IT services firms are natural self-hosters who somehow end up renting their own tooling back: a US helpdesk per agent, chat per user, a password manager per user, repos and issue tracking per user. Every hire raises the bill, and when a client's security questionnaire asks where their tickets and credentials live, the honest answer is a list of other people's clouds.
What the per-seat stack costs a ten-person firm
Zendesk Suite Team lists at $55 per agent per month (verified on zendesk.com/pricing); GitHub Team is $4 per user and Jira Standard around $7.91 per user (verified); Slack Pro runs about £7 per user and 1Password Business about $8 per user (reported list prices). An engineer holding all of Zendesk, Slack, 1Password and Jira costs roughly £75-90 a month in seats before they touch a client.
| Capability | Per-seat stack | On Node (flat, hourly billed) |
|---|---|---|
| Helpdesk | Zendesk Suite Team at $55/agent x 5: ~£217 | Zammad (Medium): £45 |
| Team chat | Slack Pro at ~£7/user x 10: ~£70 (reported) | Mattermost (Medium): £39 |
| Team secrets | 1Password Business at ~$8/user x 10: ~£63 (reported) | Vaultwarden (Small): £20 |
| Repos & issues | GitHub Team + Jira at ~$11.91/user x 10: ~£94 | Gitea (Small): £23 |
| Runbooks & docs | Per-seat wiki add-ons | BookStack (Small): £25 |
| Client automations | Per-task plans, volume-priced | n8n (Medium): £45 |
| Identity, SSO & audit | Spread across the above | Included with your apps: £0 |
| Indicative total | ~£450-750+ rising per hire | £197 flat at any headcount |
Against the £75-90 per-head bundle, the flat column crosses over at roughly two people. Scaled up, a ten-person MSP renting the full pile spends in the region of £9-11k a year; a lean flat stack on Node (Zammad plus Gitea, with the workspace itself free) is about £800 a year, unchanged at twenty heads. All Node figures are monthly equivalents: billing is hourly against the published rate card, with no commitments, so a proof-of-concept costs days, not a year's contract. Get a like-for-like figure.
What your team runs on Node
n8n deploys self-serve, in minutes, from the signup portal, as do Nextcloud, EspoCRM and DocuSeal; everything else below is managed setup, deployed and connected by our engineers.
Helpdesk without per-agent maths: Zammad (Medium, £45/month equivalent): put the whole delivery team on client tickets without counting agent seats. Shared inboxes, SLAs, a knowledge base, and your branding rather than a SaaS vendor's. Zammad's published references include Amnesty International, De'Longhi and an Oxford college.
Repos on your own soil: Gitea (Small, £23): client code and internal tooling in a UK tenant you control, with CI runners you choose. See the honest trade in the FAQ above. Blender runs its entire development on a public Gitea instance, documented on its own engineering blog.
Runbooks: BookStack (Small, £25): the documentation your on-call rota actually reads, behind your SSO instead of a public wiki or a per-seat docs tool.
Team secrets: Vaultwarden or Passbolt (Small, from £20): shared client credentials in a vault you host, not a US vendor's, with a leaver losing access the moment you disable their SSO account. Passbolt's case studies include the Luxembourg government IT centre (CTIE) and TU Graz.
Chat: Mattermost (Medium, £39): a self-hosted Slack alternative with channels, threads and integrations, flat-priced however many people join. Vendor-published Mattermost customers include the US Air Force, CERN and France's grid operator RTE.
Client automations: n8n (self-serve) (Medium, £45): the glue for client onboarding, alert routing and reporting, with 400+ integrations and no per-task meter punishing your busiest client.
Your own software: Bring Your Own App (from £7.02/month equivalent): push an image to your private registry and run the tools you build, hourly billed, with a free pre-deploy load test. For a firm that ships software, this is the closer: the same platform hosts what you buy and what you build.
A sovereignty answer you can resell
Your clients increasingly ask where their data lives, and "in our vendors' US clouds" undermines the security posture you sell them. A Node tenant gives you a cleaner story: an isolated private network on hardware we own in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, access controlled through your own SSO realm, sign-ins and admin actions audited, and a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA you can generate today and attach to your own client contracts. No product makes you or your clients compliant, and we will not claim otherwise; this is infrastructure designed to support the obligations you already carry.
AI your client code can touch
The AI gateway is OpenAI-compatible at api.node.uk: point any SDK, IDE plugin or internal tool at it with a base-URL change. UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own in our UK data centre, so client code, logs and prompts never leave our infrastructure, while the full model catalogue stays available for everything less sensitive. Metered per token in GBP, on the same hourly invoice as your apps.
Stand up the first app before your next stand-up
Deploy n8n, Nextcloud, EspoCRM or DocuSeal yourself in minutes with £25 of free credit, or walk an engineer through your current stack for a flat hourly-billed figure.
Frequently asked questions
How does the billing actually work?
Everything is billed hourly against a published rate card, with no minimum term and no contract; the monthly figures on this page are simply what an app costs if you leave it running all month. Stop an app and the meter stops. Spin up Zammad for a client trial on Monday, tear it down on Friday, and you pay for four days.
Does this replace our PSA or RMM?
No, and we will not pretend it does. Halo, NinjaOne, Datto and the rest of your PSA and RMM tooling stay exactly where they are. Node replaces the general stack around them: helpdesk, team chat, runbooks, secrets, repos and automation, which is where the per-seat fees quietly accumulate.
Is Gitea really a GitHub replacement?
Be precise about the trade. GitHub Team at $4 per user is cheap; moving to Gitea is a sovereignty and lock-in play, not a cost play, and you give up the Actions marketplace and Copilot. What you gain is repos on UK hardware in your own tenant, under your own SSO, at a flat £25 per month equivalent however many engineers commit.
Can we run our own containers, or apps we build for clients?
Yes. Bring Your Own App lets you push a container image to your tenant's private registry and run it hourly billed, from £7.02 per month equivalent, with a free pre-deploy load test so you know how it behaves before it takes traffic. It is the same platform our catalogue apps run on.
Our clients ask where their data lives. What do we tell them?
That it sits in an isolated tenant on hardware Node owns in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, behind your own single sign-on realm, with a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA behind it. For MSPs that answer is resellable: it turns a client's data-residency question from a caveat into a differentiator.
Can our tooling call your AI models?
Yes. The AI gateway is OpenAI-compatible at api.node.uk, so anything that speaks the OpenAI API works with a base-URL change. UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own, so client code and prompts never leave our infrastructure, and usage is metered per token in GBP on the same invoice as your apps.