Hi everyone! 👋 I've been lurking here for a bit and finally decided to post. I'm a sales ops analyst at a mid-sized SaaS company, and we're currently evaluating Braintrust against a couple of other talent platforms. I'm personally really excited about the model—the fact that it's talent-owned and the lower fee structure seems fantastic.
My manager, however, is skeptical. He's asked me to build a business case showing a clear ROI, but I'm struggling to move beyond the high-level value props. He wants concrete, bottom-line examples. He keeps asking, "What's the *actual* savings or efficiency gain, and can we measure it?"
Has anyone here successfully built this case for their finance or leadership team? I'd love to hear specifics.
For example:
* Did you compare a specific project cost using a traditional agency vs. Braintrust? What were the numbers?
* Have you measured a reduction in time-to-hire for critical freelance roles? By how many days/weeks?
* Beyond the direct fee savings, were there tangible impacts on project speed or quality that we could translate into business value?
Any real-world examples or even a framework you used would be a huge help. I want to show this isn't just a "nice-to-have" but a real operational upgrade for our contingent hiring.
Thanks!
Totally get where your manager's coming from. The fee difference is easy, but you need to tie it to operational metrics he cares about.
One client I worked with tracked the "project start latency" for a data engineering contract. Their usual agency took 3 weeks from scoping to having someone writing code. On Braintrust, they had a qualified candidate interviewing in 48 hours and started the project within a week. The 2-week savings on a 12-week project meant they met a critical reporting deadline for a board meeting - which had a real, if indirect, revenue impact.
For your business case, don't just compare hourly rates. Frame it as "cost of vacancy" for those critical freelance roles. If a missing marketing automation specialist delays a campaign launch by two weeks, what's the opportunity cost of that delayed pipeline? Sometimes the faster time-to-hire is the bigger ROI than the fee itself.
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I get it, the move from high-level value to hard numbers is the toughest part.
One angle that worked for me was comparing the fully-loaded cost of a typical project, not just the hourly rate. With our previous agency, we had a 30% platform fee, then a project management fee on top. That 30% was the advertised rate, but the true cost was closer to 40-45%. Breaking down a real project's invoice line by line to show the "fee on fee" structure was eye-opening for my boss.
The other concrete metric we used was "time-to-productivity." For a specialized dev we hired, the agency candidate took almost two weeks to get fully onboarded and pushing meaningful code. The Braintrust contractor was contributing in under three days. How would you quantify the value of an extra 7-10 productive days on a tight project?
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Oh, you want concrete numbers? Let's get concrete, then. Everyone in these threads gets excited about "time-to-productivity" and "cost of vacancy" until you actually have to measure them for a finance team.
First, that "lower fee structure" - have you modeled what happens when you need to replace someone mid-project on Braintrust? The platforms with big markups often eat that cost. With a talent-owned model, that risk and cost shifts directly to you. Your manager's skepticism is warranted; you need to compare total project cost, not hourly rates. Run a scenario: take a past 3-month data engineering contract, apply Braintrust's rates and fees, then add a 20% contingency for replacement risk and your own internal management overhead that the agency previously handled. That's your real baseline.
Second, measuring "reduction in time-to-hire" is a trap. You can't prove the counterfactual. The agency might have had someone in 48 hours too, if you'd paid their premium for a rush placement. The business value isn't in the days saved, it's in whether the project outcome changes. Did the campaign launch earlier because of the freelancer, or was it waiting on five other dependencies? You need a controlled comparison, which you'll never have.
Show him the fee savings on paper, sure. But then show him the line items for your own team's time managing the relationship, the cost of any vetting you now have to do internally, and the potential downtime between contracts. If the net number is still green, you've got a case. If not, you just proved his point.
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