Somewhere sells two things. Only one of them competes with us.

At a glance

Somewhere (formerly Support Shepherd) runs two products. Direct Hire is a one-time recruiting fee, after which you employ the person yourself. Talent On-Demand is a managed monthly seat, and that is the line that does the same job we do, so the table tracks it. Their figures come from their pricing page and their two service pages, read on 17 September 2026.

Where Somewhere is the better choice

Start with the part their salespeople are right about. If you hire through Somewhere's Direct Hire line and that person stays three years, you will pay less than you would pay us. Not slightly less. A lot less.

Their Direct Hire page, read on 17 September 2026, prices the service at 25 to 35 percent of the new hire's first-year salary, charged once, after you hire, with the percentage coming down on volume. Take an accountant in Latin America at $30,000 a year, which is an ordinary number for that market.

Reach we cannot match

Somewhere recruits across 18 or more countries. Latin America, South Africa, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Egypt and Pakistan are all named on their Direct Hire page, with Colombia, Brazil, Portugal and Sri Lanka given as examples. We work in four places: the Philippines for assistants, Latin America and Eastern Europe for sales and operations, Kosovo for finance and accounting, and South Africa for sales.

If your role needs a language or a market outside that list, they can probably fill it and we probably cannot. That is a real reason to pick them and you should not let anyone talk you out of it.

Volume, and they publish it

Their pricing page claims more than 275 companies helped in the past month and over 5,000 in total. What we publish is a sample of recent work: 22 seats across four companies, DLN Medical, Unikat Home, AIM and Smooth Aligners. If a long client list is part of how you judge a supplier, theirs is longer than ours and it is not close.

The pay-on-hire framing on Direct Hire is also clean. You are not funding a monthly retainer for a recruiter who may never deliver. The invoice arrives when someone accepts your offer.

The core difference

Before you compare any prices, work out which Somewhere product you are being quoted. A buyer reads the $1,200 to $2,200 a month band on the Talent On-Demand page, assumes that is the managed service, and then finds the conversation has moved to a percentage of first-year salary. Both numbers are real. They belong to different purchases.

Direct Hire moves the employment problem to you

Their pricing page is straightforward about this. You become the employer. You run payroll, you handle compliance in whichever country the person sits in, you buy the laptop, you deal with local notice and termination rules. Somewhere's involvement ends when the person starts, apart from a six-month guarantee with one free replacement. A refundable deposit starts the search and is credited against the final invoice, and the amount is not published on their site (checked 17 September 2026).

For a company that already runs an entity or an employer of record in that country, this is fine. Adding a fourth person to a payroll you already operate is an afternoon of admin. For a fifteen-person US business hiring its first person in Colombia, it is a project.

Talent On-Demand keeps it, for six months at a time

The managed line is the same shape as ours. They contract the person, they pay them, you get an invoice. The price is quoted per role and seniority, with that published band for executive and virtual assistants. Their service page also sets a minimum engagement of six months, with renewals of any length afterwards, and prices a buy-out at 30 percent of annual salary if you later want the person on your own payroll.

We sell one product. A dedicated, full-time person we headhunt, contract and pay, on one flat monthly rate, working your hours. Month to month, billed in advance, 30 days' written notice to end it. There is no minimum term and no buy-out percentage. Our rates are on the pricing section and run from $2,400 a month for an executive or virtual assistant to from $2,800 a month for finance and accounting.

What you get for the money

Their published band for assistants starts at $1,200 a month. Ours starts at $2,400. That gap is real and we are not going to argue it away. What the gap buys is worth setting out, because a monthly number on its own tells you very little.

Counting the six months

A minimum term turns a monthly price into a contract value. At the bottom of their band, $1,200 a month across six months is $7,200 committed before you can stop. At the top, $2,200 a month is $13,200. If the role turns out to be wrong, or a funding round slips, or you work out in week three that you needed a bookkeeper rather than an assistant, that commitment is still sitting there.

With us the same mistake costs one month plus 30 days' notice. That is the whole exposure. It is also why we charge more: we carry the risk of you leaving, every month, and we have to keep earning the invoice.

