Four ways to pay, depending on how much of the hiring you want to hand over: a forever free applicant tracking system, AI screening billed per use, placement fees charged only on a successful hire, and Employer of Record billed monthly per employee. This page explains what each one includes, what moves the cost, and how to pick between them.
HireCade has no single list price. The applicant tracking system is free forever, AI add-ons are billed per use at $0.10 per resume and $5 per AI interview, contractor placements cost 30% of the contractor's engagement fees, permanent placements cost 20% of first-year base salary with a refundable 10% retainer, and Employer of Record is $499 per employee each month.
That structure exists because hiring costs are not uniform. Running your own pipeline in an ATS costs a platform almost nothing, so it is free. Sourcing, outreach, and shortlisting for a senior permanent role takes weeks of human and AI work, so it is priced as a share of the salary you are about to commit to. Employing someone in a country where you have no legal entity is an ongoing compliance obligation, so it is a flat monthly fee.
The practical consequence is that you can start at zero and only move up the cost curve when you hand more of the work over. Most teams begin with the free ATS, add resume ranking when applicant volume gets heavy, add AI interview screening when the shortlist still feels unreliable, and only engage the contingency model for roles they cannot fill themselves.
Whether you want us to handle sourcing and hiring end-to-end, need a free ATS to manage your pipeline, or want to employ talent globally, HireCade has you covered.
Get everything you need to start hiring without spending a dollar. Built for startups, small teams, or anyone who wants to try HireCade before scaling up.
Resume Ranking
AI scores each resume against your job description
AI Interview Screening
AI video / voice screening with a score per candidate
Ideal for short-term projects, data annotation, and flexible engagements. Pay only when you successfully bring on a contractor.
A flat placement fee applied once the contractor begins work. No upfront retainer required.
Best for: Companies hiring for short-term or project-based work, data annotation pipelines, and flexible contractor engagements.
For employers who want hands-off recruiting and pay only when a hire is made.
Collected upfront per role. Fully refundable if no hire is made through us. Credited toward the placement fee upon a successful hire.
Final placement fee upon a successful hire. The retainer paid upfront is credited toward this amount.
Best for: Companies who want a hands-off solution and only pay when they hire
Hire employees in new markets without setting up a local legal entity. HireCade acts as the legal employer on your behalf.
Billed monthly. No setup fees.
Best for: Companies expanding globally, hiring contractors full-time, or employing remote talent in countries where you don't have an entity.
Company size matters less than the shape of the problem. A twenty person startup with a hard senior search may need contingency, while a two hundred person company with heavy inbound may only need resume ranking. Match the row that describes your situation.
| Your situation | Best fit | How you pay | What you still do yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founder or small team, one or two open roles | Free ATS | $0, plus $0.10 per resume ranked or $5 per AI interview if you want them | Write the job, review the shortlist, run the final interviews, make the offer |
| Growing team with heavy applicant volume | Free ATS with AI add-ons | Usage based, so the bill rises and falls with applicant numbers | Decide who advances, run onsite or final loops, own the offer |
| Project or short-term work such as data annotation | Contractor model | 30% of the contractor's total engagement fees, charged once they begin work, no upfront retainer | Define the scope and timeline, then manage the contractor day to day |
| Hard to fill permanent role you have no time to source | Contingency model | 10% refundable retainer per role, credited toward a 20% placement fee on the hire | Interview the pre-vetted shortlist and decide who to hire |
| Hiring an employee in a country where you have no entity | Employer of Record | $499 per employee per month, billed monthly, no setup fee | Choose the person, set the salary, and manage their work |
| You need research participants, not new staff | Market research recruiting | Scoped per project, so book a call to size it | Run the interviews and own the research questions |
Every figure in this table is the published rate on the plan cards above. Percentage based fees scale with salary or engagement value, so ask for a worked example against your own roles if you need a budget number.
Most teams do not pick a plan once. They start free and add paid pieces as specific bottlenecks appear. This is the order that usually makes sense.
Create your jobs, publish the careers page, and let applications land in the applicant tracking system. This costs nothing and gives you a baseline for how many applicants each role actually attracts.
At $0.10 per resume, AI ranking scores each application against your job description. The cost is trivially predictable: multiply applicants by ten cents.
At $5 per interview, an AI voice or video screen produces a score per candidate, so first-round calls stop consuming your engineers' time.
For permanent roles, the contingency model puts sourcing, outreach, shortlisting, and first-round screening on HireCade. You pay a 10% refundable retainer per role and a 20% placement fee only on a successful hire.
If the person you want to hire lives somewhere you have no legal entity, Employer of Record makes HireCade the legal employer for $499 per employee per month.
Hiring needs move. A team that needed full search in one quarter often needs only resume ranking in the next. Because nothing is locked behind an annual seat licence, you can change the mix as your pipeline changes.
Because most of the pricing is usage based or percentage based, your bill is not a fixed subscription you can forget about. It moves with a handful of variables, and knowing which ones you control is the difference between a predictable spend and an unpleasant surprise.
