A Founder's Guide to Paying International Contractors

Most founders I talk to in YC are grinding themselves into the ground. Coding until 2am, doing customer support in the morning, then jumping on sales calls. They wear it like a badge of honor. "We do everything ourselves."

I used to think that was the only way. Then I started working with international contractors, and I've never gone back.

My co-founder and I have been hiring internationally for years, across multiple projects and companies, long before Grade. It's not something we started doing after we raised money. It's how we've always operated. And honestly, I think more founders should try it.

The martyrdom trap

There's this idea in startup culture that founders should suffer. That doing everything yourself proves commitment. That hiring help early is somehow cheating.

It's nonsense. Your job as a founder is to make the company succeed, not to personally do every task. If you're spending 20 hours a week on things someone else could do for $30/hour, you're not being scrappy. You're being inefficient.

The math is simple: your time is worth more than $30/hour. If it's not, you have bigger problems than hiring.

Why international

A senior developer in SF costs $180-250k. The same skills in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Southeast Asia cost $60-100k. That's not a quality gap. That's a cost-of-living gap.

We've worked with developers in Ukraine, Poland, Argentina, the Philippines, Brazil. The talent is real. Some of the best engineers I've worked with weren't in Silicon Valley. They were in Kyiv or São Paulo, charging a third of Bay Area rates.

When you're early stage and watching your runway, that difference means you can build more with less. Or hire two people instead of one. Or keep an extra six months of runway for the same output.

How we actually operate

We've never had a fully in-house team. Even now, in YC, we work with contractors for design, specialized dev work, and ops tasks. It's not a temporary thing until we can afford full-time hires. It's the model.

The benefits go beyond cost. Contractors are used to working async and autonomously. They're not waiting around for standups or asking permission to start. You give them a problem, they solve it, you pay them.

It also forces you to be clear about what you need. You can't just say "help with the product." You have to define scope, deliverables, timelines. That clarity makes everything run better.

The payment stuff we figured out the hard way

After years of paying people in different countries, here's what actually works:

Wise is the default. Real exchange rates, low fees, fast transfers. Unless someone asks for something else, use Wise.

PayPal is a trap. Everyone has it, but the fees are brutal. 4-5% on every transaction adds up fast. We stopped using it years ago.

Crypto is real for some countries. Argentina, Venezuela, Nigeria — places where the banking system is unreliable or currency controls make normal transfers painful. USDC on a cheap network costs almost nothing to send.

Always ask what they prefer. "What's the easiest way for you to receive payments?" They know their country's banking situation better than you do.

Pay on time, every time

This sounds obvious but most founders screw it up. You get busy, you forget, you'll do it tomorrow. Meanwhile your contractor is wondering if they're getting paid.

Good contractors have options. If you're annoying to work with — slow to pay, unclear about scope, constantly changing requirements — they'll prioritize someone else. You'll still technically have a contractor, but you won't have their best work.

We treat payment reliability as a competitive advantage. Our contractors stick around because working with us is easy. That consistency is worth more than whatever we save by being slow.

Why we built Grade

After years of doing this, the payment logistics were still annoying. Different contractors wanted different methods. Tracking who got paid what was a spreadsheet nightmare. We'd forget someone or pay the wrong amount.

We built Grade to fix this for ourselves. Add someone with just their email. They pick their own payment method. Pay everyone with one click. Each person gets money however they want it.

We also tied payments to actual work. We'd had contractors disappear mid-project after getting paid. Now deliverables get verified before payment goes out. No more paying for work that doesn't happen.

It's the system we wished existed when we started hiring internationally.

Try it

If you're doing everything yourself, I get it. There's something satisfying about building with your own hands. But you're also capping how fast you can move.

Start small. One contractor, one project. Something you've been putting off because you don't have time. Hire someone from Upwork or a referral, pay them with Wise, see how it goes.

The first time you get back 10 hours in a week because someone else handled something you didn't need to do yourself, you'll wonder why you waited so long.

That's how we've operated for years. It works.