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Comment by chocolatkey | Hacker News Reader

I have a real-life scenario that applies to my business: we employee 50+ freelancers ee pay every month. I dread when it comes time to pay them, because I have to log into multiple bank account and manually send each transfer using clunky web UIs. I am just copy-pasting all this data from a spreadsheet where it's already been verified. If I could automate payments to a sizeable portion of the freelancers, it would save me a lot of time and reduce potential for mistakes during data entry

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Is a payroll company not an option? I'm not from the US but presumably there are companies that can do this for you at a relatively low cost per employee?

These are not employees, they're freelancers from all around the world.

Even so, surely must be an equivalent of a payroll company that can make all these payments for you? We use Deel and upwork for our freelancers

I think the difference is that the freelancers in our business can be paid very different amounts in a month, from ~$10-5000 in range. Deel is probably fine for you with what you're paying freelancers with its price, but imagine we have a freelancer only do, let's say, $30 worth of work in a month. Deel's cheapest plan is $49/mo. That is more than we're paying the FL! If you're paying the FL e.g. $3000/mo it's worth your money, but for us this would be a 163% fee. And with 50+ freelancers, that's at least ~$2.5k per month. At that price I might as well hire someone to click the buttons for me.

Have you looked at Upwork? We pay some of our offshore Customer Service people through Upwork. I'm not directly involved in that but presumably the economics work as their hourly rates are between $5-$15 per hour.

I think I wasn't clear enough in my initial post, but we personally reach out to and recruit and manage the freelancers ourselves, not through a jobs platform. Our business needs very specialized people you can't really find on Upwork

I've never used them but Wise might work if the freelancers are all over the world: https://wise.com/gb/business/api

Have you seen https://www.deel.com? Might be a solution for this problem.

That, Payoneer (which has a sufficiently extensive API), and I think Stripe can also handle payouts: https://stripe.com/connect/marketplaces

(possibly I'm misreading Stripe marketplaces' offerings, please correct me if I am)

Payoneer is one of the options we use to pay freelancers, in fact many of them quite like it, but for the freelancers' sake, I prefer 100% free methods like Zelle or ACH where possible because you have to pay a fee to take money out of payoneer you receive. At least it's better than paypal

Zelle takes a considerable percentage cut for non-personal transactions.

Do you make use of Payoneer API for payouts? How do you find it?

I use Zelle through the BoA small business account's web interface, there is no charge. I tried getting Zelle API access through US Bank but they never replied so I'm stuck with BoA web.

Payoneer is really cagey about how you unlock better features, our account got upgraded to VIP though because we pay a lot through it. We still use their interface, maybe I'll figure out how to get their API someday

Is TransferWise an option?

I'm considering it for foreign payments, but what I'm looking for is really a good API for ACH, Wire etc. because different freelancers want to use different payment methods. Honestly if Mercury (which we have an account with) would just let us do International Wires through their API it would already make life easier, but for whatever reason they only condone ACH transfers through their API (even though the web UI uses an API for wires...). Even then though, I still have to deal with other freelancers who want to use another payment method. That's why I'm looking for the most complete service out there in terms of financial system integration. The OP's service looks appealing to me because it says "ACH transfers", "Wire transfers", and "Real-Time Payments". That covers quite a portion of what freelancers want, unlike e.g. Wise, which is a single method. I'll keep doing my research for now.

All fair points! My apologies I could not be more helpful.

$49/contract per month is just way way too much, sorry. Some freelancers don't even get paid that much in a month with the work they are doing. And with the churn we have as well, at a per contract rate we'd be pouring insane amounts of money into this solution. And they also aren't open about what payout payment methods they offer, that is not a good start.

I think it's possible to automate it with a browser extension or something like Selenium

ah ok. so this is a workaround of the traditional banks having crappy UI/APIs? what about using Stripe/Braintree/Paypal/etc (i know those are not exact matches, but just enquiring about the general problem space)

This is completely different. Stripe/Braintree are ways to charge customers on their credit/debit card on your website, completely unwieldy for paying freelancers. You'd have to have freelancers set up Stripe merchant accounts and receive card payments, that would be very weird and broken use case, especially considering Stripe's fees. I can send a freelancer an ACH transfer for $0, why would I want to pay 3+%?

As for PayPal, some freelancer (especially outside US) do get paid using it, but paypal's fees are outrageous and we try to get anyone we can on an alternative like zelle, ach etc.

> Stripe/Braintree are ways to charge customers on their credit/debit card on your website

Stripe has a banking as a service segment now -

https://stripe.com/treasury

That looks reasonable, having worked with Stripe's APIs before I know that part would at least be nice. But I am worried about pricing with the "contact sales". If they charged per transfer initiated that would be a dealbreaker.

Check out mallo.io or feel free to email me ronak [at] mallo.io

Hit me up, colton@routefusion.com, happy to chat around this :)

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