Salary is the biggest single lever on placement work. Both the contingency retainer and the placement fee are calculated on first-year base salary, so the same amount of recruiting effort costs more on a senior role than on a junior one. That is deliberate: senior searches take longer and the cost of a bad hire is higher. If you are budgeting, take the base salary you expect to offer and work from there rather than from a flat per role figure.
Applicant volume is the lever on the AI add-ons. Resume ranking is charged per resume and interview screening per interview, so a role that attracts three hundred applicants costs more to triage than one that attracts thirty. The useful consequence is that you can cap it: rank everyone but only screen the top slice, and your spend follows your judgement rather than raw inbound volume.
How much of the process you hand over is the third lever. Running the pipeline yourself in the free ATS is the cheapest option and always will be. Asking HireCade to source, reach out, shortlist, and screen is the most expensive, because it replaces weeks of work. Most of the middle ground, scoring resumes and screening candidates you already have, sits between the two.
Headcount in other countries is the fourth. Employer of Record is a flat $499 per employee per month, so it scales linearly with the number of people you employ that way rather than with their salaries. There is no minimum employee count, which means the maths works for a single hire as well as for a team.
The four models bill at different moments, which matters more for cash flow than the headline percentages do. It is worth knowing when money actually leaves your account.
On the free plan, nothing is billed until you use an add-on. Resume ranking and AI interview screening are usage based, so charges follow the activity you triggered. There is no card required to start and no trial clock counting down in the background, which is why the plan is described as forever free rather than as a free tier.
On the contingency model, the 10% retainer is collected upfront, per role, and calculated on the estimated first-year base salary. It is fully refundable if no hire is made through us, and on a successful hire it is credited toward the 20% placement fee rather than charged in addition to it. So the retainer is best understood as a prepayment that aligns both sides on filling the role, not as an extra fee.
On the contractor model there is no upfront retainer at all. The 30% placement fee applies once the contractor begins work and is calculated on the contractor's total engagement fees. That makes it a pay for success arrangement: if nobody starts, nothing is charged.
On Employer of Record, billing is monthly at $499 per employee, with no setup fees. The employee's own compensation and the statutory costs required in their country are separate from that service fee, because those are determined by your offer and by local law.
If you exceed the limits of a tier, you can either upgrade or pay overage fees where they apply, so access to candidates and interviews is never cut off mid-search.
The applicant tracking system is free at $0 and includes the full pipeline from application to offer, a branded careers page you can launch in minutes, unlimited candidates, and unlimited job posts. The stated reason is a simple one: every company, whatever its size, should have professional hiring tools from day one.
That is a meaningful distinction from the common freemium pattern where the free tier caps you at a few jobs or a couple of seats and then charges when you grow. Here, volume is not the thing being monetised. The AI work is. You could run a hundred roles through the ATS and still pay nothing if you never rank a resume or run an AI screen.
What is not free is anything that consumes compute or human effort on your behalf. Resume ranking, AI interview screening, contractor and permanent placements, and Employer of Record all carry a price because each one does work you would otherwise do yourself or pay someone else to do.
The upgrade path is designed to be undramatic. The free plan advertises a seamless upgrade into AI recruiting, and both the contractor and contingency models explicitly include everything in the free plan. You are not migrating between products when you start paying, you are switching on more of the same one.
Outgrowing the free plan usually shows up in one of three ways, and each has a different answer.
The first is volume. You are getting far more applicants than anyone on the team can read, and good candidates are sitting unreviewed for days. The answer is resume ranking rather than a bigger plan: score everything at $0.10 per resume, then spend your reading time on the top of the list.
The second is interview load. You have a workable shortlist, but your engineers are losing hours to first-round calls that mostly end in a no. The answer is AI interview screening at $5 per candidate, which returns a score per interview so your team only meets people who have already cleared a bar.
The third is capacity. The role is genuinely hard to fill, inbound applications are not producing the right people, and nobody internally has time to source. That is the point where the contingency model earns its fee, because it replaces the work rather than speeding it up. The 10% retainer is refundable if no hire results, which limits the downside of trying it on a single role before committing further.
If you exceed a tier's limits, upgrading or paying overage fees where applicable keeps everything accessible, and you can move between the Contingency and Subscription models in either direction. If your constraint is geography rather than volume, Employer of Record is the route: it lets you employ the person you actually want in the country they actually live in, without registering an entity there.
Where the published numbers do not cover your situation, for example an unusual role mix or a multi-country rollout, the mechanism rather than the price is the thing to discuss. Book an intro call and size it against the roles in front of you.
You want to manage your hiring pipeline yourself and pay only for AI add-ons (resume ranking & interview screening) as you need them.
You need flexible, short-term talent fast, such as data annotators or project-based contractors, with no upfront retainer.
You want HireCade to handle everything: sourcing, screening, and shortlisting, and pay only for successful hires.
You're hiring employees in countries where you don't have a legal entity, and need compliant employment handled end-to-end.
The applicant tracking system is free forever at $0, with unlimited job posts, unlimited candidates, and a branded careers page. Beyond that you pay for what you use: $0.10 per resume for AI resume ranking, $5 per AI interview screening, 30% of a contractor's total engagement fees on a contractor placement, 20% of first-year base salary on a contingency hire, and $499 per employee per month for Employer of Record.
