Plane's software-first global payroll
Matt Drozdzynski, CEO and co-founder of Plane, on global payroll post-COVID
This reveals a product strategy that puts software architecture ahead of service headcount. In global payroll, every new country adds contracts, tax forms, payment rails, and exception handling. If those jobs get staffed manually first, the company can keep selling, but its cost base and org chart start to depend on people doing repetitive work. Plane chose to encode onboarding, payroll runs, and worker setup into software early, so growth can come from more customers on the same system rather than a much larger ops team.
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The tradeoff maps to customer mix. Plane says most of a typical customer team is US employees and international contractors, while only 5% to 10% of headcount is EOR, and over half of its EOR workers can be covered with just two entities. That makes broad software coverage and repeatable workflows more important than building large in country teams for every edge case.
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Some rivals made the opposite bet. Deel scaled by owning entities, replacing third party EOR partners and local payroll processors, and employing more than 6,500 people while pushing gross margins to about 85% and EBITDA margin to 16% in 2025. That shows ops heavy models can work, but they become a very specific company design, built around vertical integration and service depth.
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This matters because payroll categories tend to drift from software into software plus services. Contractor payroll started as a way to wrap compliance, contracts, and payouts into a payroll like workflow instead of one off wires, spreadsheets, and legal cleanup. Once customers rely on humans to solve those steps, removing that labor later is organizationally hard even if the workflow could be automated.
The next phase favors companies that can absorb more compliance and support work into product without breaking trust or payment reliability. As AI and better payroll infrastructure automate document handling, support, and country setup, lean operators can widen the gap on speed and margins, while ops heavy platforms will keep moving toward full service global employment stacks.