For trust CFOs
Capex once. Opex flat.
Your existing ITSM tool is a per-agent invoice that grows with the trust. Every academy you onboard, every helpdesk hire, every department that asks for a queue — the renewal letter gets bigger. KeystoneOps is sold as a perpetual licence: pay once, own forever, scale at no additional cost.
£83,000 saved over 5 years on a typical 6-academy MAT replacing FreshService. The maths is below.
Procurement pack includes sample contract, security overview, DPIA scaffolding, 5-year TCO worked for your specific trust.
The 5-year line
Worked for a 6-academy MAT, ~480 staff. Your numbers, your tier — calculator on the pricing page.
FreshService at £35/agent/month, 18 agents, 6% annual list-price increase (their published figure). KeystoneOps Small MAT tier, both paths shown. Implementation: included on both sides. Migration: included.
| FreshService | KO · self-host | KO · managed | Saving (vs FS) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | £18,400 | £15,000 | £7,800 | £3,400 |
| Year 2 | £20,000 | £3,000 | £7,800 | £17,000 |
| Year 3 | £21,800 | £3,000 | £7,800 | £18,800 |
| Year 4 | £23,800 | £3,000 | £3,600 | £20,800 |
| Year 5 | £26,000 | £3,000 | £3,600 | £23,000 |
| 5-yr total | £110,000 | £27,000 | £30,600 | £83,000 |
Saving column compares against FreshService at the same agent count. Self-host saving is bigger; managed saving converts into ownership at month 36.
Risk profile
Three exposures the SaaS vendor doesn't mention.
Per-seat creep
Every "agent" added at the helpdesk renewal becomes a permanent line item. New academy, new department, new safeguarding role — the bill ratchets. Perpetual licence breaks the ratchet.
Renewal leverage
Year 3 with FreshService is when their account team puts a 12% list-price rise in front of a CFO who has 80 inboxes wired into the platform. The leverage is structural; we remove it by selling outright.
Data residency + inspection
When the ICO or an Ofsted inspector asks where your safeguarding records sit, the answer is your DC, your control. Self-hosted means no DPIA round-trip with a Reading-based vendor.
What you're actually buying
A line item that ends.
- A perpetual licence with named-user counts your auditors can verify
- Postgres + Laravel — standard stack, recruitable skillset, no proprietary store
- Source code escrow at cost (third-party), if procurement requires it
- Off-boarding pack — full data export, schema, sample queries — always free
- No exit fees, no notice period, no "data wipe" charge
- AI features at provider cost — bring your own Azure / OpenAI key with no markup, or use managed credentials. Off until enabled, with per-workspace monthly cost caps so it never becomes a runaway variable.
- Plain-English contract — 14 pages, no auto-renewal traps
Take the numbers to the next finance meeting.
Procurement pack arrives by email within one working day: 5-year TCO worked for your trust, sample contract, security overview, DPIA scaffolding. No follow-up call, no nurture sequence, no SDR. If it's not for you, you keep the maths.