TL;DR: At one person, the decision is almost never "which platform". It is contractor or employee, and the work itself decides that, not your budget. A genuine contractor needs a contract, a W-8BEN, and a payment rail, which is $19/month on Shor. An employee needs a legal employer in their country, which is an employer of record (EOR) at $299-449/month with us against $599-699 published stickers elsewhere. Your own entity almost never pays off for one person. Where a country requires a deposit, it is country-dependent and quoted up front.
Disclosure: we build Shor, and it competes with several products named below. Every third-party figure here comes from that provider's own published page or a clearly cited independent guide, as of August 2026.
Every guide to hiring internationally is written for the company hiring ten people. It assumes a target country, a budget line, and someone whose job is expansion. The much more common situation is one engineer in Poland, one designer in Argentina, one operations hire in the Philippines, and a founder who wants to know the smallest correct thing to do.
That case is genuinely different, because at a headcount of one nothing amortizes. A $10,000 entity setup is $10,000 per employee. A platform's annual plan is the whole cost of the hire's administration. So the useful question is not "what does a global hiring stack look like" but "what is the least I can set up and still be right".
The only question that actually matters first
Contractor or employee is not a pricing choice. It is a description of how the work happens, and both the US and the person's own country get a say.
On the US side, the Department of Labor published a proposed rule on February 26, 2026 that would rescind the 2024 classification rule and return to an analysis close to the 2021 framework, with control and opportunity for profit or loss as the core considerations. The comment period closed April 28, 2026 and no final rule has published as of this writing. The practical posture is already in effect, though: Jackson Lewis notes that the proposal makes clear actual practice outweighs contract language, and the Wage and Hour Division has not been enforcing the 2024 rule since 2025 (DOL rulemaking page).
The part founders miss is that US law is the less dangerous half. Your contractor's own country applies its own test, and the remedies there are worse: back social contributions, statutory severance, and in several markets an employment relationship declared retroactively. That is why the classification question survives every clever contract you can write.
A rough filter that holds up in most jurisdictions:
- They set their own hours, use their own equipment, can subcontract, and have other clients. Contractor is defensible.
- You set their schedule, they attend your standups, they use your laptop, and they have no other clients. That is an employee wherever they live, whatever the agreement says.
- You are hiring them full time, indefinitely, to do core work. Treat that as employment and price it that way.
If you land on contractor because the work is genuinely project-shaped, good. If you land on contractor because employment looked expensive, you have not saved money, you have deferred it.
The four options at n equals 1
| Option | What you pay monthly | Who employs them | Honest fit at one person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contractor, paid by bank wire | $25-45 per wire plus an FX spread inside the rate | Nobody | Fine for a few payments a year; leaves you the contract, tax form, and records |
| Contractor, on a platform | $19 (Shor), $25 (Remofirst), $29 (Remote, Oyster), $40 (Multiplier), $49 (Deel) | Nobody | The default for genuine contractors paid monthly |
| Employee through an EOR | $299-449 (Shor), from $199 (Remofirst), from $400 (Multiplier), $599 (Deel), $699 (Remote, Oyster) | The EOR | The default for anyone who is really an employee |
| Your own local entity | Setup plus accounting, audit, and filings, then payroll | You | Almost never at one person; the fixed overhead has nobody to spread across |
Sources: Deel pricing, Remote pricing, Oyster pricing guide (eorhq), Multiplier pricing guide (eorhq), Remofirst via Remote People's EOR cost guide, and Shor pricing. Wire costs are the range we see quoted by US banks and reported in payment guides; confirm yours with your bank. Our EOR pricing comparison keeps the full table current.
The entity row deserves its own sentence, because it is where n=1 thinking most often goes wrong. Incorporation itself is usually cheap: a UK Ltd costs a £50 filing fee, which rose to £100 in February 2026, and an Indian private limited runs ₹7,000-25,000 in government and professional fees. What you cannot buy cheaply is the year after: audits, filings, transfer pricing documentation, and in India a director resident 182 or more days a year. We ran the full model in EOR vs. your own entity, and the breakeven sits around four employees in India and one to two in the UK. At one person, in almost every country, an entity is a commitment you have not earned yet.
What one person actually costs
Take a $4,000 a month hire in India, the most common first international hire we see, and price both paths honestly.
As a contractor. $4,000 to them, $19 to us, and a flat disclosed 2% if and when they convert dollars to rupees. They fund their own taxes and contributions. Your all-in is about $4,019 a month, and the compliance you keep is a real contract, a W-8BEN, and invoices that match payments.
As an employee through an EOR. $4,000 gross, plus employer statutory contributions of roughly 20-25% in India, plus $299 for the EOR. Your all-in is roughly $5,100 a month. The extra buys a legal employer, statutory benefits handled, payroll filings, and severance exposure that sits with the EOR rather than with you. Our employer cost league table has the statutory load for 25 markets, and it ranges from about 3-5% in Chile to 55-70% in Brazil, so run your own country before you budget.
