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We're a very small company (10 FTEs), but we have been anything but impressed with Zenefits as a customer. We only use them for medical and dental insurance, bu

We're a very small company (10 FTEs), but we have been anything but impressed with Zenefits as a customer. We only use them for medical and dental insurance, but in reality, they provide very little, if any value. The Zenefits software is really nothing special, and in fact, the onboarding UI is pretty poor. Now that we have our insurance, Zenefits adds zero value to us. We deal directly with United and Zenefits collects a 10% commission on our monthly premiums. Its a genius business model, and little else. Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Twitter killed off plenty of companies when it decided to shut down the 3rd party ecosystem. Facebook obviously maintains similar strategic control over it's API. How many case studies must there be for companies to understand that building on another company's platform always carries business and strategic risks?

randall 11y ago
Have you ever had an insurance broker before? They're like the same thing but without the easy software.
- geori 11y ago
  Your local insurance salesperson probably has less bargaining power than Zenefits, so your rates with them could be higher.
  - imh 11y ago
    FWIW my experience has been the opposite. No idea why, but the local guys do a great job for me relative to zenefits.
  - chetanahuja 11y ago
    Nope. In our experience, Zenefits has no special deals and absurdly high pricing for health insurance for small companies. You're far better off going with a PEO (e.g. Trinet etc.)
  - babar 11y ago
    For small businesses, Zenefits and other brokers offer almost exactly the same rates, which are the list rates of the insurance companies. The negotiation only comes in to play with larger companies (currently 50+ employees, next year it will be 100+, I think). For us, Zenefits seemed slightly more expensive, but it is hard to tell since they didn't give us good comparison data based on employee ages and coverage. If you want to leverage the large company rates as a small company, you need to explore the PEO model, which Zenefits does not support, but ADP does (and several others).
    - g10r 11y ago
      We use TriNet, super happy.
  - borski 11y ago
    We got cheaper rates with a 'boutique' insurance firm that was smaller. You can get even cheaper by going the PEO route, but we decided that wasn't a route we wanted to go down. Zenefits does not get any special deals; you get the same deal as every other 'small business' broker.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
joshstrange 11y ago
> Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Zenefits doesn't want or need intrinsic rights to the ADP system. They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. They might provide little to no value or be a worthless company but NONE OF THAT MATTERS. The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or output data from the ADP system.
- stoic 11y ago
  well, they have the rights granted within the acceptable use policy agreed upon in their ADP contract, anyway
- slg 11y ago
  >They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. What is the scale of Zenefits' access? Do they function like a human or as a machine? Isn't treating machines differently than humans a well accepted standard of the tech industry? Why else would Robots.txt exist?
- baakss 11y ago
  Similar argument for those who bot in video games, not that it works.
- neotek 11y ago
  >The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or output data from the ADP system. Surely ADP has a superseding right to determine how information enters and leaves their system? I'm not suggesting that's good or bad, just pointing out that it's their system, being a customer doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you like. Hell, look at what happened to Aaron Swartz.
  - BasDirks 11y ago
    What happened to Aaron is a good reason to give them the finger.
  - 11y ago
alasdair_ 11y ago
I, too, have a small company and so far I'm definitely not impressed with Zenefits. A trivial example: we have roughly fifteen contractors working for us. I had them all sign up for Zenefits so we could pay them (and track 1099's appropriately). Come the first of the month, we tried to pay the contractors, only to discover that we had a cap of $2,500 TOTAL for any given week. This isn't mentioned anywhere obvious and caused huge problems for us. In the end, we had to Paypal everyone money at the last minute. Next up was trying to pay a founder as the sole employee in a single state. No matter how much we try, we can't seem to figure out how to make this happen - the Zenefits software assumes that we need a tax ID for the state but the state itself insists that we don't need one (since it's a solo founder, working from his home, there is no LNI and no income tax either). Then there were the countless issues with email addresses (an infinite loop that seemed to be caused by the fact that I used an email address with a plus symbol on it) The support people are very nice but so far none of them have managed to actually resolve an issue for me. Anyway, not impressed.
- JoelSutherland 11y ago
  I too run a small company and am a Zenefits customer. We've now done ~15 payroll runs with Zenefits and only 3 have worked without my manual intervention to fix a problem at the last minute. I don't think this will be the only lawsuit in their future.
  - wj 11y ago
    Having used both ADP and Peak Payroll at our company in the past we have experienced a lot of manual intervention at both. Usually things get ironed out until some/any out of the ordinary change causes problems that end up taking a payroll or two to correct. Basically I'm saying that all payroll providers seem to have these problems. We're back on ADP after our company was bought as that is what the parent company uses.
- CPLX 11y ago
  Payroll and benefits management is a classic hard problem. Now granted, with half a billion dollars and some technical acumen major innovation is possible. But the events of this week and the bearing of the CEO paint a picture of a company that is not aware of and focused on that hard problem.
efuquen 11y ago
So are you against or defending the defamation lawsuit? Because nothing you said really had anything to do with that.

