Start9 Business

An IT professional, a DevOps engineer and a Linux sysadmin, on call 24/7/365, for $20,000 a year. Hire us, and take your company off rented software for good: more private, more secure, fully in your control, and far cheaper.

The numbers

Three roles for one fee

Self-hosting takes people who know what they are doing, and keep doing it after the install. Start9 Business is those people: the team that builds StartOS, working for your company around the clock.

  • IT professional

    Reviews every application you rent, finds what replaces it, recommends the hardware and where it lives, and trains your staff to run it.

  • DevOps engineer

    Deploys each service and migrates your data intact. Where a proven open-source replacement is not yet packaged for StartOS, packages it.

  • Linux sysadmin

    Patching, upgrades and hardening, covered. On call 24 hours a day, every day of the year, for the week you need it.

One in-house sysadmin (fully loaded)About ten times the fee
Start9 Business (the whole team)$20,000 a year

A sysadmin of your own sits down the hall. Ours answers at 3 a.m. on a holiday, never takes a vacation, and wrote the operating system your servers run.

Privacy

Every vendor you rent from keeps its own copy of your company: your customers, your books, your contracts, your conversations. Each reads it under its own policy, and can rewrite that policy whenever it likes. On your own servers there is one copy, on your hardware, under your rules.

Security

A vendor serving ten thousand companies is a target worth ten thousand companies, and when it is breached, so are you. You find out when it decides to tell you. Your own server has one tenant and one perimeter, and sits off the public internet: staff reach it through StartTunnel, not a login page anyone can find.

Control

Your price, your terms, your features, and whether you have an account at all are decided by someone else, and rewritten with every new Terms of Service. A vendor can drop your whole industry by policy, without notice and without anyone breaking a law. On systems you own, there is no account to close.

Cost

Subscriptions are billed per seat, per month, forever, and they only go up. Open-source software is free, the hardware is bought once at cost, and support is one flat fee. For the 25-person company in our worked example, that is 70% off the bill, every year.

So what's the catch?

It takes time.

There is no cutover weekend, and nothing goes dark. Your company moves one service at a time, most expensive or most exposed first, each one approved by you before it moves. A slow and steady journey, at your pace, one sure step after another, until nothing your business depends on can be priced, read or switched off by someone else.

Some applications should stay where they are, and you hear which ones before you have paid anything.

Your queueMost expensive or most exposed first
  1. Passwords Vaultwarden Owned
  2. Files and documents Nextcloud Owned
  3. Team chat Matrix Moving
  4. Email Stalwart Next
  5. Video calls Jitsi Queued
  6. E-signatures DocuSeal Queued
  7. AI assistants Open WebUI Queued
  8. Payroll tax filing Stays where it is Stays
  1. 1AssessFree and without obligation. What each application costs, what it exposes, and what can replace it.
  2. 2RecommendNon-proprietary hardware you buy at cost and keep in your office, a colocation facility, or both.
  3. 3Deploy and trainYour data migrated intact. Your staff trained on-site or remotely, holding every credential.
  4. 4Support24 hours a day, every day of the year. Patching, upgrades and hardening included.
  5. Then the next serviceWhen you choose.
24/7/365

Staying off the cloud

Moving off the cloud is the easy part. Staying off it means someone who knows your setup is there every hour of every day. Most weeks you will not need us. The fee is for the week you do.

An account manager One person who knows your business and your setup.
Technicians for off-hours and escalations The people who build StartOS, StartWRT and StartTunnel.
An AI assistant on Start9 GPUs Contextualized to your company's setup. No prompt ever leaves Start9's network.
One private space Your own rooms on Start9's Matrix server, encrypted end to end and invite only.

You don't depend on us

Hiring us must not become another dependency. Start9 advises; your company acts, and owns everything.

  • It runs without us. Deployed software never contacts Start9 or checks a license. Non-proprietary hardware means any vendor can service it.
  • Your staff hold the keys. Any competent Linux engineer can administer StartOS, StartWRT and StartTunnel. Offered credentials are declined; Start9 keeps no copy, no recovery key and no override.
  • No lock-in. Should Start9 discontinue the engagement, you receive a pro-rated refund and the systems keep running. You are notified within ten days of any acquisition or change of control.
  • Incidents are reported in writing. Any suspected access to your information is reported within 24 hours. The engagement record is deleted 90 days after termination, or on request.
What Start9 holds of yours
Your files, email or databases
Passwords, keys or recovery phrases
Access to your systems
Backups of your systems
Monitoring or telemetry
A remote-administration back door
Only notes on the engagement

The numbers

One price, stated plainly. Do the math against what you pay today.

$20,000 a year
  • A free assessment before you commit
  • Deployment, migration and training
  • 24/7 support
  • No per-seat pricing, no setup fee, no tiers
  • Rolling one-year term

Example: a 25-person company

Current subscriptions and cloud
$93,478 a year
Total with Start9
$28,220 a year
Saved
$65,258 a year, 70%
One-time hardware, at cost
About $10,500
Payback
About five months
Five years
About $316,000 net

A 25-person US company, horizontally organized, that ships software. Published list rates at annual billing with typical seat counts, verified 2026-08. Retained subscriptions are cap-table software and payroll tax filing; running costs are business internet, power, off-site backup storage and an email relay. Steady-state figures, reached at your pace; the queue is ranked by cost, so the savings front-load, and the three most expensive lines alone are $34,788 of the $65,258. On-premises placement; a colocation primary with an SLA adds roughly $2,400 to $6,000 a year. An illustration, not a quote.

The first step is a conversation

A call to ask anything about Start9 Business. If you choose to go on, the free assessment comes next, and you decide what moves first.

Built for companies of roughly 20 to 50 people, including:

  • Bitcoin and digital-asset businesses
  • Professional services, agencies, consultancies
  • Law firms
  • Accounting, CPA, wealth management
  • Lawful high-risk merchant categories