Why IBIS pays you back for using it

Most business software makes its money from lock-in. You pay every month whether or not the tool earns its place, and leaving is made just painful enough that you don't bother. We built IBIS to work the other way — and because that surprises people, it's worth explaining the thinking, not just the rule. The whole model fits in one sentence:

IBIS is R300 a month for the whole platform — use it and up to R240 comes back. Run payroll and you add one flat amount for your team size. That's the entire model.

This post is about the shape behind that sentence and the why. Pricing turned out to be layered enough — trial, a per-company subscription that scales only with your team, an engagement rebate, a capped transaction fee, a lifetime option — that a static article couldn't do it justice, so the exact tiers and worked examples live in one interactive place.

See the pricing page for the precise figures — this post explains why they're set up the way they are.

One company price a month — and using it earns the base back

The shape is simple: after a genuinely free trial, it's one price per company, per month, including VAT — never per person and never per payslip, with unlimited users. That price moves only with the size of your team, never with how hard you use the product. And every month you're genuinely active earns a large share of the base back as credit you can spend on AI insights or on the subscription itself. By active we mean really using IBIS, not logging in once: showing up across several days, doing real work in your tools, looking around the platform, and taking part in the community. If a month went quiet for a fair reason, tell us; if it holds up, the full rebate stands.

One small fee, only where money moves

When a client pays you through your IBIS payment link, we take one small, capped fee — capped low enough that a large invoice costs you the same few rand as a small one. It sits on top of the card gateway's own fees (which are theirs, not ours), it's itemised on your billing page, and it's posted into your books automatically. Payroll carries no per-payslip fee, and nothing else in IBIS carries a transaction fee.

The exit door is always open

If a month goes unpaid your workspace turns read-only — but even then, you can export everything you own, whenever you want. We don't delete your data and we don't hold it hostage. If IBIS ever stops being worth it, you should be able to walk out with all of it — and knowing you can is part of why staying feels safe.

Compliance you can prove

IBIS sells compliance, so we made quiet non-compliance architecturally impossible: every payslip, payroll run, and VAT figure is recorded on a tamper-evident, append-only trail that even we cannot edit. Corrections are new entries, visible forever — and you or your auditor can verify the whole chain at any time.

Why we'd build it this way

Because our incentives only pay off when yours do. We don't measure our worth by how many businesses have signed up — we measure it by how many are genuinely thriving in our community. A business that pays and ignores us earns us a little in the short term, but it never buys the help that adds real value, never refers anyone, and never lifts the community that gives us our credibility and reach. A business that's actively using IBIS is the one that grows — and as it grows, paid help it actually wants (coaching, consulting, a CEO for a day) gets taken up because it's wanted, not pushed. The rebate quietly sorts for the people we most want to work with.

Anyone can clone an app. No one can clone a community that's actually thriving.

There's a deeper reason, too. Legacy Live's founder spent twenty years leading community-impact work and kept hitting the same wall: impact without the systems to sustain it. IBIS is those systems. Changing how South African businesses are run — at the roots, for good — is the whole point, and it only works if the businesses using it actually flourish.

And for the businesses that want to make it permanent, there's a strictly limited run of lifetime memberships: a founding covenant, priced deliberately below what serving you for life will cost us — underwritten by later members, not a discount — with every lifetime rand held as a funded obligation to serve you rather than booked as revenue. "Lifetime" has a real definition in our terms: your own lifetime plus one transfer to a single named heir, ending with theirs.

The exact price, the number that will ever exist, and the tiers, rebate and fee behind everything above are all on the pricing page — laid out so you can see what your own business would pay.

The IBIS team

Legacy Live Web — practical help for running a healthier business.