Is Tremendous or Trolley cheaper?

Tremendous starts at $0 to use the platform; you pay only the face value of what you send (free plan available). Trolley starts at $2,399 per year for the Pay module, plus per-transaction fees (free trial).

Tremendous vs Trolley

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Tremendous compared with Trolley

Both pay people who are not on payroll, at different scales. Trolley charges 2,399 dollars a year for its Pay module plus per-transaction fees around 1 to 4 euros, and gives you recipient onboarding, approval workflows, DAC7 and OECD tax reporting and 210-plus countries. Tremendous costs nothing up front but takes 4 to 6 percent on cash. Below a few thousand dollars a month in cash payouts Tremendous wins on simplicity and cost; above that Trolley's subscription plus flat fees becomes materially cheaper.

Trolley compared with Tremendous

Different scales of the same job. Tremendous costs nothing up front and takes 4 to 6 percent on cash payouts, which is ideal for small SPIFFs and prizes. Trolley costs 2,399 dollars a year plus roughly one to four euros a transfer, which is far cheaper per dollar once payouts are substantial. Crossover is around a few thousand dollars a month in cash payouts. Tremendous also offers gift cards, which Trolley does not, and Trolley offers verification and tax filing, which Tremendous mostly does not.

Choose Tremendous if

Any small business that pays out sales SPIFFs, contest prizes, referral fees, research incentives or one-off bonuses to people who are not on payroll, especially teams paying internationally or paying non-employees, and anyone who wants the payout rail to cost nothing until money actually moves.

Choose Trolley if

Companies paying commission, referral fees or revenue share to people who are not employees, especially across borders, where recipient onboarding, identity verification and tax reporting are as much of the problem as moving the money, and where volume justifies a low four-figure annual platform cost.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Tremendous	Trolley
Category	Commissions	Commissions
Starting price	$0 to use the platform; you pay only the face value of what you send (free plan available)	$2,399 per year for the Pay module, plus per-transaction fees (free trial)
Pricing model	Free platform with no subscription, seats or minimums. Revenue comes from reward margin, a surcharge on cash payout options, and a card funding fee.	Annual subscription per module, with per-transaction and per-statement fees on top, plus a currency conversion margin. Two plans: a published Standard and a sales-quoted Trolley Plus.
Free plan	The entire platform is free: sending, bulk upload, API, integrations, fraud prevention, tax tools and reporting, with no subscription, no seat count and no minimum spend.	No
Free trial	Not applicable; the platform is free to use and you fund it only when you want to send	A free trial is offered, with self-serve start on the Standard plan
Best for	Any small business that pays out sales SPIFFs, contest prizes, referral fees, research incentives or one-off bonuses to people who are not on payroll, especially teams paying internationally or paying non-employees, and anyone who wants the payout rail to cost nothing until money actually moves.	Companies paying commission, referral fees or revenue share to people who are not employees, especially across borders, where recipient onboarding, identity verification and tax reporting are as much of the problem as moving the money, and where volume justifies a low four-figure annual platform cost.
Setup time	Under an hour to send your first reward. Create an account, fund it by bank transfer, upload or enter recipients, send. API integration is a day or two of engineering depending on what triggers the payout.	A first payout run within a week if recipients are cooperative, most of which is waiting for them to complete onboarding and verification rather than anything you do. API and widget integration adds one to three weeks of engineering.
Learning curve	Minimal. The product is a dashboard, a spreadsheet upload and an API, and the only genuine decision is which reward types you want to make available to recipients and whether you are willing to absorb the cash surcharge.	Moderate on the finance side. The payment concepts are straightforward but the tax module requires understanding which reporting regime applies to your recipients, and that determination is not something the software makes for you.
Platforms	Web dashboard, REST API, Email and SMS delivery, Bulk link export	Web dashboard, REST API and SDKs, Embeddable iframe widget, CSV import, Native ERP integrations
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, Automatic W-9 collection and verification, 1099 preparation for US tax reporting	SOC 2 certified, IRS reporting for US-sourced payouts, DAC7 for EU sellers, OECD digital platform reporting
Founded	2010	2015
Headquarters	United States, with employees across three continents	Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with offices in Toronto, Halifax, London, Miami, San Francisco, Singapore and Vilnius
Ownership	Founder and employee owned, profitable, and explicitly VC-free after buying out its original investors in 2013	Venture-backed and privately held

Strengths and limitations

Tremendous

Strengths

Free to use with no subscription, no seats and no minimum, which removes every procurement obstacle for a small company.
Recipient choice across 2,500-plus gift cards, prepaid Visa, cash to five-plus rails and charity, which is what makes an incentive feel like a reward rather than an obligation.
200-plus countries with automatic currency conversion and translation, so paying an overseas rep or partner is the same workflow as paying a local one.
Automatic W-9 collection and 1099 preparation, which quietly fixes the compliance problem that informal prize programs create.

