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Remofirst costs $199 per employee per month, and that figure is real. The question worth your time is not whether it is the cheapest EOR on the market, because it is. It is which of the things Remofirst does not do will start costing you more than $199 a month to work around.
Four of those gaps show up repeatedly, and each one points at a different replacement. Work out which one is yours before you look at any shortlist, because the cheapest answer to a compliance problem and the cheapest answer to an integration problem are not the same provider.
Check current pricing and plans
What does Remofirst actually cost?
The platform fee is $199 per employee per month and there is no setup fee and no annual contract. On a straightforward hire in a standard market, that is what you pay, and no competitor on this page comes close to it.
Three things sit outside that figure, and only one of them is published.
Country-specific quotes are the first. The $199 applies to standard markets, and users have reported quotes above $400 per employee for harder jurisdictions such as Ireland. Ask for a written quote for your actual countries before you model anything.
The currency margin is the second, and we have to be straight about what we do not know. Remofirst publishes no FX rate anywhere on its pricing page.
One third-party pricing guide estimates 1 to 2 percent above the mid-market rate. We could not corroborate that with a second source, so treat it as an estimate and not a cost line.
The deposit is the third, and it is the one most commonly asserted as fact, including by us until this update. Remofirst publishes no deposit position at all. One third-party guide reports a one-month salary deposit per employee. Get the answer in writing rather than budgeting from either figure.
So the honest all-in position is $199 plus employer contributions plus an unpublished currency margin plus a deposit that may or may not exist. For a 10-person team, that uncertainty is worth a single email to your account manager before your Finance team builds anything on the $199.
Why do buyers leave Remofirst?
Four gaps account for almost every Remofirst exit we have looked at, and they arrive in a fairly predictable order as you grow.
The first is the entity model, and it is the one that stops deals rather than annoying people. Remofirst owns no entities anywhere. Every one of its 185+ countries runs through a local partner that Remofirst selected.
Your contract is with Remofirst. The employment contract is with a company you have not met. When your legal team asks who legally employs your engineer in Germany, that two-link chain is the answer, and compliance-led procurement teams tend to flag it before the deal closes rather than after.
Remofirst frames the partner model as a deliberate choice and cites partners with 15 to 20 years of operating history. That is a reasonable defence and it does not resolve the audit question, which is what your legal team is actually asking.
The second gap is the missing API. There is no developer portal, no public documentation and no webhooks. If your finance team wants payroll data flowing into NetSuite, the route is a manual export or a support ticket, every month, forever.
The third is platform depth. Remofirst covers onboarding, payroll and basic document management, and the only native HRIS integration is BambooHR. Beyond that you are running a second system alongside it and reconciling between them by hand.
That second system is where the saving quietly goes. A separate HRIS at $50 to $100 per employee per month eats between an eighth and a quarter of the $400 gap to Deel, before you count the hours spent reconciling the two systems by hand.
The fourth is support, and Remofirst’s own site cannot answer it consistently. Its pricing page advertises 24/7 support with a dedicated account manager. Its employer-of-record page lists 24/5 in the feature list and then says 24/7 in the FAQ on the same page.
We are not going to pretend to know which is right. Reviewers on G2 and Trustpilot through 2025 and 2026 describe post-onboarding support gaps and delayed invoice processing.
No published response-time commitment exists to hold anyone to. For payroll, where a Thursday delay can mean a missed statutory deadline, get the response time written into the contract.
Which Remofirst alternative fits your switching trigger?
Match the trigger to the provider. Every option below costs more than $199, so the only sensible question is whether it removes a problem that is currently costing you more than the difference.
If Legal will not sign off on partner entities
This is the hardest trigger to solve honestly, and we have to correct something we published previously. We used to tell readers that Remote runs 100% owned entities everywhere. Remote’s own review page says otherwise: owned entities in its main markets, vetted local partners beyond them, across 90+ countries at $699 per employee per month.
Remote is still the strongest answer here, and it is no longer a complete one. It publishes no deposit and its owned-entity footprint covers the markets most teams hire in first. Outside those markets you are back to asking who the local partner is.
G-P claims roughly 95% own-entity coverage across 180+ countries, which is the highest ratio we track. It publishes no EOR rate, and our own pages carry estimates that disagree with each other badly enough that quoting one would mislead you. Ask G-P for a written quote for your countries.
The practical move for either provider is the same. Ask for the country-by-country entity list in writing, for the countries you actually hire in, before you compare prices. A provider that will not put that in writing has answered your question.
If the missing API is the problem
Deel at $599 per employee per month is the direct fix, with a public API, 120+ integrations, and HRIS, IT management and equity tools in the same platform. The premium over Remofirst is $400 per employee per month.
