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cbzink000

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It's actually fairly simple to get running. I'm bopping around in a private instance right now. Looks like there would be an insane amount of work to re-brand everything, but it's certainly possible.

It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it would allow for commercial use.

I'm not speaking for or against Zenefits and their methods, but ADPs API is severely limited and extremely expensive. I worked with their Dealer Services division when I was at a startup in the automotive space and ADP had one of the worst crafted APIs I have ever seen. I made a comment about it on an earlier Zenefits post, but the gist was that the "stable, production API" was a constantly moving target that changed without notice or reason.

I believe we had incurred over $50,000.00 in fees before we ever reached the testing stage or purchased the right to use the API (that license is on a client by client basis, too). That $50M number was fees directly to ADP, and does not include our own payroll and expenses.

We were completely bootstrapped and started with about $70M in the bank, yet we were still able to complete that integration. I can't see how a company with over $500MM in funding[0] couldn't unless they were prohibited by ADP.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zenefits

When I was back at an automotive startup, we had to write an integration with ADP's DMS. I can say without a doubt that it was the worst API I have ever had the misfortune of working with. Horribly buggy, the documentation didn't match the output, endpoints disappeared at random, different endpoints required different auth keys. Made no sense at all.

I even remember a time when our ADP representative called us and said she thought the project should be called off due to the amount of malformed payloads we were sending her.... on our development account. Not production.. Not even testing. Development.

ADP has left a bitter taste in my mouth since then.

When I joined my first (and only) startup, I promised them I would be there for a year. At the end of that year, if I didn't feel my career wasn't headed anywhere (raises, stock options, etc) then I would head back to fintech.

Almost exactly one year, one month later I left the company with no promotions or stock options in sight, although the workload and my duties were significantly larger than we agreed on.

In addition, that year made me realize that I had absolutely no passion for the work I was doing (automotive industry) and while the startup culture looks glamorous, it's far too stressful in the end and negatively affected my emotional and physical health.

I'm back in "big corporate" fintech and happy to say I was able to bring a lot of what I learned in the startup world back with me. I've been advancing my career far faster than I would have done in the land of startups and now own a significant amount of stock in my current company.