Payments, compliance
and the freelance market
Notes from operating a US merchant of record. Written for developers and agencies outside the United States, with no sales pitch in the answers — where a different tool fits better than ours, we say so.
How to read a payout fee honestly
Every platform that pays freelancers publishes a percentage. Very few of them are lying, and very few of those percentages tell you what you will receive. The gap is not deception — it is that a payout has three costs and only one of them is advertised.
Read the article→What a merchant of record is not
MoR gets confused with employer of record, with payment processing, and occasionally with tax avoidance. Clearing that up is most of understanding whether you need one.
Stablecoin payouts: where they genuinely help, and where they are the wrong tool
USDT settles in minutes and works where correspondent banking does not. It is also the wrong answer in the EU, the UK and the US — for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.
Why US clients refuse foreign vendors — and what actually changes their mind
The objection is almost never about you. It is about a vendor-onboarding process built for domestic suppliers, and there are only three ways past it.
Practical guides
A working method for freelancers and small dev teams outside the United States: invoice US clients through a US merchant of record, with a W-9 the client can file, and no foreign entity of your own.
A plain explanation of the two IRS forms that appear in every US freelance contract, who signs which one, and why your client keeps asking for the one you cannot provide.
The realistic options for receiving US-dollar payments as a developer outside the United States — direct wire, payment platforms, marketplaces and merchant-of-record invoicing — and what each one actually costs you.
MoR and EOR sound similar and solve different problems. One issues invoices on your behalf; the other employs people on someone else's behalf. Picking the wrong one is expensive.
Why US procurement teams refuse foreign vendors, what they are actually worried about, and the three ways to get the contract anyway.
Wise, Payoneer, Deel, Ruul, Abillio, Useme and merchant-of-record invoicing: what each is built for, what it does not do, and how to tell which one fits your situation.
Marketplace payouts, multi-currency wallets, US virtual accounts and merchant-of-record invoicing are four different kinds of system solving four different problems. How to tell which problem is yours, and how to compare the real cost of each.
US clients prefer ACH because it is cheap, domestic and already wired into their accounting. The routes a freelancer outside the US has to be payable that way — and what each route looks like from the client's side.
For the US side of the deal: what paying a foreign contractor actually requires, which parts of the friction are real, and how paying a US merchant of record instead turns the purchase into a domestic one.