Remote.com Equipment vs a Standalone Equipment Platform

One less vendor. That is how Remote.com’s device management looks when it sits alongside the employment products you are already buying. The detail worth knowing before you buy is that Remote doesn’t run the logistics itself. It’s fulfilled by a partner and surfaced inside Remote, and that single fact changes almost everything about how the comparison should be run.

What Remote actually provides

Checked 24 October 2026. Remote’s device management runs through Fleet, described as a provider of IT equipment rental and logistics, and it appears inside Remote with no separate login.

Hardware is ordered from a catalogue during onboarding and shipped to the employee’s location, with Remote handling delivery, returns and replacements. For a company already running employment through Remote, that’s a genuinely convenient arrangement: one system, one relationship, one place where a new starter’s employment and their laptop are both arranged.

One naming caution if you go researching. There’s more than one company called Fleet in this space, including an open-source device management project that’s a completely different thing. Make sure the one you read about is the equipment logistics provider.

The pricing position

No per-device price or shipping fee schedule is published for the equipment service. Remote markets clear upfront pricing generally, and the specific hardware rates aren’t public.

That puts it in the same position as nearly everybody else in this category, so it isn’t a mark against Remote specifically. Workwize, Firstbase, GroWrk, allwhere, Esevel and Deel IT all publish nothing either.

There’s one question worth asking that’s specific to a partner-fulfilled model, though. When a service is resold, ask plainly whether any margin sits between the partner’s price and yours, and what you would pay going direct. A reasonable vendor will answer it.

What the bundle genuinely buys you

Let’s be fair about this, because the convenience is real and gets dismissed too quickly.

One onboarding flow. The person who sets up employment also orders the laptop, in the same place, at the same time. That removes an entire handoff between two separate teams, and handoffs between teams are reliably where new starter equipment goes wrong.

One invoice and one contract. Procurement and finance both like this more than they will admit, and it genuinely reduces administrative load for a small team.

Employment and equipment in one record. When somebody leaves, the system that knows they’re leaving is the same system that knows what hardware they hold. That’s worth real money, and most companies running two separate vendors end up building that link themselves with a spreadsheet nobody wants to own.

What a standalone platform buys instead

A direct relationship, mainly. That sounds abstract until something goes wrong.

When a shipment is stuck in customs in week one of somebody’s employment, you want to be talking to the people who physically hold the stock and booked the courier. In a resold model your escalation goes through the reseller to the fulfiller and back, which adds a step precisely when time matters most. Ask how escalation works before you need it.

You also get portability. Equipment tied to an employment platform is harder to move when you change employment providers, and employment providers do get changed. A standalone arrangement keeps those two decisions independent of each other.

What to do:

• Ask who physically holds the stock and who you escalate to.
• Ask whether equipment data comes with you if you change employment provider.
• Compare the catalogue, not just the service. Resold catalogues are sometimes narrower.
• Check coverage country by country rather than by headline total.

A company that split the two

A 76-person company used an employment platform for 9 countries and bought equipment through the same vendor. It worked well for about a year.

Then they moved employment providers for reasons that had nothing to do with hardware, and discovered the device history, the assignment records and the retrieval arrangements all sat inside the system they were leaving. Rebuilding the asset register took most of a quarter, and the lesson wasn’t that bundling is wrong but that they had never asked what happens on exit.

They run the two separately now. One more vendor, one more invoice, and two decisions that no longer hold each other hostage.

Where we sit

RemoAsset is our own product, and it is a standalone platform, so treat this section accordingly. Procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries, each device tracked from issue through return, from $1,499 a year on the Subscription tier for companies with 50 to 5,000+ employees, including a 60 per cent reduction on retrieval charges.

Three limits. It has no network discovery, so it covers devices it handled rather than your whole estate. It has no software licence management of any kind, so the whole software side of your estate sits somewhere else. And only the Subscription tier publishes a figure, with the pay-as-you-go option quoted on request like everybody else in the category.

It also does no employment, payroll or EOR, which is precisely the convenience a bundled option is offering you. If one invoice and one onboarding flow are what you actually want, that’s a real argument for the bundle and we don’t answer it.

Checklist

Checklist:

• Confirmation of who fulfils the service and who holds the stock.
• The escalation path when a shipment fails, in writing.
• What happens to equipment data if you change employment provider.
• Whether any resale margin sits between the fulfiller’s price and yours.
• Catalogue breadth in the countries you actually hire in.
• Whether retrieval is included or billed separately.

Final Thoughts

Bundling equipment with employment is a legitimate choice and for a small distributed team it is often the right one. The convenience is real and the handoff it removes is the one that most reliably breaks.

Just go in knowing it is a partner service with a wrapper, ask the escalation and exit questions before signing, and keep your asset data somewhere you can take with you. Those three steps cost nothing and they are the difference between a convenient arrangement and a dependency.

Frequently asked questions