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Comment by donall | Hacker News Reader

I have had a series of bad experiences with Trinet. Not so bad that it's ruined my life, but bad like "I can't believe this is the best we can do for HR". I like the idea of outsourcing that sort of thing so we can focus on the hacking, but I feel like that particular space is ripe for disruption (to use a clichéd term).

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A great company solving the "Back-office / operations" side of a startup, including HR and benefits management, is Advisor. http://Advsor.com Yeah, the website is being updated, but with clients like Uber, ZeroCater, PandoDaily, Buffer, Expensify, and 70+ more, they are a SOLID solution.

Their website does not have any prices listed.

Based on your experience, how do they charge (per employee, per transaction, etc) and how much does it cost, roughly?

We've been generally happy with TriNet, and it's worth having a great benefit package and an HR call center. It's not free, but I think the math works out about the same way free meals do.

Same question on Trinet - since they also have no prices on their website - based on your experience, how do they charge (per employee, per transaction, etc) and how much does it cost, roughly? 100$/empl/mth, 1'000$/empl/mth?

Per employee, with something like a minimum of $2k/mo for 4 or 5 employees and something that approaches $160/mo per employee with a larger number. There's also some several thousand dollars of initial cost.

Disclaimer: My data is from an answer to a LinkedIn question several years ago, so it's oudated at best.

About $150/employee/month, for almost all services. Of course if you elect to pay a portion of benefits (e.g., health care), that's on top as a pass-through. Certain special requests have a la carte pricing, but you most likely won't need them.

Out of curiosity, what kind of bad experiences did you have? What were you disappointed with?

Without getting into details, there was some significant mismanagement of my user account, resulting in incorrect tax being withheld until I noticed the problem and notified them about it. After an unreasonable amount of time spent resolving the problem with a number of different people on their end, the end result was a large tax bill that I had not budgeted for.

There have also been other less significant issues, mostly regarding my status as a foreign employee. I speculate that it stems from a lack of properly engineered software on their end. In all cases, my problems would have been fixed by some logic along the lines of "If (employee.status == X && !taxesApplied.include(correctTaxes)) then trigger alert Y". Perhaps I'm too much of an engineer, but I find it hard to believe that a company that focusses solely on HR can even operate without this kind of automated check.

I don't know about the quality of their service, but damn if their salespeople don't spam/harass the crap out of small business owners.

Not a good look for a company trying to sell a service that requires credibility.

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