For 20 people that is $96,000 a year, which is a real number and the first one your CFO will see. Set against it the second HRIS subscription you stop paying for and the monthly export nobody has to do by hand any more.
If you are already paying $50 to $100 per employee per month for that second tool, the effective premium is closer to $300 than $400. On 20 people that is still $72,000 a year, so make the integration savings explicit before you take this to Finance.
If you want a step up without a $400 jump
Multiplier publishes $459 per employee per month on an annual commitment, or $499 month to month. That is a premium of $260 or $300 over Remofirst depending on how you contract.
One correction matters here, because we got it wrong on this page until August 2026. The $400 Multiplier figure that circulates widely, including on our own pages, is its Contractor of Record rate. It is not the EOR price and it should not be read as one.
What the money buys is a more established platform with owned entities in Singapore, India, the Philippines, the UK and Australia. For APAC-weighted hiring that owned-entity list is the argument, because it is the region where checking a local partner independently is hardest.
If your international hires are the ones complaining
Oyster covers 120+ countries and runs the cleanest employee-facing platform in our assessment, with dedicated customer success managers and employment liability insurance.
We cannot give you a reliable price. Oyster’s EOR rate appears on our own pages as $599, as $499 to $599, as $599 to $699 and as $699, with no single supported value behind any of them. Get a written quote and do not trust our range, including the one in the table below.
The trigger for Oyster is specific. It matters when your hires deal with the platform directly for payslips, leave and expenses, because every question they cannot answer alone becomes a ticket your People team writes.
If your Finance team needs reporting Remofirst cannot produce
Papaya Global runs consolidated payroll reporting across 160+ countries at $650 to $770 per employee per month, with a tier-1 banking licence behind the payment rails.
This is the one trigger on the page that is not really about employment. If your CFO wants real-time cost analytics across every country in one dashboard, Remofirst’s reporting will not get there with any amount of configuration, and no cheaper provider here closes that gap either.
If you need immigration support or unusual markets
Velocity Global, now trading as Pebl, covers 185+ countries at $399 to $599 and keeps an immigration team in house rather than routing visa questions to a local partner. It has 160+ cross-border M&A integrations on record.
Remofirst matches Pebl on raw country count. What it does not match is having handled a transfer of employment before, which is what you are buying when the hire involves sponsorship or an acquisition.
If you have enough people in one country to stop renting an employer
One option here is not a provider. If most of your hires sit in a single country and you intend to keep growing there, your own legal entity removes the per-employee fee instead of discounting it.
The economics are weaker from Remofirst than from anywhere else on this page, and that is worth saying plainly. Five employees at $199 is $11,940 a year in platform fees.
That is the entire recurring cost incorporation has to beat. From a $699 provider the same five employees cost $41,940 a year, which is why this option comes up far more often on the expensive pages than on this one.
We are not going to quote you a setup cost. Our own pages carry ranges that disagree by an order of magnitude, so any figure we gave you would be a coin toss. Get a written quote from a local accountant in the specific country.
What the quote will not tell you is the running commitment. You register the company, appoint a local accountant, open a bank account that may want to meet a director in person, and inherit filing deadlines that become yours to miss.
Most companies that go this far end up hybrid. They keep their own entity in the one dense country and an EOR everywhere else.
What Remofirst does that its alternatives do not
It is $199, and nothing else in our coverage is within $200 of it while reaching 185+ countries. That combination is the reason to stay, and it is a stronger reason than this page’s length might suggest.
For a bootstrapped team making its first international hires in standard markets, the price gap is not a line item. It is the difference between hiring abroad and not hiring abroad, and providers charging two to three times more do not employ your person any harder.
There is no setup fee, no annual lock-in, and onboarding is consistently described as fast in published reviews. If your compliance requirements are ordinary, your integrations are manual anyway and your headcount is under about 15, the honest recommendation is to stay where you are.
How do Remofirst alternative costs compare?
Remofirst is the cheapest published rate in our coverage and every alternative here costs more. The spread from Remofirst to the dearest option on this page is roughly $570 per employee per month.
| Provider | EOR price | Entity model | Switching trigger it answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Remofirst | $199/month | 100% partner, 185+ countries | None. This is the incumbent. |
| Multiplier | $459 annual / $499 monthly | Mixed, 5 owned in APAC | Platform depth without the full jump |
| Deel | $599/month | Mixed, 150+ countries | No API, thin platform |
| Remote | $699/month, no deposit | Owned in main markets, partners beyond, 90+ countries | Entity audit questions from Legal |
| Oyster | Quote only. See note below. | Mixed, 120+ countries | Employee experience complaints |
| Velocity Global (Pebl) | $399-599/month | Mixed, 185+ countries | Immigration, M&A, unusual markets |
| Papaya Global | $650-770/month | Mixed, 160+ countries | CFO-grade payroll reporting |
| G-P | Quote only. Not published. | ~95% owned, 180+ countries | Highest own-entity ratio available |
Source: provider pricing pages and our own review pages, re-checked August 2026. Oyster and G-P show as quote-only because our own pages carry ranges for them that we cannot reconcile to one supported figure. Multiplier’s widely quoted $400 is its Contractor of Record rate.