randall 11y ago

Have you ever had an insurance broker before? They're like the same thing but without the easy software.

geori 11y ago
Your local insurance salesperson probably has less bargaining power than Zenefits, so your rates with them could be higher.
- imh 11y ago
  FWIW my experience has been the opposite. No idea why, but the local guys do a great job for me relative to zenefits.
- chetanahuja 11y ago
  Nope. In our experience, Zenefits has no special deals and absurdly high pricing for health insurance for small companies. You're far better off going with a PEO (e.g. Trinet etc.)
- babar 11y ago
  For small businesses, Zenefits and other brokers offer almost exactly the same rates, which are the list rates of the insurance companies. The negotiation only comes in to play with larger companies (currently 50+ employees, next year it will be 100+, I think). For us, Zenefits seemed slightly more expensive, but it is hard to tell since they didn't give us good comparison data based on employee ages and coverage. If you want to leverage the large company rates as a small company, you need to explore the PEO model, which Zenefits does not support, but ADP does (and several others).
  - g10r 11y ago
    We use TriNet, super happy.
- borski 11y ago
  We got cheaper rates with a 'boutique' insurance firm that was smaller. You can get even cheaper by going the PEO route, but we decided that wasn't a route we wanted to go down. Zenefits does not get any special deals; you get the same deal as every other 'small business' broker.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

joshstrange 11y ago

> Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Zenefits doesn't want or need intrinsic rights to the ADP system. They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. They might provide little to no value or be a worthless company but NONE OF THAT MATTERS. The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or output data from the ADP system.

stoic 11y ago
well, they have the rights granted within the acceptable use policy agreed upon in their ADP contract, anyway
slg 11y ago
>They do need (and deserve) the same level of access as a human working for a client using ADP. What is the scale of Zenefits' access? Do they function like a human or as a machine? Isn't treating machines differently than humans a well accepted standard of the tech industry? Why else would Robots.txt exist?
baakss 11y ago
Similar argument for those who bot in video games, not that it works.
neotek 11y ago
>The client paid for ADP access and has every right to use whatever means they deem necessary to input or output data from the ADP system. Surely ADP has a superseding right to determine how information enters and leaves their system? I'm not suggesting that's good or bad, just pointing out that it's their system, being a customer doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you like. Hell, look at what happened to Aaron Swartz.
- BasDirks 11y ago
  What happened to Aaron is a good reason to give them the finger.
- 11y ago

alasdair_ 11y ago

I, too, have a small company and so far I'm definitely not impressed with Zenefits. A trivial example: we have roughly fifteen contractors working for us. I had them all sign up for Zenefits so we could pay them (and track 1099's appropriately). Come the first of the month, we tried to pay the contractors, only to discover that we had a cap of $2,500 TOTAL for any given week. This isn't mentioned anywhere obvious and caused huge problems for us. In the end, we had to Paypal everyone money at the last minute. Next up was trying to pay a founder as the sole employee in a single state. No matter how much we try, we can't seem to figure out how to make this happen - the Zenefits software assumes that we need a tax ID for the state but the state itself insists that we don't need one (since it's a solo founder, working from his home, there is no LNI and no income tax either). Then there were the countless issues with email addresses (an infinite loop that seemed to be caused by the fact that I used an email address with a plus symbol on it) The support people are very nice but so far none of them have managed to actually resolve an issue for me. Anyway, not impressed.

JoelSutherland 11y ago
I too run a small company and am a Zenefits customer. We've now done ~15 payroll runs with Zenefits and only 3 have worked without my manual intervention to fix a problem at the last minute. I don't think this will be the only lawsuit in their future.
- wj 11y ago
  Having used both ADP and Peak Payroll at our company in the past we have experienced a lot of manual intervention at both. Usually things get ironed out until some/any out of the ordinary change causes problems that end up taking a payroll or two to correct. Basically I'm saying that all payroll providers seem to have these problems. We're back on ADP after our company was bought as that is what the parent company uses.
CPLX 11y ago
Payroll and benefits management is a classic hard problem. Now granted, with half a billion dollars and some technical acumen major innovation is possible. But the events of this week and the bearing of the CEO paint a picture of a company that is not aware of and focused on that hard problem.

efuquen 11y ago

So are you against or defending the defamation lawsuit? Because nothing you said really had anything to do with that.