For landlords & block managers

Property software charges by the door: Arthur Online lists £82.50 per month for 55 units, effectively £1.50 per unit per month, billed annually (verified); Fixflo shows a £75 per month base but carries a 50-property minimum with services from £300 and pricing otherwise on request (partially verified); Landlord Vision runs £19.97 to £84.97 per month by tenancy count plus fees per extra tenancy (verified); Alto is quote-only, and reviewers report mid-contract price rises. Meanwhile repairs arrive by phone, WhatsApp and email with no audit trail, and the gas safety certs, EICRs, EPCs and deposit paperwork sprawl across inboxes.

What per-unit pricing costs a growing portfolio

To be straight about the crossover: below roughly 75 units the gap is small, and the reason to move at that size is capability, not savings. The line that matters for a growing operator is the slope: the per-unit column rises with every management win, and the Node column does not. Ask us for a like-for-like figure.

What your portfolio office 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.

The repairs desk: Zammad (Medium, £45/month equivalent, managed setup): tenants email one address and every leak, alarm fault and lift outage becomes a tracked, auditable ticket with the contractor CC'd on the thread. Other organisations using Zammad include De'Longhi and an Oxford college (vendor references).

Rent & service-charge invoicing: Invoice Ninja (Small, £22, managed setup): recurring rent and service-charge invoices with automatic late reminders and a clean statement per tenancy.

Compliance folders: Nextcloud (self-serve) (Medium, £45): a folder per property, shared with contractors and leaseholders by expiring link instead of attachment roulette.

Certificate archive: Paperless-ngx (Small, £25, managed setup): every gas safety cert, EICR and EPC scanned, OCR'd, searchable and tagged with its expiry date so renewals surface before the deadline does.

Property & tenancy register: NocoDB or Baserow (Small, £22 or £21, managed setup): units, tenancies, key holders and contractor details in a proper database your spreadsheet is impersonating.

For larger operators: ERPNext (Medium, £45, managed setup): accounting and an asset register across the portfolio. Honestly, it is an ERP, not a lettings platform; see the FAQ above for what we do not do.

Records that survive a dispute

Tenant files carry references, income details, guarantor documents and sometimes vulnerability notes: personal data under UK GDPR that deserves better than a shared inbox. Your Node tenant keeps it on hardware we own in UK data centres, under UK jurisdiction, network-isolated, behind your own single sign-on so a departing property manager loses every app in one account change, with sign-ins and admin actions audited. A UK GDPR Article 28 DPA is standard. No product makes you compliant, and we will not claim otherwise; this is infrastructure for record-keeping duties that remain yours.

AI for the paperwork, without tenant files leaving the UK

Summarising surveyor reports, drafting Section 20 letters, triaging the repairs inbox: the AI gateway labels every model UK-hosted or partner-routed; UK-hosted models run on GPUs we own, so tenant data in prompts never leaves our infrastructure. Metered per token in GBP on the same hourly invoice.

Frequently asked questions

How does the billing work compared with per-unit pricing?

Everything is billed hourly against a published rate card, with no minimum term and no contract; the monthly figures on this page are equivalents for an app left running all month. Stop an app and the meter stops. Nothing counts units, tenancies or users, so taking on another block changes your income, not your software bill, and there is no annual contract to true-up.

Does this replace Arthur, Alto or Fixflo?

No, and we will say so before you find out the hard way: node.uk is not a lettings or property-management platform. There is no tenant-find, no referencing, no deposit-scheme or portal integrations and no rent-collection engine. What it replaces is the office around your portfolio: the repairs inbox, the compliance filing, the invoicing and the document chaos. If Arthur's tenancy workflows earn their keep for you, keep them.

What does it cost for a 200-unit block manager?

From the published rate card, with no platform fee: Zammad £45 per month equivalent, Invoice Ninja £22, Nextcloud £45 and Paperless-ngx £25, so the full stack is £137 per month equivalent plus VAT, billed hourly. Arthur Online's verified rate works out at £1.50 per unit per month, which is £300 at 200 units and rising with every unit you add. The Node figure does not move.

We manage 40 units. Is it worth switching?

Honestly, the raw saving is small below roughly 75 units, and we would rather tell you that than oversell. The case at that size is capability and predictability: every repair a tracked ticket instead of a WhatsApp thread, certificates that surface before they expire, and a bill that stays flat as you grow into the size where per-unit pricing starts to hurt.

How does this stand up if a deposit dispute or safety audit lands?

Tenant data such as references, income details and vulnerability notes is personal data under UK GDPR, and deposit and safety-cert record-keeping needs a durable trail. Every repair in Zammad is a timestamped ticket with the full email history, and every certificate in Paperless-ngx keeps its original scan and audit log, on UK hardware behind your own single sign-on, with a UK GDPR Article 28 DPA as standard.

Can we try it before moving the portfolio's paperwork?

Yes. Nextcloud, EspoCRM, DocuSeal and n8n deploy self-serve from the signup portal in minutes, with £25 of free credit and single sign-on already wired. Start with the compliance folders for one block, add the managed-setup apps when you have seen it working, and import the archive at your own pace.