Counting the buy-out

The 30 percent buy-out is the line most buyers never price in. If the person is good and you want them inside your own company in year two, that is 30 percent of their annual salary to Somewhere. On a $30,000 salary, $9,000. It is roughly the Direct Hire fee again, paid later, after a year of monthly invoices. Their service page publishes it, so it is not a surprise if you read that page, but it belongs in your spreadsheet on day one rather than in month fourteen.

What the monthly rate covers

On both sides the monthly figure is all-in: the person's compensation, payroll, admin, tooling and the provider's margin. On our side it also covers AI-tooling training before day one, including Claude Code, and an AI layer that captures how the seat is actually being done into a living playbook for that seat, then coaches the person on it every week. When someone moves on, the replacement inherits that playbook rather than starting from a blank page.

If you want to compare either option against a US hire instead of against each other, our cost calculator does the fully loaded arithmetic, including the parts of a US salary that never appear on the offer letter.

Speed, and who you actually meet

Somewhere quotes 10 to 20 days to hire on Talent On-Demand, with 10 days given as the standard. On Direct Hire they say candidates arrive within days, some placements have closed in as little as three days, and most clients finish hiring in under 21 days. That is a respectable recruiting timeline and it beats most agencies we have watched.

We publish a different pair of numbers. Three availability-confirmed candidates within 48 hours of the brief. On recent placements, 4 to 7 days from brief to first day of work. We define time to fill as brief to first day and we say so on the page, because plenty of companies quote time to shortlist and let the reader assume it means the same thing.

Who you can see before anyone calls you

Somewhere runs a public job board and a public salary calculator, both genuinely useful. What they do not run is a set of public candidate profiles; people come after a discovery call. The featured people on our front page are public, and their availability is re-confirmed every week, so what you are looking at is people who are actually free rather than people who were free in March.

Picture the week your bookkeeper resigns with two days' notice and the month-end close is nine days out. A 20-day process and a 4-day process are different experiences of that month. Neither number means anything if the person turns out not to be free to start, which is the reason we re-check availability weekly and put the date next to the name.

How your risk is covered

Somewhere's two products carry two guarantees, and the managed one is strong.

On Direct Hire, their pricing page publishes a six-month guarantee including one free replacement. Six months is a long window by the standards of this market, and we found only one company publishing a longer direct-hire window. The limit is the word one. After that replacement, the hire is entirely yours, which is the logic of the model rather than a flaw in it.

On Talent On-Demand they publish unlimited free replacements for the duration of the engagement. On its face that matches what we offer, and it is the strongest replacement language we found on any managed line other than our own. We would rather say that plainly than pretend we are alone out here.

What the promise is attached to

The difference is the period. Their engagement runs a minimum of six months, so the promise is unlimited replacements inside a term you cannot leave. Ours runs month to month, so the replacement promise and your right to walk sit next to each other. A provider who can be fired in 30 days has a sharper incentive to get the second attempt right than one who has your next five invoices already.

Our guarantee section publishes four conditions rather than leaving them to a terms page. The replacement is for the same role and scope. You need to have given the person defined work and written feedback. We need at least 10 working days before a request. And after three replacements either side can walk away on the standard 30 days' written notice. We would rather you read those four before you sign than meet them in month four.

One practical note on their paperwork. Their FAQ and terms-of-service paths both returned a 404 when we checked on 17 September 2026, which happens to plenty of sites. It does mean the public terms were not readable that day, so the commitment and notice language is whatever their service page says and whatever ends up in your contract. Ask for the notice period in writing on the call, from them and from us.

Which one should you pick?

Questions people ask when comparing

Sources and how this page was written

We read Somewhere's public pages ourselves on 17 September 2026 and quote what they publish, not what a third party says about them. We describe their claims rather than reproduce their copy. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. Our own numbers come from our pricing section and our published guarantee.

1. 01Somewhere pricing page, somewhere.com/pricing, read 17 September 2026
2. 02Somewhere Direct Hire service page, somewhere.com/services/direct-hire, read 17 September 2026
3. 03Somewhere Talent On-Demand service page, somewhere.com/services/talent-on-demand, read 17 September 2026
4. 04Contractanaut rates, replacement conditions and availability, contractanaut.com/#pricing, published 17 September 2026