◆ Compare · Vouch vs doing it yourself
The inbox, a spreadsheet, and increasingly a few GPT agents someone built on a quiet Sunday. It's the most common way to hire, and for a while it's genuinely the right answer. Here's where the seams show.
Last updated · 15 August 2026 · Written by the Vouch team
◆ Two categories, not two contenders
The same instincts, assembled into one system, with memory, and without you maintaining it.
Email, a tracking sheet, a folder of CVs, and prompts someone assembled themselves. Free, flexible, and entirely dependent on the person who set it up.
◆ Same moment, different posture
You need to hire. Last time was eight months ago, and you can't remember how you did it.
◆ What we built around
The teams running their own screening prompts are usually the sharpest people we talk to. They worked out what the job needs and built it, which is more than most buyers ever do. The argument isn't that you were wrong. It's that you're now maintaining recruitment software as a side project, and you didn't set out to do that.
Two things reliably break this setup: volume, somewhere around eighty applicants, and departure, when the person who built it leaves. Neither is a discipline problem you can fix by being more organised. The memory is in someone's head and the spreadsheet is a snapshot, so the moment either is stressed, the whole thing degrades at once.
Nobody in the room is a recruiter and nobody wants to become one. Vouch scopes the role from a conversation, screens every applicant against criteria you set, sits in the interviews and writes the notes, and makes sure everyone who applied gets an answer. You keep the decisions, which were always the part that needed you.
◆ Questions to ask yourself
Because you're maintaining them. Vouch does the same reading, but the criteria live next to the candidates, the evidence is attached to each verdict, and the results are in one place your colleagues can see without you forwarding anything. And it doesn't quietly break when something upstream changes. If you enjoy the tinkering, keep it, plenty of our customers still use their own tools alongside. The difference is you're no longer the only reason it works.
Honestly, AI screening isn't the main value at that volume, and we'd rather say so than oversell it. But the model suits low volume: the ATS is free, you pay only when the AI does work, and what you build this round is waiting for you next round. For occasional hiring the question isn't whether you need a powerful system, it's whether you want to set everything up from scratch every single time.
Not really, and we're not going to argue against network hiring, it works. Vouch is the thing that catches everything around it: the referral who wasn't right this time, the person who came recommended while you had nothing open, the applicant you liked but couldn't place. They stay on the record with the reasoning, and they come back up when something fits.
One role, and a few days. There's no migration project because there's usually nothing to migrate, and if you do have a spreadsheet we'll bring it in. Start free on the first 30 credits, run one opening end to end, and see whether the shortlist is better than the one you'd have built yourself.
This is the part that quietly costs you. Running hiring out of an inbox means most applicants get silence, and people talk about that. In Vouch everyone gets a real answer, personalised, in your own voice. 98.9% of our last 1000 candidates rated the application experience highly. It costs you nothing extra and it's how a small company earns a reputation worth having.
◆ Pricing posture
Public pricing. Starter free for life with 30 credits. Growth €249/mo, Scale €499/mo. Seats, roles, candidates and storage are unlimited; the only thing metered is AI work. Four things keep that from becoming a worry: AI can be switched off per workspace or per role, unused credits roll over up to 3× your monthly quota, auto top-up takes a monthly ceiling you set, and the price is on the site.
A spreadsheet is free and model access is cheap, so on paper this wins easily. The costs that don't appear on the invoice are the evenings spent reading, the roles that stay open longer, the candidates who go quiet, and the fact that one person is now the single point of failure for how you hire.
◆ What moving actually involves
This is the easiest switch we do, because there's rarely a system to leave. No contract to time it around, no vendor to notify, no data locked in someone else's tenancy.
◆ When each one fits
Your own tooling does something specific that matters to you. Keep it. There's a public API, signed webhooks and an embeddable apply flow, so your build can sit alongside Vouch instead of being torn out. The teams who wired their own agents together are usually the ones who get the most out of this, because they already know exactly what they want it to do.
"It feels less like a tool and more like an assistant that actually helps us hire."
Meet the founder
Building Vouch, the AI-native ATS for the Nordic recruiter.
Book a chat →Think we've been unfair to the spreadsheet? Tell us, hakon@vouch.careers. We'd rather be right than rhetorical.
