If you’ve ever sat across the table from an HR technology consultant and watched a quote for a “simple” integration climb past $20,000 you already understand why Koluit exists.
That moment has happened to a lot of HR teams at small and mid-sized companies. You know what you need. You know it’s technically possible. But the cost to get there is completely disconnected from the actual size of the problem. So you leave the meeting without the integration, go back to the manual workaround, and file the idea away under “maybe next year.”
We started Koluit because that experience is too common and it no longer has to be.
The Problem with HR Tech for Smaller Companies
Enterprise HR software has never been built with small and mid-sized businesses in mind. The platforms are designed to justify six-figure contracts to Fortune 500 procurement teams, and the consulting ecosystem that surrounds them prices accordingly.
The numbers tell the story clearly. Implementation fees alone can range from $3,000 to $75,000 depending on company size and complexity and that’s before any custom integration work. When you add custom integrations, HRIS consultants typically bill between $150 and $350+ per hour, with project-based HR outsourcing engagements ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 or more. For a company with 50 or 500 employees, those numbers aren’t just expensive they’re a closed door.
The result: companies with 20, 50, or 500 employees are forced to choose between overpaying for tools they can’t fully use, settling for basic software that doesn’t actually fit how they work, or doing without entirely.
For HR teams that are already stretched or companies that don’t have a dedicated HR team at all this isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a real operational cost. Every manual workaround, every spreadsheet substituting for a proper system, every process that falls through the cracks because nobody could afford to build the right fix that’s time, accuracy, and energy that doesn’t come back.
The worst part? The gap between “what’s possible” and “what we can afford” has nothing to do with technical complexity. It has to do with how HR tech has been priced and delivered.
What Changed and Why Now Is Different
AI-assisted development has fundamentally changed what it costs to build software.
What used to require a team of developers, a lengthy scoping process, and a significant consulting budget can now be built faster, leaner, and at a fraction of the cost when the right expertise is guiding the process.
This is the shift that made Koluit possible. Coming from a background in HR operations and HRIS management, the problems were always clear. The barrier was always cost. When AI coding tools made it possible to build real, functional HR applications without the traditional overhead, the equation changed.
We didn’t need to build like a big consulting firm. We needed to build like an HR team that actually understood the problem and now we had the tools to do it affordably.
That’s Koluit: the expertise of someone who has lived inside HR systems, combined with the efficiency of AI-assisted development, delivered at a price that makes sense for companies that aren’t Workday’s target customer.
A Real Example: Bulk One-Time Payments
Here’s the kind of problem Koluit was built to solve.
If your HRIS supports one-time payments bonuses, spot awards, reimbursements, stipends there’s a good chance you’re processing them one employee at a time. Or you’re wrestling with a clunky import file that only HR administrators know how to format correctly, hoping nothing breaks in the upload.
For a single payment to a single employee, that’s annoying. For a round of spot bonuses to 40 employees, it’s a time sink. For a quarterly reimbursement run across departments, it becomes a genuine operational bottleneck.
Koluit built an application that solves exactly this: a clean, simple tool that lets you bulk upload one-time payments for any group of employees in a single action. No clunky import formatting headaches. No one-at-a-time processing. No need to route it through an HR administrator just to get the file right. HR teams and managers can get payments queued and processed the way the work actually flows — not the way the software vendor imagined it might.
This is what purpose-built HR tools look like. Not a workaround. Not a feature request sitting in a vendor’s backlog for two years. A tool that solves the actual problem, built the way you’d build it if you’d ever actually done the job.
What We Solve and Who We Serve
Koluit works with two kinds of organizations:
Small companies with little or no dedicated HR team. You need systems that work out of the box, without requiring an HR administrator to maintain them. You need solutions built around how your company actually operates not how a software vendor imagined a generic company might operate.
Small and mid-sized companies with lean HR technology resources. You have an HRIS. You know what it can’t do. And every time you’ve explored closing that gap, the price tag has ended the conversation. That’s exactly where Koluit works.
We build and deliver:
- Prebuilt HR applications – ready-to-use tools built for common problems: bulk payment processing, HR AI agents, integrations, reporting dashboards, onboarding workflows, employee self-service portals, and more.
- Custom HR applications – built around your specific processes, your existing systems, and your team’s actual needs.
- Consulting and implementation support – because building the tool is only half the job. We help you configure it, integrate it, and make sure it actually works the way your team needs it to.
We’re not a faceless software vendor. We’re not a traditional consulting firm that bills by the hour for every question. We’re a boutique team that combines deep HR practitioner experience with modern AI-powered development and we work with you, not around you.
What “Boutique” Actually Means and How We Keep Costs Low
Boutique is a word that gets used loosely in consulting. Here’s what it means at Koluit.
We know your situation, not a category your company fits into. When you bring us a problem, you’re not getting a templated response from a team that cycles through clients. You’re getting someone who has managed HR systems firsthand who has dealt with the same integration headaches, the same vendor limitations, the same budget conversations and who will give you a straight answer about what to build, what to buy, and what to skip.
One thing worth being upfront about: Koluit is a side project, built and run during nights and weekends. That’s intentional it keeps overhead low and those savings pass directly to clients. The flexibility in how we operate is the flexibility in what we charge. You’re not paying for a downtown office or a sales team. You’re paying for the work, done well, by someone who has actually done it before.
We use AI to build faster and smarter than traditional development shops. That efficiency, combined with a lean operating model, is why our pricing looks different from what you’ve been quoted before.
Why We’re Doing This
The HR technology market isn’t short on vendors. It’s short on solutions that actually work for companies that aren’t enterprise-scale.
The belief behind Koluit is straightforward: access to good HR technology shouldn’t require an enterprise budget. Small and mid-sized companies deserve tools that fit how they work — built by people who understand HR, priced for organizations that are growing, not already arrived.
That’s what we’re building. If you’re curious what that could look like for your team, we’d love to hear from you.