About IBIS
We build healthy businesses.
IBIS exists for one reason: to help South African service founders — the people who want the way they run their business to leave a legacy — stay compliant, profitable, sustainable and excellent, without carrying a back office they can't yet afford. We do it by bringing your whole business into one place, pairing deep insights with efficient workflows, so however stretched you are you can handle whatever comes — and get back to the work, and the people, that matter.
Good businesses are held back by their tools, not their effort.
The tools an owner is given pull in different directions. Clients live in one place, invoices in another, the books in a third — and the person who could connect them usually sees it all months later. By the time something is visible, the moment to act on it has passed.
We built IBIS because a business owner deserves to see the whole picture while it can still be changed. When operations, finance, people and growth share one system, the patterns that matter stop hiding in the gaps between tools. One action updates everything — and the business becomes something you can understand, not just survive.
“Form healthy businesses through digital simplification and intelligent, essential feedback.”
The "Intelligence" in IBIS is systems thinking.
“Business Intelligence” usually means dashboards. We mean something older and more useful: helping you see your business as a connected system, and respond with the move that fits the kind of problem you're actually in. A clear problem needs a checklist; a complicated one needs an expert; a complex one needs a small experiment; a chaotic one needs you to stabilise first and investigate later. IBIS helps you tell which is which — and gives you the three things an owner inside the day-to-day can't get alone: mentors, data, and time.
- See the system — connected modules reveal patterns, not just records.
- Respond by type — the right approach for the kind of problem you're in.
- Catch it early — leading signals (overdue, low stock, a slipping goal) reach you while they're still cheap to fix.
- Get an outside view — mentors, your own data, and a sense of time and progress.
How we think and behave.
Three words decide every trade-off we make. If a choice doesn't serve at least one — and never undermines the others — we don't ship it.
Flexible
We bend to your business, not the other way round. Earned access, fair pricing, unlimited users, and we listen to the people who use it.
Professional
We hold to best business, accounting and statutory standards — presented with quiet authority, not noise.
Simple
Nothing duplicated, everything where you'd expect it, and plain language over jargon. If a screen needs a manual, we've failed.
Healthy businesses first
every feature should move you toward compliance, profitability, sustainability and excellence.
Mission-aligned economics
we profit when you thrive — engagement earns most of your subscription back, and we never profit from locking you in.
A wide exit door
your data is always yours to export, even if you leave.
We chose economics that are on your side.
It would be easy to lock you in and bill you forever — that's the usual model. We deliberately did the opposite. IBIS is one per-company price a month (from R300, tiered by payroll headcount), and every month you genuinely use it pays up to R240 of the base back — credit you can spend on AI or the subscription itself. Where money moves we take a small capped fee (2% up to R5 on a payment link — payroll carries no per-payslip fee), and you can take your data and leave at any time. A limited run of 100 lifetime memberships lets a business own IBIS outright, held by us as a funded obligation to serve them forever. We make our money when IBIS is genuinely working for you — never from trapping someone who's trying to do the right thing.
The company behind IBIS.
IBIS is built and operated by Legacy Live Web (Pty) Ltd (Reg. 2019/034831/07), a South African company based in Bloemfontein in the Free State. We're a small, deliberate team — the kind that answers its own support chat — and we're building IBIS for the long term, as a product an owner could pass on to their children.
IBIS grew out of a frustration our founder, Ryan Mayne, met again and again over twenty years of community-impact work: real impact, with no systems underneath to sustain it. Good people doing good work, bleeding money on admin or putting it off until it bit them, with cash-flow surprises and tools that didn't talk to each other. IBIS is those missing systems — built so the businesses changing South Africa from the ground up can actually last.
We run on it ourselves: Legacy Live Web manages its own business — its clients, invoicing and books — entirely inside IBIS. The system we ask you to trust is the one we trust to run us.
Independently owned, and staying that way.
IBIS has no outside investors and no board. There is no fund behind us with a five-year clock on it, so there is nobody who can vote to raise your price, sell your data, or retire the product because it stopped suiting a shareholder. South African owners have watched enough tools get bought, merged and switched off to know that this is not a small thing — and it is a promise a venture-backed competitor structurally cannot make, however much they might mean it.
What we do instead of a lock-in: your data stays exportable at any time, in full, even during a month you haven't paid for.
Meet the founders
Ryan Mayne
Founder & senior full-stack developer
The systems thinker behind IBIS and the owner of Legacy Live Web. A psychology honours degree and 14 years running his own businesses keep his focus on the people behind the numbers. Two decades leading and co-leading local community upliftment projects are why community matters so much to him.
Interesting fact: Black belt in karate.
JJ Reynders
UX/UI & web design
Shapes how IBIS looks and feels — ranked among South Africa's top 40 UX designers by the Interaction Design Foundation, with 8 years in teaching and training. He also draws bespoke artwork for social-media creators and runs Music Bridge Academy, his guitar-coaching company.
Interesting fact: Earned Free State colours in gymnastics.
Our Information Officer is Ryan Mayne ([email protected]) — the person who handles your privacy questions and data requests, by name.
Where we're going.
Today
A complete web application — operations, finance, people, growth and community — in early access with founding South African businesses.
Next
Native mobile apps, so your business travels in your pocket (coming soon).
On the horizon
Human help on demand — business coaching, “rent a CEO for a day”, and consulting — unlocked simply by using IBIS well (coming soon).
We'll always tell you plainly what's ready and what's still on the way. That's part of being the mentor, not the hype-person.
Build a healthier business with us.
Join the businesses shaping IBIS — three months free, then up to R240 back every month you use it.