Blog
Arguments, not announcements
We ran hiring and HR for other companies for years before building software for it, which means most of what we have to say is about the buying, not the shipping. These posts make arguments and are dated. The guides answer tasks and are maintained as references. Where a post depends on detail, it links to the guide that carries it.
19 posts in four topics, published March to August 2026, all free to read in full. Each one runs six to eight minutes, so nothing here is a white paper in disguise.
Start here
One post to read first, if you read nothing else here. Not the most recent, deliberately: an argument about how this software is priced and sold does not expire on a schedule, and a list sorted by date would bury it.
Pricing and packaging
4 posts
How this category learned to charge for software it had already built, and how to read a pricing page that would rather you did not.
- What a free plan actually means Four different things are sold as a free plan, and only one of them is one. A test for what expires, what is withheld, and what happens to your data.
- How to read an HR pricing page Most HR pricing pages cannot answer what you will pay next year. A buyer's guide to minimums, billed headcount, module units, and what contact sales means.
- Feature gating is a tax on growing Tiered feature gating is a toll charged at the moment you grow. Where the pattern came from, and the one test that separates it from a fair price.
- The SSO tax Single sign-on is a security control, not a luxury, yet it is the classic top-tier upsell. Where the practice came from and how to price around it.
Buying HR software
6 posts
What to ask, what to test and what to ignore when you are choosing the system that will hold your people for the next five years.
- An HR system is a record of the past The questions that decide whether an HR system was worth it are all about dates that have already gone. Why effective dating is the thing to buy for.
- When payroll is the centre of the HR system A payroll engine with HR attached behaves differently from a record with payroll attached. What that changes for a company hiring in more than one country.
- Start your shortlist with the export Judge an HR vendor by its exit, not its demo. What a good export contains, what a bad one hides, and how to test the real thing during a two week trial.
- Build or buy your first HR system A spreadsheet is a legitimate first HR system. Here is exactly where it works, the four events that end it, and why buying too early has a real cost too.
- The real cost of switching HR systems The licence is the smallest line in a migration. Here is what data cleanup, a parallel run, retraining and rebuilt integrations actually cost, by company size.
- Twelve questions to ask a vendor Twelve questions any honest HR vendor can answer in a sentence, what a good answer and a bad answer sound like, and why an evasive reply is itself the finding.
HR across borders
5 posts
Contractors, entities, payroll partners and data residency, for teams whose second country arrived faster than their second HR hire.
- What breaks when you hire in a second country The second country is where a small company HR setup stops working. The seven things that go plural, the ones that quietly stay singular, and what to fix first.
- What a data region actually is Residency as a dropdown on a shared system is not the same as a region that is a genuine deployment boundary. What to ask a vendor, and why answers differ.
- Why payroll should be a partner Statutory payroll is a per-country, per-year moving target. Why the system of record and the system of computation belong apart, and what the split costs.
- Contractors are not cheap employees What classification tests look at, why the contract heading barely matters, what misclassification really costs, and why contractors need their own operations.
- How to sequence your first hires abroad Contractor first, employer of record next, your own entity last. The order that works for a small company, the signals to move on, and what each step costs.
Data, security and AI
4 posts
What a small company can actually promise about security, and what should never come from a model guessing.
- What we will not build A roadmap of refusals: the nine things Capstan does not do, the reason behind each one, and which are permanent positions rather than gaps waiting to be filled.
- The audit log is not an enterprise feature The record of what happened is written either way. Charging to read it bills a customer for evidence of what was done to their own data, when they need it most.
- The security questionnaire when you are twelve people How to answer an enterprise security questionnaire with no SOC 2, no ISO certificate and no security hire: name the controls you have, and name the gaps.
- What should never be a model's guess Machine learning is genuinely useful in HR software, and there is a line it must not cross. Where the line sits, and why determinism and contestability draw it.
How to follow this
There is no newsletter and no form on this page. This site holds no database and stores nothing about anybody, so an email list is not something we could offer without breaking the promise the rest of the site makes. The feed is the whole mechanism.
The feed
Every post, newest first, with its summary and a link. Paste it into any reader. The guides feed is separate and quieter, because a guide changes far less often than a new argument arrives.
Nineteen arguments about buying HR software. Ours is free to try.