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Ask HN: How do you pay your remote workers located in various countries?
I'm about to hire 1 remote worker / freelancer working out of Barcelona, Spain (US Citizen) and another working out of India (Indian Citizen).
I previously hired a remote worker out of Ukraine and after he completed a small job, found out that I couldn't pay him through paypal. Ukraine has some laws that make it difficult. So the only way was to open an UpWork account and grant him a private gig and then pay him through them. UpWork charges the client (me) 10% or 20% which is ugly.
So I would like to know how you pay your remote workers as freelance contractors, if you are in a situation similar to mine, without ending up having to eat expensive fees, or violating any US or remote workers' country's tax laws.
Costs, Fees, reliability #s would be great!
[P.S. I'm based in San Francisco, California]
- toomuchtodo 9y agoHave you checked out Transferwise for payments? Highly recommend their Borderless account, currently using it to pay contractors from the US in AUD, EUR, and CAD, rates are very reasonable.
- Urgo 9y agoI second this. Currently using it (though not the borderless account, looks like that is new and need to check it out) to pay contractors in Canada and Australia.
- triggeredlurker 9y agoThat's how I pay my remote workers to.
- innopreneur 9y agoTransferWise is awesome. It provides realtime market conversion rates. Charges very nominal fee. It has INR and EUR currency support (which OP needs for India and Spain). Money reaches destination within 2-3 days.
- piva00 9y agoOr even less! Sent some money from Brazil to Sweden and in Brazil it's a convoluted process of paying invoices that need to be cleared by the banks, normally taking 1-2 working days. Even with that had my money from TW in 1 working day, pretty impressed.
- chrisabrams 9y agoBTC/ETH/LTC
- justboxing 9y agoThanks, but most remote workers I spoke with during the interview process don't trust cryptocurrency yet...
- kesor 9y agoBTC/ETH/LTC
- justboxing 9y agoThanks, but most remote workers I spoke with during the interview process don't trust cryptocurrency yet...
- nextlevelwizard 9y agoMy problem with them is simple: "how the hell do you turn them into actual money?" I have/had 50€ worth of bitcoin and I tried to turn them into real money. Now I have ~50€ in some wallet on some service and I haven't been able to figure out how to get them out. In most of the world cryptocurrencies are not practical in any way.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- literallycancer 9y agoYou have an account with an exchange. You click a few buttons and the money is in your bank account a few days later. This is the user experience for an EU citizen. It's probably similar for people in the states.
- rootsudo 9y agoPhilippines - Remittance via local banks. Remitely makes it easy, but the fees/exchange rate is high. I also am debating about sending a prepaid debit card w/ PIN, because local ATM fees are only 50-100 peso for international transaction. Maximum 52php, but the full interchange rate is applied 49-52 PHP/1USD vs Remitely 47-48PHP. At $500-700, that's $10 to send via the service + $10 in exchange fees.
- gexla 9y agoI just paid 250 pesos at an ATM the other day, that's up from 200 pesos. Take a look at coins.ph - the service has apparently built some connections with a lot of local money options. You can even put money back into it via 7/11 in the Philippines if you have no other banking options.
- rootsudo 9y agoTry to avoid BDO/BPI, they raised the rates. Alternatively, if you have Charles Schwab/TDbank, they refund all ATM fees.
- gexla 9y agoGood to know, it was a BPO ATM which I tried. I wonder why they raised the rates from 200 to 250? Currency fluctuations? That seems like a lot of money for something totally automated. That's probably one of the few services in this town which is making money. ;)
- ssijak 9y agoPayoneer. He can open an virtual account there and get their mastercard for free which he can use whereever he needs. And you send money to that account easiliy. Most freelance sites use something like this to pay freelancers. Even Upwork that you used can send earnings to freelancers Payoneer account, so you could have just skipped giving money to Upwork and paid him directly
- kawera 9y agoPayoneer works well but keep in mind that their ATM charges are really high.
- simplyinfinity 9y agoWhat's wrong with bank transfers?
- TomMarius 9y agoVery expensive
- true_religion 9y ago30 USD per transaction is expensive?
- gexla 9y agoThat's 10 days of labor in the country I'm living in. Even decently paid people here might need 3 days of work to make that. And yes, it seems like a lot for something which requires very little action from anyone.
- true_religion 9y agoBut as a fee relative to the amounts I'd expect someone to pay a software developer... it shouldn't be too much. Speaking to a potential employer, I would say that if 30 USD is expensive versus the salary you are paying, then you are paying too little. As an example, my employer hires developers in the Philippines and pays on average 5000 USD each per month. The cost of the wire transfer is 0.6% of that. I think we pay more per month on phone service just to talk to them.
- saiprashanth93 9y agoThat is quite generous of your company to pay 5000 usd per month to devs in the Philippines. If you don't mind, can you let me know what company you work for? Since there is no contact info in your pofile, If you don't want to put it here, my email is in my profile. Thanks.
- izacus 9y agoUmm, as part of remote company mostly based in EU, most of the payments from US just came via standard bank transfer - even for coworkers in Ukraine. The costs were usually around 30$ - certanly not cheap but not that problematic in grand scheme of things. Being paid via bank transfer is standard here (for employment it's actually enforced by law), if my employer in US would try to pay me via some strange intermediate or god-forbid BTC, I'd immediately think of a scam or attempt at tax evasion (with all the liability that comes with that).
- wmboy 9y agoOrbitRemit works very well for us
- mdekkers 9y agoTransferwise or Payoneer
- richardknop 9y agoBank transfers are probably the best way to handle this. I'd suggest to pay employees directly to their bank accounts from company account. And have company eat the transfer fees as business expense. Another questions is how would you define salaries of your employees across various countries. As exchange rates could go up and down a lot. So you'd probably define salaries in the currency of country where company is incorporated in. So for a US company you would pay your employees by bank transfer in defined amount of USD, pay the transfer fee on top of that. And employees would get money in their local currency based on the exchange rate. Of course, ideally you would have all your remote employees open a bank account in your currency which would simplify everything.
- izacus 9y ago> So for a US company you would pay your employees by bank transfer in defined amount of USD, pay the transfer fee on top of that. And employees would get money in their local currency based on the exchange rate. For most banks / situation you actually get USD - the banks aren's allowed just do conversion by themselves (at least here in EU). So you get a separate USD account balance which you then need to manually request to exchange - which is good because you can decided when to exchange it :)
- richardknop 9y agoRight that's probably better. I think you can do the currency conversion at the same time you send a payment but it's better to leave it on employees to choose when to convert currencies. They might better optimise exchange rates. They might even want to keep most of their money in USD if their local currency is not very stable.
- justboxing 9y ago> Another questions is how would you define salaries of your employees across various countries Yes, good point. I'm incorporated in US and the remote workers are Contractors, not Employees (sorry, should've made that clear in my OP). I will be paying these contractors an agreed upon monthly or 1 time fees payable in USD.
- PerfectElement 9y agoI've been using PayPal to pay contractors in the Philippines and US (I'm in Canada), and it's been pretty good. The fees are low compared to other options.
- mindhash 9y agoIf this is long term, its better for remote workers to register as company (as sole proprietor). You can then pay them online. For e.g. - Indian guy can register as company and get a instapay account. Share a link and invoice with you and then you can pay. This works as you will anyway need invoice for tracking expenses
- meric 9y agoMoneygram?
- artur_makly 9y agoxoom.com transfrwise payoneer