Comparison
The bench marketplace alternative
When a project ends, skilled people sit on the bench — idle payroll you keep paying. A bench marketplace lets you rent them out for cash. A time exchange offers a different answer: circulate the capacity instead of selling it.
The bench problem
Utilization in service companies is uneven. Between engagements, teams have real capacity but no revenue against it. The instinct is to sell those hours — but publishing your bench signals to the market that you have people spare, and bench sales are bilateral deals, often carrying broker commissions or margins, and mostly confined to IT.
What bench marketplaces and body leasing offer
Bench-sales marketplaces, body leasing, staff augmentation, and outsourcing all sell people for money, bilaterally (vendor → client), and mostly in IT. The trade-offs:
- You publish availability — which reads as a signal of weakness to clients and competitors.
- Deals are two-sided; you need a buyer for exactly the skill you have spare, right now.
- Marketplace commissions or broker margins often sit between you and the counterparty.
- Coverage is mostly IT, so non-technical capacity has nowhere to go.
The exchange alternative
Hours is a multilateral B2B time exchange. Instead of renting a person out for cash, you contribute unused hours and receive Hours — a time credit you later spend on specialists from other companies. The differences, side by side:
| Bench marketplace / body leasing | Hours time exchange |
|---|---|
| Mostly IT | Any business competence |
| Rent people for money | Exchange time for time |
| Hourly rates | 1 hour = 1 Hour |
| Two-sided deals | Multilateral network |
| Sell your capacity | Circulate your capacity |
| Vendor and client | Members of the same exchange |
Anonymity until match
Offers are published without your company name — "available capacity" from a verified company of your category. Your identity is revealed only when you accept an interested member, so you never broadcast idle time to clients or competitors.
What your team gets
Varied work instead of idle time, and access to skills you'd otherwise have to buy — all without cash leaving the business. Cash-free is not accounting-free: exchanged services may still need documenting under your local rules, and the network keeps a full ledger of every settled exchange that you can use for your bookkeeping.