Benefits Studio started with a problem I kept hearing about from brokers: ROI. Every vendor in an employer’s benefits package wants credit for the savings. I’ve heard from brokers who had several vendors claim the same ROI win on their dashboards. Honestly, it’s hard for any one vendor to prove what they’re worth on their own. The results come from the whole package working together, and putting that package together is what good brokers do well.

Meanwhile, mid-market employers get stuck. Navigation vendors charge per employee per month and go after the big accounts. A 200-person company usually ends up with a PDF on a shared drive and a carrier phone number.

So I wanted to build something with a lot of what benefits navigation offers, priced so low that ROI stops being a question. Benefits Studio starts at $49 a month per portal. We don’t charge per employee, and we don’t charge thousands of dollars a year for a portal. A broker or HR team can launch one in about five minutes. Every portal comes with Benny, our AI assistant, who answers employee questions from the actual plan documents and shows the page number so people can check him. We also manage plan years instead of pages. When the new plan year comes, you preview it, flip it live, and last year’s information gets archived.

My first broker came from an old contact. At HealthJoy I spent a lot of time talking with brokers, and I kept those relationships. Before Benefits Studio launched, I had a lot of conversations with brokers about what they actually needed and what frustrated them about the tools they had. Those conversations changed the product in real ways. One of those brokers helped shape it and then became my first customer. Several more brokers are now testing it with select clients, and they plan to roll it out more widely next year.

Today most new business starts with outbound. Our SDRs reach out to brokerage agencies, and the ask is small: run a pilot with one client. Our public launch in October got covered by Coverager, which brought in some broker interest on its own. One thing I didn’t expect is that some brokers pay for the portals themselves and give them to clients as added value. That tells me they see it as a way to keep clients.

The decision was flat pricing per portal instead of per employee. Almost everyone in benefits navigation charges per employee per month, so a 200-person company can easily pay $7,000 a year or more. Our Professional plan is $1,188 a year whatever the headcount. That one choice shaped everything else. Brokers can roll the product out across their whole book of business instead of saving it for their biggest clients. It also forced us to keep Benny focused on a narrow job and run him efficiently, which made the product better.

The mistake was assuming every company would be fine with a public benefits site. I was firm about no logins. Walmart publishes its benefits openly, so why not everyone? Then brokers and HR people pushed back, and the research showed only about 10 to 15 percent of companies publish their benefits publicly. HR teams needed something to show their CEO or legal counsel. We added an optional site-wide password that’s off by default and doesn’t require employee accounts. What I learned is that the person approving the purchase needs to feel safe, and that matters as much as anything I build for the end user.

Employees now ask AI tools questions all day, so a 60-page benefits booklet feels ancient to them. They expect an answer in seconds. At the same time, CFOs are asking much harder questions about what navigation vendors actually deliver for the money, and a lot of those vendors can’t show clear ROI.

We built around both. Benny answers in plain English, but he only answers from the employer’s own plan documents and always cites the page. In benefits, a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer at all, so being able to check the source is what makes people trust him. On the cost side, we kept pricing low enough that HR can approve it without a long budget fight. Brokers also face more pressure to bring technology to their clients without raising fees, and flat per-portal pricing lets them do that across their whole book.

Talk to brokers before you build anything. Learn how they get paid, what makes them look good to their clients, and what keeps them up during open enrollment. I learned this the hard way at HealthJoy when we moved from selling to consumers to selling to businesses. I had to learn the language of HR and benefits consultants almost from scratch. If you can’t explain your product in their words, you won’t get a meeting with them.

Ignore the jumbo accounts. Everyone wants the Fortune 500 logo, and those deals take forever and come with a huge list of demands. The mid-market is where employers are being ignored, and those companies make decisions in weeks instead of quarters.