[birken]

Vanguard has fees in addition to their funds' individual fees if they manage the 401k for a small business, though my guess is they are less than $8/month/person.

Having used Vanguard's site to manage my Google 401k, I can say it wasn't (and still isn't) the most usable website in the world, and I have no doubt the plan administration also isn't the most usable thing in the world. Then again, Google was normally pretty smart about which vendors they chose and they used Vanguard (and might still use --- I have no idea).

It is interesting that Guideline's whole blog post was about low cost and almost certainly Vanguard is a less expensive option (in addition to being secure and battle tested and they also probably have hired some lawyers).

When I watched Captain401's (YC company, https://captain401.com) presentation about their similar product, their whole pitch was about how much easier their service made administration and setup of the plan.

[busque]

Actually, Vanguard is not less expensive. We use the same funds. You pay the same price for the funds in Guideline as you would if you bought them in a Vanguard plan. We don't make money on AUM, ever. We compete on being a full service 401(k) provider, that is not the case for Vanguard. You would still need all the third party services for fiduciary, compliance etc, and you would have very high startup costs and not to mention the lack of payroll integrations. And yes, we have super slick onboarding for employees and an 8 minute sign-up process for the business all without charging AUM based fees.

[Rezo]

This sounds really great for startups. Which payroll integrations do you support (hoping for Gusto)? Could not find any mention on your site.

[busque]

Yes on Gusto ;)

[ucaetano]

Same here (and Google continues to use it), but given how little time I spend managing my 401k, if I had the option of getting a very user-friendly product for an additional 0.01% fee, I wouldn't take it.

[twiceaday]

Still do.