Useme is a Poland-born platform that solves one very real, very annoying problem: paying a freelancer who doesn't run a registered company, and still walking away with a proper invoice. If you hire independent contractors across borders and the paperwork keeps tripping you up, Useme is a genuinely smart thing to be looking at. It's less a "find me a developer" marketplace and more the billing-and-payments layer that sits between you and the person you already want to hire. Useme was founded on June 28, 2013 in Wrocław, Poland, by Przemysław Głośny, and today operates as Useme SA. Its role is described plainly on Wikipedia: an "intermediary in the settlement of payments between freelancers and sole proprietors and their clients," enabling "international transactions and settlements based on remote work contracts and invoices." The scale is real. By 2021 the platform had passed 100,000 registered users from 50 countries. Reported revenue climbed from PLN 120.9 million in 2022 to PLN 193.0 million in 2023 to PLN 245.0 million in 2024, and by April 2025 Useme reported having processed over half a million projects since launch. This is not a weekend project — it's a growing fintech-plus-marketplace with a decade of operating history behind it.

Useme's core trick is the invoice. Normally, if you want to pay a freelancer who isn't a registered business, you're stuck: they can't hand you a VAT invoice, and you can't cleanly book the expense. Useme steps into that gap as the intermediary. The freelancer does the work, and Useme handles the settlement and issues a compliant invoice, so the buyer gets clean paperwork and the contractor gets paid without incorporating anything. The platform started in IT, graphic design, and copywriting, then expanded into social media marketing, 3D design, and architecture. It added batch and bulk settlement features so a company working with many contractors at once can pay them in one motion, and it registered an Estonian entity back in 2018 to support cross-border operations. You can post work and hire through it, but the sturdiest part of the product is the money-and-compliance rail underneath.

It removes a specific, painful blocker. The "freelancer has no company, so I can't get an invoice" problem is exactly what Useme was built to erase. For that job, it's purpose-built. Cross-border payments are the whole point. Users from 50 countries and an Estonian entity for international settlement mean this isn't a domestic-only tool bolted onto exports. Paying someone in another country is the design center, not an edge case. Bulk settlement scales with you. If you juggle a roster of contributors, paying them one invoice at a time is death by a thousand cuts. Batch settlement is a real operational relief. A decade of track record. Rising revenue through 2024 and half a million projects processed is the kind of longevity that tells you the rails actually hold up under volume.

Useme is a payments-and-invoicing layer, so it's strongest when you already know who you want to pay. The hiring and vetting of the person is still yours to do — Useme makes the transaction clean, not the selection. Because it's an intermediary that earns a commission on each settlement, it's built around throughput of transactions rather than deep, hands-on assessment of any one contractor's skill. That's the right shape for paying many freelancers efficiently, and a different shape from "help me be sure this specific engineer is excellent." And a marketplace surfaces the people who list themselves. That's a feature when you want breadth and choice fast. It's worth being clear-eyed that the strongest specialists in a field often aren't the ones sitting on any open marketplace.

Here's the honest split. Useme is a payments rail. We're the opposite end of the problem — the reach and the proof. The best engineers usually aren't on Useme, or any marketplace. The ones you actually want are already working — booked on a contract somewhere else, heads-down on something hard, not listed anywhere waiting to be hired. Nextdev reaches the top 1% of AI engineers — the ones who aren't looking. We go and find them. Then we give each a real problem to build and watch how they actually work, so you know they're AI-native because you've seen it, not because a profile said so. When you want one, we employ them for you. One named engineer. The contract, payroll, and compliance never touch your desk. That's the burden a marketplace leaves on you: you still have to prove the person is genuinely AI-native, and you still have to run the employment yourself. We do both. We find them, we prove them, we hire them out to you. You're not picking from who signed up. You're getting the engineer who never would have.

Useme is a strong, credible answer to a real question: how do I pay independent freelancers cleanly, across borders, and get a proper invoice every time? If that's your problem, it's a well-run tool with a decade behind it, and choosing it is a smart move. But paying a freelancer and landing a top-1% AI-native engineer are different problems. If the second one is what's keeping you up — one proven engineer, employed for you, no marketplace roulette — that's the part Nextdev owns.

Sources: Useme (Wikipedia); Useme.