Hiring guides
BPO, freelancer platform, or direct hire? Picking your route to offshore support
The three ways UK startups actually get a Philippines-based support rep, what each genuinely costs, and the question that decides it: who owns the relationship?
The Adarna Team
Editors
Once a founder decides the next support hire should be Philippines-based, the next decision is the one that actually shapes the outcome, and it's usually made by accident. There are three real routes: rent a seat from an outsourcing firm, find a freelancer on a marketplace, or hire someone directly. Each is the right answer for somebody. Most content on this subject is written by a company selling one of the three, so before we get to ours (we sell the third), here is the honest map.
Route one: the BPO seat
Business process outsourcing is the classic route: you sign with a firm in Manila or Cebu, they staff your queue, manage the people, and send one invoice. It genuinely shines in two situations: you need ten seats, not one, or you need coverage without wanting any part of managing it. The trade-offs are structural. You pay roughly 1.5–2× what the agent earns, forever. The agent works for the BPO, not for you, so the product knowledge, the customer relationships, and the person can be rotated onto another account without your say. And quality control happens through an account manager, one step removed from the person talking to your customers.
Route two: the freelancer platform
Marketplaces (OnlineJobs.ph, Upwork and cousins) are the cheapest ticket in, and for a five-hour-a-week task-based role they are hard to beat. For a full-time seat on your support queue, the economics look better than they behave. The vetting is entirely on you: the profile says "excellent written English" and the evidence is a star rating from a client with different standards. Screening two hundred applications to interview eight is a real week of founder time, and the false-pass cost lands three months later, in your churn numbers. The platform also keeps no one accountable when it goes wrong: no replacement, no recourse, next candidate.
Who owns the relationship with the person answering your customers? If the answer is "a vendor", you have bought coverage. If the answer is "we do", you have made a hire.
Route three: the direct hire
Direct hire means the person works for you: your tools, your standards, your culture, your 1:1s, at the market rate they actually earn, with no perpetual middleman margin. It is what the BPO agent usually wishes they had, which is why direct roles attract the strongest candidates. The honest cost is in the finding: sourcing, assessing written English and judgement properly, checking references, and getting the engagement terms right. You can absorb that yourself, or pay a structured recruiter a one-off fee to do it, which is the gap Adarna exists to fill: assessment-first search, three vetted candidates in ten working days,£3,899 all-in with the Search Deposit refunded if you don't hire.
| BPO seat | Freelancer platform | Direct hire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £1,500 – £2,200 | £500 – £900 | £800 – £1,100 |
| One-off cost | Setup fee, varies | Your screening time | Placement fee (or your time) |
| Who vets | The BPO | You | The recruiter (evidence shared) |
| Who manages | Account manager | You | You |
| Agent works for | The BPO | Themselves | You |
| If it doesn't work out | Seat re-staffed | Start again | Replacement guarantee |
| Best when | 10+ seats, hands-off | Part-time, task-based | 1–5 seats you want to keep |
How to choose in one minute
- You need a whole team yesterday and don't want to manage it → BPO. Accept the margin as the price of hands-off.
- You need ten flexible hours a week of task work → freelancer platform. Keep expectations task-shaped.
- You need one to five people who learn your product, stay, and get better every quarter → hire directly, and decide only whether you do the finding or pay someone who has built the assessment machinery to do it for you.
The pattern we see repeatedly: startups begin with a freelancer, get burned or outgrow it, price a BPO, flinch at the margin, and land on direct hiring, usually a year later than they'd choose to in hindsight. Whichever route you take, take it deliberately. The seat you're filling talks to your customers all day; it is a strange one to leave to accident.