Limitations

It calculates nothing. No commission plan, no quota, no accelerator, no split, no clawback, no rep statement, no CRM integration and no audit trail tying a payout to the deal that earned it.
The 4 to 6 percent fee on cash options is the entire business model and becomes expensive at volume; it is not disclosed as loudly as the word free.
There is no approval workflow designed for finance, so controlling who can send how much rests on account access rather than on a multi-level sign-off chain.
Reward balances sit with Tremendous once funded, which is a cash management and counterparty consideration a careful CFO will want to size.

Trolley

Strengths

Published module pricing with a self-serve free trial, which is rare among global payout platforms where the norm is a demo and a quote.
Recipient self-onboarding with white-label communications and an embeddable widget removes the single most tedious part of paying non-employees.
Tax handling across IRS, DAC7 and OECD digital platform reporting, with more than 1.2 million statements filed across 210 countries as evidence it works at scale.
Flat per-transaction pricing of roughly one to four euros on local rails, which is dramatically cheaper than percentage-based alternatives at meaningful payout values.

Limitations

It calculates nothing. No plan designer, no quota, no accelerator, no split, no clawback and no rep statement; the amount owed has to be determined elsewhere.
The module structure fragments the price, and a realistic configuration of Pay, Tax and Trust approaches 6,000 dollars a year before a single transaction fee.
The Standard plan covers only one tax jurisdiction, which pushes genuinely international programmes into a sales-quoted tier quickly.
Annual billing only, with no monthly option, so the commitment is a year regardless of how the trial goes.

Pricing compared

Tremendous

Free platform with no subscription, seats or minimums. Revenue comes from reward margin, a surcharge on cash payout options, and a card funding fee.

Standard$0
High volume (200,000 dollars-plus annually)$0 platform fee

For its actual job, this is close to unbeatable value: a global payout rail with tax handling, fraud controls, an API and SOC 2 Type II, at no platform cost. The comparison is not against commission software, which does something else entirely, but against buying gift cards manually or setting up international wires, both of which cost more in time and neither of which produces a record. The only place the economics turn against you is high-volume cash payouts, where 4 to 6 percent on every dollar eventually exceeds what a dedicated payout provider like Trolley charges on a subscription plus flat per-transaction basis. Below roughly 50,000 dollars a year in cash sending, Tremendous is cheaper and simpler; above it, run the arithmetic.

Trolley

Annual subscription per module, with per-transaction and per-statement fees on top, plus a currency conversion margin. Two plans: a published Standard and a sales-quoted Trolley Plus.

Standard$2,399 per year for Pay, plus optional modules
Trolley PlusCustom

Trolley is priced for a company with a real payout operation, not for one sending a few partner cheques. Below roughly 50,000 dollars a year in partner payments, the platform fees dominate and Wise Business or Tremendous will be cheaper. Above that, the arithmetic flips hard: flat per-transaction fees of one to four euros beat percentage-based rails, and the value of automated recipient onboarding, identity verification and tax filing is difficult to overstate for anyone who has done it manually. The thing to model carefully is the 2 percent FX margin, which on a genuinely international programme can exceed every subscription line combined. Judged as payout infrastructure it is fairly priced and unusually transparent; judged as anything to do with calculating commission it is not in the running, because it does not attempt it.

Editorial verdict on each

Tremendous

Innovation

Tremendous is the right answer to a question most commission software does not ask: how do you actually get a 250 dollar SPIFF into a rep's hands, in the country they live in, with a record your accountant will accept, without paying for the privilege. It costs nothing to adopt, works at five people and at five thousand, and the recipient choosing their own reward is the detail that makes an incentive feel like one. Be equally clear about what it is not. It calculates nothing, connects to no CRM, has no plan logic and no audit trail linking payment to performance, so a buyer shopping for commission software should treat it as a companion purchase rather than a candidate. Watch the 4 to 6 percent cash fee if your program is large and cash-heavy. Otherwise, there is very little reason for any small business paying out incentives not to have an account.

Read the full Tremendous profile

Trolley

Trolley is the right tool for a specific and underserved problem: paying variable compensation to people your payroll cannot reach. Recipient self-onboarding, identity verification, tax filing across IRS, DAC7 and OECD regimes, approval workflows and flat per-transaction pricing on local rails add up to something a bank login and a spreadsheet cannot approximate, and the published module pricing plus a self-serve trial is more transparency than this corner of fintech usually offers. Be clear-eyed about the cost shape. The advertised 2,399 dollars covers payments only, a realistic configuration approaches 6,000 dollars a year, the Standard tier is limited to one tax jurisdiction, and the 2 percent FX margin can quietly exceed all of it. And be absolutely clear that Trolley calculates nothing. Pair it with a commission tool that produces the number, and it will get that number to a partner in almost any country with a record you can defend.

Read the full Trolley profile

Tremendous profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Trolley last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.