The SMB with batch work
Backups, imports and exports, nightly processing, chains of scripts that must run in a precise order — and that you want proof ran.
Product · The house scheduler
Ordoman — a simple, lightweight job scheduler.
Put your batch jobs in a queue; Ordoman runs them one at a time, in priority order, resumes after a reboot, and keeps a record of everything.
It runs in production today, ordering the house’s own missions. Commercial licence, aimed at small and mid-sized businesses that cannot justify the big enterprise schedulers — with prices shown in the open, not “contact us for a quote”.
You have outgrown cron, but you do not need an enterprise scheduler.
Between the free-but-blind native tools and the heavy, costly enterprise suites, there is a gap.
cron, systemd timers and the Windows Task Scheduler are free and unkillable — but blind: no queue, no dependencies, no fine resume, no central log, no view across machines. The enterprise schedulers do all that and far more, but they are heavy to run, expensive, and sold on quote — out of scale for a business that simply needs its nightly jobs to run in order, and proof that they did. Ordoman sits in between: the order and the record, without the weight or the price.
For the operator who needs order, not a factory.
The hands-on operator
The all-rounder who keeps a small estate running, has no time to learn an enterprise scheduler and no budget for its licence, but has outgrown what cron honestly does.
One place for a small estate
Drive a single queue from one spot, instead of connecting to each machine in turn.
What it does today — and does for real.
Not a brochure list: each of these already runs in the house tool, documented in its manual.
A queue, one job at a time
Jobs enter a queue and run one at a time, or with bounded parallelism. The next starts only when a slot frees up. Lower number, higher priority.
Resume that never double-runs
After a reboot or an outage, one command restarts the queue. A job that already finished is never run again — the resume is idempotent.
It never kills a running job
Even when you ask it to stop, the running job goes to the end; Ordoman only stops starting new ones. Cutting a job mid-way would lose what it was writing.
A failure does not block the queue
A failed job is flagged, its reason written — dead session, timeout, failed dependency — and the queue moves on. You do not lose a whole night on the first grain of sand.
A queue you can read
The queue is a plain tab-separated file, one line per job, readable by eye and surviving a reboot. A memory guard refuses one more job when free RAM drops below a kept margin; a maximum duration frees the queue from a job that never returns.
A record of everything
Every event — queued, started, done, failed, purged — is logged. An operator wants proof a job ran, not a promise.
The limits, in the open.
What Ordoman is not — so you know before you buy.
- It is not open source. The code can be shown to a client under agreement, but Ordoman is a commercial product — not an open-source project.
- It does not replace an enterprise scheduler: no mainframe, no estate of thousands of distributed agents, no rich SLA dependency graphs, no large-scale managed file transfer.
- It does not guarantee that a re-run job is side-effect-free: Ordoman guarantees it will not relaunch a finished job; writing an idempotent job stays your responsibility.
- It does not watch spend in euros: it counts jobs, not money. It is the sequence that protects the budget, not a meter.
- If your need is “run one script at 3 a.m. on one machine”, cron is free and enough — and we will tell you so.
Real commands, a real record — not a mockup.
Ordoman runs in production, ordering the house’s own missions. Here is its actual command interface and the shape of its log.
ordoman add nightly-backup ~/jobs/backup.sh --priority 10
ordoman add compta-import ~/jobs/import.sh --priority 20 --after nightly-backup
ordoman start # one job at a time (default)
ordoman queue # priority · state · dependency · duration
ordering nightly-backup done duration:24min
ordering compta-import started after:nightly-backup
ordering export-edi failed reason:timeout-exceeded
A written manual ships with it — the internal manual already exists and reads in ten minutes.
Where it stands
We will not say “coming soon” about a tool that already runs. We say plainly what exists today and what we are still opening up.
The engine runs. We are packaging it.
Ordoman’s sequencing engine is written, tested without spending, and in service: persistent queue, priorities, simple dependencies, RAM guard, maximum duration, idempotent resume, a stop that never kills the running job, full logging. What we are building is the wrapping — a clean installer, the client documentation, and the work to open it from the house’s own jobs to any batch job. It is under continuous improvement.
The real cost of an enterprise scheduler is not the licence alone.
For a mid-to-large organisation, the true annual cost adds up across four lines. What follows are orders of magnitude, each sourced — not official tariffs.
Enterprise scheduler vendors do not publish their prices: the market standard is a quote. The figures below are orders of magnitude drawn from user testimonials, vendor ranges and salary benchmarks, gathered on 8 August 2026 — they are not official tariffs. A single invented figure in a sales argument turns against you at the first client who checks; so every figure here carries its source, or it is not shown.
| Cost line | Enterprise scheduler (order of magnitude, estimated) | Ordoman |
|---|---|---|
| Licence & annual maintenance | Sold on quote. Workload-automation solutions run about $30,000–250,000/year depending on complexity; Control-M testimonials cite ~$250,000/year for ~9,000 jobs, and ~€1M over three years for 4,000 jobs. Maintenance is typically 18–22%/year of the licence. | Perpetual per-machine licence, price shown: Ordoman Poste 79 €, Ordoman Serveur 390 € (proposed, to be confirmed). Optional annual maintenance around 18%. |
| Servers & infrastructure | A dedicated environment, usually made redundant for high availability, plus a disaster-recovery site. | Installs on a Linux machine you already have. No dedicated server required. |
| Dedicated administrators | One or more dedicated admins. The loaded cost of a full-time systems engineer in France runs about €76,000–78,000/year (≈€53,500 median gross in the Paris region, plus ~42–45% employer charges). | Built for a hands-on all-rounder: a readable queue, resume in one command, a clear log. No dedicated headcount. |
| Expertise, training, upgrades | External integration expertise, training, and billed version migrations. | A manual ships with it; up and running in minutes; updates included the first year. |
Sources (8 Aug 2026): peerspot.com (Control-M testimonials), smatechnologies.com (solution ranges), vendorbenchmark.com & savibm.com (maintenance %), roberthalf.com and indeed.com (salaries), payfit.com and watt-portage.fr (employer charges). Orders of magnitude, not official tariffs.
Honest caveat: Ordoman does not do everything these tools do — no mainframe, no estate of thousands of distributed agents, no SLA graphs. The comparison is about the need a small business actually has, not feature parity.
A commercial licence, priced in the open.
No quote wall. A perpetual licence per machine, with the first year of updates included, then optional annual maintenance. Perpetual means nothing to cancel.
- Ordoman Poste 79 € One machine · queue, dependencies, resume, log
- Ordoman Serveur 390 € One server · plus alerting and longer retention
- Ordoman Parc On request Multi-machine supervision — when it ships
Optional annual maintenance : Around 18% of the licence — updates and support. A perpetual licence keeps working without it; we never brick the tool to force a renewal.
Prices shown are a proposal, to be confirmed by the founder before publication. Bespoke work will have quotes later — but the standard licence is never quote-only. The free path is named too: if cron is enough for your need, we will tell you so.
Next step
Commercial product, prices shown, no artificial urgency.
See whether Ordoman replaces your homemade cron.
Tell us what your nightly jobs look like and how many machines you run. We will tell you honestly whether Ordoman fits — or whether cron already does the job.