So I work for a startup and the CEO showed me our monthly expenses and i literally cannot comprehend what i'm looking at. Our payroll software alone costs $8,900/month. For comparison, AWS ($3,800) + Stripe fees ($2,800) + our entire remaining tech stack is about the same. we're literally paying as much for payroll as we pay to run our entire product We're a 31 person SaaS company (22 US, 9 international). The company has been using one of the "big" payroll providers for 2 years. thought this was just what it costs until i saw the breakdown: -base US payroll (22 people): $480 -"international contractor management" (9 people): $5,400 -"compliance monitoring": $1,100 -"tax filing services": $780 -"enhanced reporting": $420 -random monthly fees: $720 that's $600 per INTERNATIONAL CONTRACTOR per month. how is sending money abroad more expensive than running our whole infrastructure?? Best part: our romanian dev didn't get paid for 8 days last month because of "verification issues" while we're paying them 2x what we pay for AWS which handles 2 million API calls daily how did we let payroll become this expensive?? anyone else audit their costs and realize payroll is just bleeding money? Why nobody builds something cheaper?