Don’t buy the OS. Buy the estate. One rand retainer. Mixed distros first-class. Out-of-bundle products on the same SLA — nginx, Postgres, WordPress, Docker, Kubernetes, Ollama, Pi fleets. Not a vendor SKU. The stack you actually run.
ZAR · SAST
No USD licence games. Hours included so scope does not melt.
On the invoice
WhatsApp plus ticket. The person who quoted you is the person who answers.
First-class
Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Rocky, Alma, Unix — not “best effort”.
Apps included
Out-of-bundle products on the same SLA, not a science project.
What the market does vs what Open Line is
What the market does
Canonical: Ubuntu only, USD, up to ~$3,400/server/year for 24/7. Red Hat / SUSE: sockets and SKUs. SA MSPs: R400–R1,000 per Windows user. Patch vendors: cheap CVE streams, nobody on the incident.
What Open Line is
Estate retainer, not per-user, not per-socket. Debian, Ubuntu, Pi OS, Rocky, Alma, Unix — first-class. Out-of-bundle apps on the same ticket. Private AI and edge fleets as add-on SKUs.
We do not replace Ubuntu Pro, TuxCare or Red Hat indemnification. Compliance estates bring their own patch stream. We operate the mixed stack and answer the pager.
Retainers · excl. VAT · SAST
Open Bench
Up to 5 nodes. The cupboard ISP, two VPS and a Pi.
- Weekdays 08:00–17:00 SAST
- P1 in 4 hours · P2 next business day
- 4 remote hours included
- Monthly patch window + backup verify
Open Workshop
Up to 15 nodes. The SME that fled CentOS and still runs production.
- 08:00–20:00 weekdays + Saturday morning
- P1 in 1 hour · P2 in 4 hours
- 10 remote hours included
- Single Kubernetes cluster included
Open Line
Up to 40 nodes or one production cluster. Named engineer.
- Weekday 24h (24/5)
- P1 in 30 minutes
- 20 hours included
- Named senior on the invoice
Extra hours R1,650. 10-hour incident pack R11,500 (90 days). Month-to-month at list. 12 months −10%. Nodes = physical, VM, LXC or Pi.
Covered catalogue
First-class OS
Ubuntu, Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian / Orange Pi, Rocky, Alma, Fedora. Unix (AIX/Solaris) on Line by agreement.
In-box stack
nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, Docker, systemd, Fail2ban, certbot, Bind, WordPress, Postfix, Prometheus, Grafana.
Out of bundle
Extra k8s, Ceph, mail, private AI, edge fleets. If it is not on this page it is a change request at the published hourly rate.
| Add-on | Starting from | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress / Woo · 1 site | R1,450 | Updates, PHP/DB, backups, incident. 5-site bundle R3,950 |
| Mail (Postfix / Dovecot) | R1,950 | Delivery, spam path, TLS, mailbox restore drill |
| Extra Kubernetes cluster | R4,950 | On top of the one cluster Workshop already includes |
| Private AI node | R4,500 | GPU host, Ollama / vLLM, model updates, isolation |
| Edge fleet · 25 devices | R2,950 | Pi / Orange Pi / ESP32 ops, image, watch, replace |
| Ceph / shared storage | R6,500 | Health, capacity, recovery drills |
How it starts
- Platform Health Check — we map nodes, distros, out-of-bundle apps and risk. You get a one-page estate price.
- Pick Bench, Workshop or Line — tick add-ons. Sign month-to-month or 12 months.
- Operate — patch window, backup verify, ticket + WhatsApp, incident hours against the cap.