GuavaHR: The HR System You Buy Once Instead of Renting Per Employee
The same records, leave, attendance, payroll, recruitment and appraisals as the big HR platforms, set up once, owned by you, and running on a ~$28/month server instead of a per-head subscription that never stops.
Every mainstream HR platform is rented, and it is rented by the head. BambooHR lists Core at $10, Pro at $17 and Elite at $25 per employee per month, with a flat rate starting at $250/month for teams of 25 or fewer. Workday is enterprise-only and custom-quoted well into five figures a year. Every person you hire is another line on the invoice, forever, and at the end you own nothing.
GuavaHR is the opposite model. WhiteGuava sets it up on your own cloud, configures it to your leave rules, pay structures and approval chains, hands it over, and then it is yours: no per-employee licence, no renewal, and the only ongoing cost is roughly $28 a month for the server. It covers the whole employee lifecycle, records and documents, onboarding and offboarding checklists, leave and holiday policies, attendance and shifts, expense claims, payroll with salary structures and bank files, recruitment, appraisals and goals, employee self-service, and HR analytics, plus an AI assistant built directly in.
HR software is priced per employee, the one number that only goes up. GuavaHR is a one-time setup, then about $28/month for the server (roughly $1,700 over five years), flat regardless of headcount. It covers records, onboarding, leave, attendance, payroll, recruitment and appraisals, with the AI assistant included rather than gated to an upper tier.
What per-employee HR pricing is really charging you for
The core feature set of an HRMS is mature and broadly the same everywhere. What the per-head price rents is the hosting, the vendor’s margin, the support organisation, and the right to keep your own people data accessible next month. Stop paying and access ends, even though every record in there is about your staff.
Per-employee pricing also compounds badly. A growing team crosses a plan’s minimum, then its next tier, and a busy hiring quarter shows up as a bigger renewal. Payroll is frequently a separate product or a per-employee add-on. And the AI assistant, the one feature everyone now wants, sits in the upper tier on BambooHR and Zoho alike.
Every plan, side by side
This is the price ladder for a 10-person team at list price, annual billing, before tax. The final column divides each annual total by GuavaHR’s ~$400/year server-and-AI cost, and the gap widens with every hire.
| Plan | Per employee / mo | 10 people / year | AI assistant | vs GuavaHR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GuavaHR (self-hosted) | N/A | ~$400 | Built in (~$3–5/mo usage) | N/A |
| Zoho People · Professional | $4.50 | $540 | Zia (higher tiers) | 1.4× |
| BambooHR · Core | $10 | $1,200 | No | 3× |
| Rippling · HR | ~$10 | $1,200 | Partial | 3× |
| BambooHR · Pro | $17 | $2,040 | Ask BambooHR | 5× |
| BambooHR · Elite | $25 | $3,000 | Partial | 8× |
| Workday · small deployment (est.) | N/A | ~$35,000 | Partial | 88× |
At 10 people the cheapest paid option is close on price, but it has no payroll, no AI, and its bill scales with your headcount while GuavaHR’s does not. Run the calculator at 50 or 100 people to see the real divergence.
How GuavaHR fits together
Every module in GuavaHR writes to a single employee master and a policy engine that knows your leave rules, approval limits and pay structures. Book leave once and the balance, the manager’s approval queue, the attendance record and payroll all move together. The diagram shows the layers.
Everything GuavaHR does out of the box
Every module below is part of GuavaHR from day one, including payroll, which most platforms sell separately. Explore what each one covers, then check the feature matrix for the tier or add-on that charges for it elsewhere.
Hire to exit, working
This is the full employee lifecycle in GuavaHR. Every stage writes to the same employee record, so an offer becomes an employee becomes a payslip with nothing re-keyed.
What renting BambooHR, Workday or Rippling will never give you
Feature lists converge. What separates an owned HR system from a rented one is structural, where the most sensitive data your company holds actually lives, and whether the price moves when you grow.
The AI is built in, not an "Ask HR" upgrade
WhiteGuava adds the AI features an HR team actually uses straight onto GuavaHR as a custom module:
- Draft with AI, writes offer letters, policy answers and appraisal summaries from the employee’s own record and your policy set.
- Summarize, condenses a long employee history or a full appraisal cycle into a few lines for a manager or HR partner.
- Ask AI, answers plain-English questions like leave balances, who is off this week, or headcount by team, only within the asker’s HR permissions.
- Screening assist, ranks and shortlists applicants against a role, with the reasoning shown for a recruiter to check.
BambooHR gates its assistant to Pro; Zoho gates Zia to its upper tiers. Because GuavaHR’s source is yours, the assistant is just a feature, priced at what the API costs, not what a vendor can charge for it.
GuavaHR is one of ten applications in the Guava Product Suite, the same buy-once, own-it model applied to accounting and operations, staff training and project work.
Who GuavaHR is built for
GuavaHR is the right call for teams that want to own the system their people data lives in:
- Growing companies, 20 to 500 people, that do not want the HR bill to rise every time they hire.
- Businesses that must be able to say exactly where employee data is stored and who can reach it.
- Teams that want records, leave, attendance and payroll in one system instead of three subscriptions and a spreadsheet.
- Companies with leave rules, pay structures or statutory requirements that generic HR products cannot quite express.
- Anyone who has priced five years of per-employee HR software against their hiring plan.
How you get GuavaHR
It is a one-time engagement, not a subscription:
- WhiteGuava deploys GuavaHR on your cloud account (Azure, AWS or your choice), branded for your business.
- We set up your leave types and accrual rules, holiday calendars, salary structures, approval chains, appraisal cycles and roles, import your employee master, and switch on the AI module.
- We hand over full admin access, the database and documentation. From that point the software is yours.
- Ongoing, you pay only for the server, around $28 a month, plus a few dollars of AI usage. Support and future changes are optional.
BambooHR Pro for a 30-person team: roughly $30,000 over five years, rented, and rising as you hire. GuavaHR: a one-time setup, then about $1,700 in server cost over the same five years, flat regardless of headcount.
Want an HR system your company owns outright?
WhiteGuava sets up GuavaHR on your cloud, configures your policies and payroll, imports your employee master, switches on the AI, and hands it over. One-time setup, then about $28 a month with no per-employee fees.
Get a GuavaHR quoteMore from WhiteGuava
Frequently Asked Questions
Let's Build Something Intelligent.
Have an idea, workflow, or business problem you'd like to solve?
Tell us what you're working on and we'll get back to you.