BandStack
Pave Assumes You Have a Comp Analyst. BandStack Assumes You Are Doing This Yourself.
Built for the Head of People, ops lead, or finance person who sets salary bands alone, with no survey budget and a board presentation coming up.
Get defensible salary bands in one day
If BandStack doesn't cut your comp prep time by at least 75%, you get a full refund.
Every startup compensation benchmarking tool on the market was built for a company that already has a comp analyst. Pave connects to your equity management system and layers comp philosophy onto a dataset your HR team maintains. Carta Total Comp runs on structured headcount data your recruiter ops team keeps current. These products do their job. They were built for a company with ten more people in it than yours.
At a 25-person Series A company, the person running compensation is the Head of People who also runs recruiting, onboarding, and the employee handbook. Sometimes it's the CFO. Sometimes it's the ops lead who inherited the role. That person does not have time to learn a comp platform. They have three weeks before the board meeting and a spreadsheet with data pulled from four websites, none of which agree with each other.
Setting salary bands by hand produces an output that can't be defended when someone asks how you arrived at the numbers. When your board asks how you landed on $175K for a Senior Software Engineer in Austin, the honest answer is "LinkedIn and a recruiter's gut feel." That answer holds until you lose an offer because a candidate has Levels.fyi open on their phone. Until you have to explain a $40K intra-band spread to an employee who found out what their peer makes.
The Four-Website Comp Benchmark and Why It Breaks in the Board Room
People ops leads setting salary bands without Radford or Mercer typically spend 30–40 hours per comp cycle. They pull from Levels.fyi for tech roles, download the LinkedIn Salary report, email three recruiters, check Glassdoor, and build a spreadsheet with a confidence column. They present it to leadership and get one question: "How do we know this is right?"
The methodology isn't reproducible. The percentile targets aren't defined. The geographic adjustments are guesses. The board approves it because there's no alternative, but the bands don't hold. A junior engineer negotiates to the midpoint of a senior band because the recruiter quoted a range without knowing the philosophy behind it. A CS lead resigns after discovering she's making $20K less than a peer at the same level.
Accessing the surveys that fix this costs $15,000 to $50,000 a year. Compensation benchmarking without a consultant engagement starts at $5,000 per project. Both are priced for a company with an HR team that runs comp reviews quarterly.
Introducing BandStack
BandStack puts curated market data, a role-and-level structure, and a board-ready methodology summary in the hands of the one person at your company who sets comp. It covers the roles and levels that exist at seed-through-Series-B startups, lets you set a percentile target and compensation philosophy, and outputs salary bands with the methodology behind them — formatted for your board, your recruiter, and any candidate who asks.
What You Get — From $299
60+ Startup Roles, Leveled the Way Startups Actually Level — Pre-built comp structures across engineering, product, design, GTM, and G&A, organized from IC1 through Staff and M1 through VP. Matches how startups title and level people, not how enterprise HR systems classify them.
Curated Market Data by Stage and Geography — Salary percentiles (25th, 50th, 75th) from recent public surveys, aggregated offer data, and job postings, segmented by funding stage and metro vs. remote. Updated quarterly.
Salary Band Builder — Input your target percentile for each function. Get a band (min, mid, max) for every role and level in your org. Adjust the percentile target or geographic inputs and the bands recalculate.
Methodology Export — A one-page summary of your data sources, percentile anchors, and geographic adjustments. Formatted to present to a board, explain to a candidate, or hand to a future comp analyst who needs to understand how the bands were set.
Existing Salary Audit — Upload your current headcount and salaries. BandStack shows who sits below the 25th percentile, who sits above the 75th, and where you have compression between levels. See the equity problems before they show up in exit interviews.
Offer Range Lookup — When recruiting asks for the range on a new role, pull it from the same bands you set during comp review. The number a recruiter quotes on a call matches the number in the offer letter.
Annual Comp Cycle Checklist — Step-by-step guidance for running a full comp review: when to pull data, how to present ranges to leadership, how to communicate changes to employees. Written for a team of one.
Why $299 (or $599/year)
A single-cycle license costs $299. An annual license, which includes quarterly data updates and year-round access to offer range lookups, costs $599. The alternative is 35 hours of manual benchmarking work at your hourly rate, a survey subscription priced for a Fortune 500 HR team, or a comp consultant engagement starting at $5,000. BandStack is priced to be a no-friction decision for a Head of People at a company that has never bought a comp tool before.
Who This Is For
You're the only person at your company who touches compensation decisions, and that worked fine until the board started asking questions.
You've been asked to present updated salary bands and your current answer involves a spreadsheet you are not fully confident in.
You are recruiting for roles where candidates arrive with Levels.fyi data and you don't know whether your ranges hold up.
You've had an employee raise a pay equity concern and had no structured methodology to point to.
You want to set salary bands once, maintain them as the company grows, and stop rebuilding the spreadsheet from scratch each year.
The BandStack Benchmark Guarantee
If BandStack doesn't cut your compensation benchmarking prep time by at least 75% compared to your previous process, contact us within 30 days of your first comp cycle and we'll refund your full purchase. No forms required.
In One Comp Cycle, You'll Have:
- Salary bands covering every role and level in your current org
- A percentile-anchored methodology you can explain to your board, your recruiter, and your candidates
- An audit showing where current salaries sit relative to the market bands
- A process for running the next comp review without starting from scratch
- Offer ranges your recruiting team can quote with confidence
- A one-page methodology summary ready for board presentation
Frequently Asked Questions
How does BandStack compare to setting salary bands without Radford or other enterprise surveys?
Radford and Mercer charge $15,000–$50,000/year to access the survey data behind enterprise comp benchmarks. BandStack sources from the same public surveys and offer datasets used to benchmark startup roles, packages them by stage and function, and makes them usable for a single person running a comp cycle. You won't get the same depth of data cuts as a full Radford license, but you'll get defensible percentile data for the roles that matter at your stage.
Is BandStack a BambooHR alternative for running compensation bands?
BambooHR handles HR records, onboarding, and time-off tracking. Its compensation features let you log what employees are paid, but it doesn't benchmark against market data or generate salary band structures. BandStack covers the benchmarking step — setting the ranges in the first place — and exports clean data you can paste into whatever HR system you already use.
How long does it take to run a full comp cycle with BandStack?
Most customers complete their full benchmarking cycle — selecting roles, setting percentile targets, running the salary audit, and exporting the methodology summary — in four to six hours. The manual approach typically takes three to five weeks when you factor in data gathering, spreadsheet building, and presenting draft bands to leadership for revision.
What if my company has roles that aren't in the library?
The library covers 60+ common startup roles. For roles that don't map cleanly, BandStack includes a custom role builder that lets you define the function, scope, and level, then pulls the closest market data match and flags the confidence level. For highly specialized roles, the library notes where the data is thinner and what additional sources to check.
What it is: A startup compensation benchmarking tool that produces salary bands by role and level using curated market data — sized for companies without a comp analyst.
What you get: Role and level library, market data by stage and geography, salary band builder, methodology export, salary audit, offer range lookup, and annual comp cycle checklist.
Price: $299 single cycle or $599/year
Catch: The data covers common startup roles at seed through Series B. Highly specialized or executive comp may need additional sources.
Guarantee: Cut your comp prep time by 75% or get a full refund within 30 days.
Get defensible salary bands in one day