Why we built Benefits Studio
You already pay for great benefits. The problem is your employees can't find them.
A PDF booklet arrives at open enrollment. It gets skimmed. It gets saved to a folder. It gets forgotten inside a week.
That's not a communication failure. It's the delivery format. A dense document was never going to be how a real person figures out whether their kid's braces are covered at 10pm on a Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the modern version of that experience, a real benefits portal with an assistant that can actually answer questions, has existed for years. It's just been priced for the top of the market. The companies that can afford a six-figure implementation and a per-employee monthly fee get it. Everyone else, small businesses, mid-market employers, the brokers serving them, gets the PDF.
I know because I helped build one of those enterprise platforms. I was on the founding team at HealthJoy before we raised our seed round. Consumer first, then B2B. Two builds, two markets, and a lot of hard lessons about what makes a benefits product actually work. The clearest one: the parts employees actually use are a small fraction of what makes the enterprise version expensive. A benefit wallet they can navigate. Clear plan pages. An assistant that answers from their real documents instead of guessing. That's ninety percent of the value at ten percent of the cost, if you're willing to strip out everything else and price it accordingly.
The other option employers had was a custom-built portal from an agency, tens of thousands of dollars, weeks to months to deliver, beautiful the day it ships and stale the moment plans renew. Nobody rebuilds them annually. So the polished portal becomes the same forgotten document as the PDF, just more expensive.
Benefits Studio is what I wanted to exist for the employers and brokers who've been quietly locked out of both options. Upload your plan documents. Review what the AI pulls out. Publish. Fifteen minutes, not fifteen weeks. And because Benny only answers from documents you uploaded, not general internet knowledge, not another company's plan, the answers employees get are grounded in their own plan, with the page number they can go read for themselves.
The PDF benefits booklet should be dead
The PDF benefits booklet has been dead for a while. We just haven't buried it yet.
Employees should be able to understand their own benefits. They should be able to unlock the full value of what their employer is paying for. And that means the information can't live behind a login they'll forget or an app they'll never install. One URL. Bookmark it. Come back whenever.
I've also changed my mind about the “employee portal behind a login” default this industry runs on. Benefits exist as an incentive. They're something employers spend real money on to attract and keep people. Hiding them behind authentication is the opposite of what they're for. Walmart and Starbucks publish their benefits publicly, they're proud of them, they want candidates and current employees to see them. Every employer should do the same.
Built to be accessible from day one
Transparent pricing is a deliberate choice, not an accident. You don't book a demo. You don't wait a week for a quote. You don't discover the real number after a sales call and then find out about the upcharges twelve months later. You sign up, try it, and if it works, roll it out.
The price is also low enough that HR doesn't have to save it for open enrollment. A Slack message to the team any Tuesday in April is enough to launch a portal. And it's low enough that finance doesn't get involved, which anyone who's ever tried to buy software at a small company knows is the actual difference between “we'll get to it next quarter” and “done today.”
Every choice underneath the product, one price, no PEPM, no logins, no implementation project, exists to make that possible. Benefits Studio is a tool built from day one for the employers and brokers who've been priced out of the modern benefits experience for the last decade.
That's what I want it to be.
Rick Ramos
Founder, Benefits Studio