The gap between those two numbers, roughly $1,100 a month, is what tempts founders to call an employee a contractor. It is also roughly what one misclassification finding costs per month of back exposure, before penalties, in a market that decides against you. That is the whole trade.
The minimum viable setup for one hire
Whichever path you pick, this is the short list. It is short on purpose.
- A written agreement in the right shape. A contractor agreement and an employment contract are different documents. For contractors, the two clauses that matter most to you are intellectual property assignment and confidentiality, because in several countries IP does not transfer by default just because you paid for the work.
- A W-8BEN before the first payment. It establishes that the person is a foreign person for US tax purposes. A non-US contractor performing services outside the US is generally not 1099-reportable, but thresholds and rules change, so confirm your specific filing obligations with your accountant.
- One payment method, used consistently. Mixing a wire this month and a peer-to-peer app the next produces records nobody can reconcile at diligence.
- Invoices that match payments. Even for a monthly retainer. Your future finance hire will thank you and so will your auditor.
- A calendar reminder to revisit classification. The project-shaped engagement that quietly became full time is the single most common way startups end up misclassified.
For an employee through an EOR, most of this is the EOR's job rather than yours, which is a real part of what the monthly fee buys. Our EOR onboarding timeline walks through who owns which step.
When the bigger platforms are the right call
We are not the answer to every version of this. Concede the obvious:
- Your one hire is in a country we do not cover as an EOR. We run EOR in 25+ markets and contractor payments in 150+ countries. Deel and Remote both publish far wider EOR footprints, and coverage beats price when the country is the constraint.
- You want one vendor for global payroll, devices, and IT. Rippling's platform scope is real and we do not compete with it. We compared the tradeoff in Rippling vs. Deel.
- You need the lowest possible cost on a single transfer and nothing else. A multi-currency transfer account will beat any platform on that one line. We put numbers on when that stops being true in Shor vs. Wise.
- Procurement requires a large-vendor security program. That is a legitimate constraint and it is not a pricing argument.
What we would push back on is paying a $599 sticker for one contractor-shaped engagement, or standing up an entity for a single hire because a calculator told you entities are cheaper at scale. At n=1 you are buying a legal employer or you are buying a payment rail with paperwork attached. Price the one you actually need.
What it costs through Shor
$19 per month per contractor, including the contract, W-8BEN collection, and invoicing. $299-449 per month per EOR employee depending on country. A flat 2% FX margin, disclosed on the receipt, charged only when money actually converts, not on every payment. Month to month, no setup fee, no initial term. Where a country requires a deposit for EOR employment, it is country-dependent and quoted up front before you sign, so the cash-flow picture is not a surprise. Payouts land same day on local rails in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, and 12+ corridors across Latin America; elsewhere they follow standard local timelines. The pricing calculator will price your specific country.
All third-party pricing referenced above comes from each provider's published pages or the cited independent guides as of August 2026 and may change; confirm current figures with the provider. Employment, tax, and classification rules change too, so confirm your specific situation with your counsel and accountant. All trademarks belong to their respective owners, and no provider mentioned here is affiliated with or endorses Shor.
FAQ
Can I just pay one person abroad as a contractor to keep it simple? Only if the engagement is genuinely contractor-shaped: they control how and when the work gets done, they can work for others, and they are not filling a permanent role in your org chart. The test that matters is the one in their country, not the wording of your agreement, and the 2026 US proposal makes the same point that actual practice outweighs contract language. If they look like an employee, hiring them through an employer of record costs roughly 25-30% more all-in and removes the exposure.
Is an EOR worth it for a single employee? Usually yes, because the alternative is not "cheaper", it is "unincorporated". Without a local entity you have no legal way to employ someone in most countries, so the real comparison is an EOR against a misclassified contractor or against an entity you would run for one person. At $299-449 a month with us, the EOR is the only option in that set that is both compliant and reversible with notice.
Do I need to set up a legal entity to hire one person in another country? No, and at one person you should not want to. Incorporation is often cheap (a UK Ltd filing fee is £50, rising to £100 in February 2026) but the recurring overhead of audits, filings, and local directors is what decides it, and that overhead has a single employee to spread across. Our breakeven model puts the crossover around four employees in India and one to two in the UK, and those numbers assume platform-run payroll.
What paperwork do I actually need for one international contractor? A written contractor agreement with intellectual property assignment and confidentiality, a W-8BEN collected before the first payment, invoices that match what you paid, and consistent records. On Shor the contract, the W-8BEN, and the invoicing come with the $19 monthly fee, which is most of why the fee exists.