Payroll Revenue Subsidizes HR Pricing

This gives Employment Hero a different pricing weapon than HiBob, because it can make money every time wages move, employees pull pay early, or workers spend through its app, not just when HR buys seats. That lets it keep headline HR software prices lower in SMB and lower mid market deals, while HiBob still relies much more on per employee software revenue and paid module expansion into payroll, finance, and talent.

• Employment Hero bundles core HR and payroll with Swag, an employee app for earned wage access, spend accounts, rewards, and cashback. Those products add fee streams like transaction fees, interchange, and affiliate commissions, so the company can recover margin outside the core HR subscription.
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• HiBob is broadening beyond HR, but its economics are still centered on software. ARR per customer roughly doubled from $29K to $50K between 2023 and 2025 as it sold more payroll, FP&A, and talent modules, which means price competition lands harder on its core seat based package.
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• This playbook already shows up across payroll. Deel and Rippling also push into the employee wallet side of payroll, because once a platform controls wage data and pay runs, it can attach higher frequency financial products on top and use that profit pool to compete harder on the system of record.
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The next phase is a market where HR software is increasingly sold close to cost, and profit shifts to payroll flow and employee financial activity. That favors platforms that own both the employer workflow and the worker app, and it pushes HiBob to deepen payroll adoption and attach more finance products around its core HR base.