Why we built a free alternative to legacy job boards for bootstrapped founders

When you're bootstrapped, spending $400-800/month to test out an engineering or ops post on these platforms is a non-starter. You're stuck between a rock (legacy subscription-based job boards) and a hard place (agencies taking 20% of whoever you're hiring at's annual comp).

We wanted to build a solution that made founders' math work.

Here's how we approached building Online.jobs to fix the cost and triage problem experienced by lean operators:

Eliminate the Middleman Tax: Founders negotiate directly with candidates. No cuts to salary on the backs of your prospects and no recruitment agency fees.

Free Sourcing Runway: Every employer gets a free, forever initial posting to test the waters and see what kind of applicants are going to come their way with no financial obligation.

Solve the Triage Problem: Sourcing isn't the bottleneck anymore. It's sorting through the hundreds of applications that come in for you to do your own triage within 48 hours. We built a native applicant ranking that takes your job parameters and matches them against all the inbound applications to help you organize the Strong Matches and Needs Review buckets.

If you're hiring right now for a lean team, what's your current setup? Are you using traditional job boards, inbound forms, or direct-hire databases? Let's swap notes in the comments!