals | Nextcloud (Medium): £45 |
| Client agreements & LOAs | DocuSign: £20-33/user/mo | Documenso (Small): £25 |
| Consumer Duty evidence archive | Manual filing across shared drives | Paperless-ngx (Small): £25 |
| MI dashboards on your own book | Back-office add-on modules, quote-only | Metabase (Small): £21 |
| Identity, SSO & audit | Spread across the above | Included with your apps: £0 |
| Indicative total | Quote-dependent, rising per adviser | £141 flat, unlimited users |
The Node column is a sum of app rates and nothing else: no platform fee, no per-adviser line, no minimum term. At £141 a month equivalent, the entire satellite stack costs about one reported Intelliflo seat. It is not a back-office replacement and we will not sell it as one. Ask for a like-for-like figure for your firm.
What your firm runs on Node
Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal and n8n deploy self-serve, in minutes, from the signup portal; the rest are managed setup, deployed and connected by our engineers.
Introducers & prospects: EspoCRM (self-serve) (Small, £25/month equivalent): introducer tracking, prospect pipelines and annual review scheduling, without opening a back-office seat for every paraplanner and administrator. Not the regulated client record, as the FAQ says plainly.
Client document exchange: Nextcloud (self-serve) (Medium, £45): statements, reports and transfer packs in client folders with expiring password-protected links, replacing email attachments. Stadtsparkasse München moved confidential client-data exchange to Nextcloud under German regulatory requirements (vendor case study).
Agreements & LOAs: Documenso (managed setup) (Small, £25): client agreements, letters of authority and fee agreements signed without a per-user e-signing bill.
Evidence archive: Paperless-ngx (managed setup) (Small, £25): Consumer Duty and file-check evidence scanned, OCRed, tagged and retrievable when the file review or the FCA asks.
MI dashboards: Metabase (managed setup) (Small, £21): management information on your own book (pipeline, review coverage, introducer performance) without a quote-only add-on module.
Credentials: Vaultwarden (managed setup) (Small, £20) or Passbolt (Small, £21): shared provider-portal credentials managed properly, which is an operational resilience talking point in its own right. For glue between systems, n8n (self-serve): its published case studies include AML-automation firm K33 and insurer Seguros Bolívar.
A short answer for the operational resilience file
FCA PS21/3 and SYSC 8 expect you to know and document who your important business services depend on. Every extra SaaS vendor is another entry in that register with someone else's sub-processor list attached. Your Node tenant is a network-isolated private network on hardware we own in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, behind your own single sign-on realm so a leaver loses every app at once, with admin actions audited. A UK GDPR Article 28 DPA is standard. To be clear: this is infrastructure that supports your obligations; SM&CR, Consumer Duty and your compliance framework remain yours.
AI on client material, without pasting it into a chatbot
Drafting review letters, summarising fund notes, tidying meeting minutes: useful AI work on exactly the material that must not go into a consumer chatbot. The AI gateway labels every model UK-hosted or partner-routed; UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own, so prompt content never leaves our infrastructure. Metered per token in GBP on the same hourly invoice: see the model catalogue.
Keep the back-office, fix the stack around it
Deploy Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal or n8n yourself in minutes with £25 of free credit, or tell an engineer what your firm runs on today for a flat hourly-billed figure.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a back-office system or FCA-regulated software?
No, on both counts, and we would rather say it here than in a sales call. Node is not FCA-regulated software and is not a back-office system: there are no platform or provider integrations, no valuations feeds and no suitability tooling. Intelliflo, Xplan and Plannr do a regulated job. What we replace is the stack around them: file sharing, e-signing, evidence archives and MI dashboards, each currently billed per adviser.
How does this help with FCA operational resilience?
PS21/3 and SYSC 8 make you account for third-party dependencies in your important business services. A stack of US SaaS tools is a long list of dependencies with vague answers. A Node tenant gives you a short one: we know exactly where our data is, on UK-owned hardware in UK data centres, under a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA you can hand to your compliance consultant. Your SM&CR and Consumer Duty obligations stay yours; we make the infrastructure answer easy.
How does the billing work?
Everything is billed hourly against a published rate card with no minimum term, no onboarding fee and no annual contract; the monthly figures on this page are equivalents for comparison. Stop an app and the meter stops. After a market of quote-only pricing, minimums and renewal negotiations, a published rate card is the point.
Can EspoCRM replace our back-office CRM?
For the regulated record, no, and we will not pretend otherwise. EspoCRM here is for the work your back-office is too expensive to open seats for: introducer tracking, prospect pipelines and review scheduling for support staff. The client file of record, valuations and suitability stay in your back-office system.
What does the client document exchange look like?
Nextcloud in your own tenant: password-protected, expiring share links and client folders instead of emailing statements and LOAs as attachments. Stadtsparkasse München moved its confidential client-data exchange to Nextcloud under German regulatory requirements, according to the vendor's published case study; the same pattern fits an IFA sending a pension transfer pack.
What does it cost for a four-adviser firm?
From the published rate card, with no platform fee: EspoCRM £25 per month equivalent, Nextcloud £45, Documenso £25, Paperless-ngx £25 and Metabase £21, so the whole satellite stack is £141 per month equivalent plus VAT, unlimited users. Reported pricing puts a single Intelliflo Office seat at £130 to £135 a month, so this is the rest of the stack for less than one back-office licence.