Learning and careers decision
Deel
A small team can build a narrow contractor-payments MVP (onboarding, calculations, payouts) but cannot realistically recreate Deel's global compliance, local entities, EOR services, or scale advantages—so keeping the paid service is reasonable for full global coverage.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Onboard a contractor, collect tax/compliance docs, record pay details, run a pay event that calculates gross-to-net for a jurisdiction, and send payment to the contractor's bank or wallet.
What it still won’t have
- Local legal entities, EOR/PEO employment contracts and employer filings
- Dedicated local compliance experts and in-house payroll operations
- Built-in global tax filings and statutory reporting across 130+ countries
- Enterprise SLAs, managed onboarding, and multi-currency treasury scale
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Built on in-house infrastructure, with single payroll engines, owned entities, and more.
- Proprietary data
2,000+ local experts combined with in-house compliance logic and real-time AI.
- Compliance and regulation
EOR: Full legal employment in 130+ countries globally
- Infrastructure at scale
$20B+ compliantly processed global payroll
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 12 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted minimal global-contractor payroll MVP using: React frontend, Node.js (Express) API, Postgres, S3 for documents, and Stripe + Wise for payouts. In scope: contractor onboarding form with document uploads and metadata extraction, secure storage of worker records, a simple gross-to-net calculation module for one country (configurable rules), a pay-run flow (create, preview cost, approve, execute payouts via payment APIs), webhooks for payout status, and an admin UI for viewing payroll runs and exports. Out of scope: building an EOR legal entity, multi-country statutory filings, and offering managed payroll operations. Include error handling, input validation, unit tests for payroll calculations, integration tests for payout flows (stubbed), and a README with deploy steps and environment variables.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-9
- Evidence score22
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productDeel — official product
- official pricingDeel pricing
- official docsRun global payroll — use case
- open sourcefrappe/hrms
- open sourcehorilla/horilla-hr
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