Everything in that table is a platform fee. Employer contributions run 15 to 40 percent of gross salary in most markets, they are pass-through at every provider on this page, and they are usually several times larger than the fee itself.
So the $96,000 gap between Remofirst and Deel on a 20-person team matters less on high salaries and more on low ones. Model total cost per employee in the countries you actually hire in.
The platform fee is the only column any of these providers compete on, and it is the smallest one on the invoice.
What breaks when you switch away from Remofirst?
Switching EOR means terminating every employee under the Remofirst partner entity and rehiring them under the new provider’s. It is an employment event with legal consequences for each individual, not a platform migration, and five things go wrong more often than the rest.
Benefits can lapse. The transition window runs 2 to 4 weeks, and health insurance and pension contributions may be interrupted inside it. Some benefits restart a qualifying period under the new provider, which matters enormously to anyone mid-treatment. Communicate the dates before the paperwork arrives.
Leave balances move by hand or not at all. Accrued holiday, sick days and time off in lieu do not transfer between providers automatically. Document every balance and either migrate it or settle it in cash under the outgoing contract.
Work permits set the timeline. Where a permit is tied to the Remofirst partner entity, changing the legal employer can trigger a fresh application. This is country-specific and it is usually the longest item on the plan. Identify who is affected before you start anything else.
The partner adds a party to every conversation. Because Remofirst owns no entities, your offboarding runs through Remofirst, the local partner and the incoming provider. That is one more diary to coordinate in every country, and it is the step teams underestimate.
Ask about the deposit rather than assuming it. If a deposit was taken, get the refund date in writing before you sign elsewhere, so you are not funding two providers at once. If none was taken, you have removed a cash-flow problem the alternatives may reintroduce.
Get written answers on transition timeline, benefits continuity, permit dependencies and deposit timing from both providers before you sign anything.
WhichPayroll view
Remofirst is the right first EOR for companies where $199 is the difference between hiring internationally and not doing it at all. Most people reading this page should stay.
The number that decides this is not $199. It is how many hours a month your team spends working around the missing API and the second HRIS, and whether your legal team has started asking who the local partner is. Both usually begin between 15 and 30 international employees.
Check current pricing and plans
Frequently asked questions about Remofirst alternatives
Which alternative gives me owned entities everywhere?
None of them, and any page telling you otherwise is out of date, including earlier versions of this one. G-P claims the highest ratio at roughly 95% of 180+ countries. Remote owns entities in its main markets and uses vetted partners beyond them. Ask each provider for the country-by-country list covering your markets.
Does Remofirst charge a deposit?
Nobody can tell you from public sources, because Remofirst publishes no deposit position at all. Earlier versions of this page stated one as fact and that was wrong. Ask for the answer in writing before you model cash flow around it.
Is Remofirst suitable for a team of 50 international employees?
It becomes hard work well before 50. The missing API means every payroll export is manual, and that workload scales with headcount while the $199 saving stays flat. Enterprise procurement teams also weigh vendor scale, and Remofirst is a smaller company than Deel or Remote.
How we assessed Remofirst alternatives
WhichPayroll is an independent comparison site. We do not sell EOR, payroll or contractor services. We may earn a commission from provider links, and that does not affect our editorial judgement.
We assessed the eight providers in the table above to produce the switching-logic recommendations on this page. Pricing, entity models and product scope were verified against public documentation in April 2026, and every competitor figure was re-checked against that provider’s own review page on this site in August 2026.
That August re-check changed three things a reader may already have acted on. Remote is $699 across 90+ countries on a mixed entity model, where this page previously said $599 across 85+ on 100% owned entities.
Multiplier’s EOR rate is $459 annual or $499 monthly. The $400 we printed before is its Contractor of Record rate. Remofirst’s deposit and FX margin are both unpublished, and we stated each of them as fact.
No provider was tested as a live product. The recommendations rest on published documentation, review patterns and cross-provider analysis rather than hands-on use.
For the full assessment of the incumbent, see our Remofirst review and our Remofirst pricing breakdown.
Last reviewed: April 2026. Competitor figures re-checked August 2026.