It is free forever, not a trial. The Free ATS plan is listed at $0 and includes the full applicant tracking system, a free careers page, and unlimited candidates and job posts.
The paid parts are the optional AI add-ons and the hiring services. If you never use them, you never get a bill.
Resume ranking is $0.10 per resume and AI interview screening is $5 per interview. Both are usage based, so the cost tracks the number of applicants you choose to score and the number of candidates you choose to screen.
Nothing on the free plan forces you to use either add-on. You can run your whole pipeline manually and stay at $0.
A 10% retainer, calculated on the estimated first-year base salary, is collected upfront per role. It is fully refundable if no hire is made through us, and on a successful hire it is credited toward the final 20% placement fee.
In practice that means the retainer is not an extra charge on top of the placement fee. It is the first part of it.
The placement fee is 20% of the hire's first-year base salary, and the 10% retainer you already paid for that role is credited against it. Because the fee is a percentage, the cost scales with the salary of the role rather than with a fixed price per seat.
Contractor placements are charged at 30% of the contractor's total engagement fees, applied once the contractor begins work, with no upfront retainer. Contingency search is charged at 20% of first-year base salary for a permanent hire, with a 10% refundable retainer per role.
Contractor pricing suits short-term and project-based work such as data annotation and labelling. Contingency suits permanent roles where you want sourcing and screening handled end to end.
Employer of Record is $499 per employee per month, billed monthly, with no setup fees and no minimum employee count. The fee covers HireCade acting as the legal employer, including payroll in local currency, local tax and social contributions, statutory benefits, local language contracts, HR support, and offboarding.
The employee's own salary and statutory costs are separate from the $499 service fee, because those are set by the offer you make and by local law rather than by HireCade.
You can either upgrade to a higher tier or pay overage fees where they apply, so you always keep access to the candidates and interviews you need.
Because the AI add-ons are priced per resume and per interview rather than as a bundled quota, most teams simply see usage based charges rise or fall with hiring volume.
Yes. You can move from a hands-off Contingency model to a Subscription plan if you want self-serve access to the AI tools, or the other way round.
Nothing in the free ATS is lost when you switch, because both the Contractor and Contingency models include everything in the free plan.
Four things: the salary of the role, because placement fees are a percentage of it; the number of applicants and screens you run, because the AI add-ons are per resume and per interview; how much of the process you hand over, since self-serve is cheaper than full search; and how many people you employ through Employer of Record, since that is a flat fee per employee per month.
No. The Free ATS plan is $0 forever, so you can post jobs, publish a careers page, and review candidates before any payment is involved.
You only enter billing details when you choose to use an AI add-on or engage one of the hiring services.
Yes. We review resumes to check they align with your job requirements, and run AI voice and video interview screenings for each candidate you provide. You get a score for each resume and each video interview to support your evaluation.
This is useful when you have a backlog of past applicants and want to find the people worth revisiting before sourcing anyone new.
Candidates appear in the HireCade dashboard and are also sent directly to your mailbox, so you can schedule the next step yourself without logging in.
Employer of Record lets you hire employees in new countries or regions without setting up a local legal entity. HireCade becomes the legal employer on your behalf and manages compliance, payroll, and local HR obligations at $499 per employee per month.
It fits companies expanding into a new market, converting long-term contractors to employees, or employing remote talent where they have no entity.
Book an intro call and walk through the roles you are hiring for. Because the placement models are percentage based, the cost depends on the salary and the number of roles rather than on a published seat price.
Pricing depends on which product you use, so here is the full catalogue with a short note on what each one does.
Every HireCade product in one place, grouped by the problem it solves.
The $0 applicant tracking system, with unlimited jobs, candidates, and team seats.
Cade reviews every resume, reaches out to talent, and returns a ranked shortlist.
Human interviewers run your technical loops so your engineers keep shipping.
A curated shortlist of vetted candidates delivered to your inbox each week.
Frontend, backend, full-stack, mobile, DevOps, and machine learning engineers.
Labelling and RLHF teams, the usual fit for the contractor model.
Technical SEO, content strategy, and link building specialists.
Attorneys and paralegals for visa and mobility casework.
Lifecycle, nurture, and outbound campaign specialists.
Researchers and sales development reps who fill your pipeline.
Managers and creators for organic and paid social.
A full product team of design, engineering, and QA assembled for your roadmap.
Employ people in new countries at $499 per employee per month, with no entity of your own.
Engage contractors worldwide without taking on misclassification risk.
Work visas and relocation handled end to end for the people you hire.
Device provisioning, access control, and security for distributed teams.
Recruit verified professionals for research interviews instead of hiring them.
Pay ranges by role, useful for estimating the base salary a placement fee is calculated on.
Compare levels and compensation bands across major technology companies.
Grade codes, bands, and promotion timelines at large IT services firms.
The question bank candidates use, worth reading before you design a loop.
Compensation benchmarks, levelling guides, and hiring market research.
Longer articles on recruiting, AI screening, and building hiring processes.
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Not sure which model fits? Book an intro call and we will size it against the roles you are hiring for.
