Plane prioritizes coverage over entity ownership
Matt Drozdzynski, CEO and co-founder of Plane, on global payroll post-COVID
This reveals that Plane is optimizing for being the default payroll system for a startup’s whole team, not the most vertically integrated EOR specialist. For a US based company, most workers are still domestic employees, contractors, or concentrated in a few common markets, so broad country coverage matters more at purchase time than owning every local entity. In that model, partner led EOR fills edge cases without forcing the customer into a second tool.
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Plane describes its typical customer mix as mostly US employees, then international contractors, with only 5% to 10% of headcount in EOR. It also says more than half of its EOR workers can be covered with just two entities. That makes full entity ownership look like overbuilding for the average startup account.
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The trade off is coverage versus control. Remote explicitly markets a 100% owned entity infrastructure, which can improve consistency, compliance control, and unit economics in the countries it covers. But that approach expands country by country, so coverage breadth arrives more slowly than with a partner model.
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Deel shows the opposite strategic payoff at scale. Its business expanded from contractor payments into EOR and then payroll, and its margin gains came from replacing third party partners with owned entities and payroll engines. That playbook works best when EOR is a core product line, not just one feature inside a broader payroll system.
The market is moving toward a split. Startup focused platforms will keep using hybrid infrastructure to promise hire anyone without switching tools, while the biggest global employment platforms will keep buying or building local infrastructure to improve margins and control. Over time, the winners will be the ones that can offer both wide coverage on day one and deeper native operations in the highest volume countries.