The HR Tech Stack for Lean Teams Under $200 Per Month
HR technology has followed the same trajectory as most enterprise software categories: consolidation toward expensive suites that are optimized for companies with dedicated HR staff to configure and maintain them, leaving small and lean teams with a choice between overpaying for features they do not use or cobbling together free tools that do not connect.
A third option exists for teams under 50 people: a purpose-built lean HR stack that covers the core functional areas for under $200 per month without sacrificing the functionality that actually matters.
The Stack
For applicant tracking: Ashby starts at $299 per month for small teams and covers most capabilities. For truly lean budgets, a self-hosted alternative like OpenCATS works for teams hiring fewer than 10 people per year.
For HRIS and employee records: a Notion-based people wiki (cost: Notion team plan at $8 per user per month) or HiBob at $6 per user per month both work well. For under 25 employees, the Notion-based approach is often superior because it integrates with the tools the team already uses for documentation.
The minimum employee record system for compliance: hire date, job title, compensation history, performance review records, PTO accrual, and termination documentation. All of this can be maintained in structured Notion databases with appropriate access control.
For onboarding: use Notion for the onboarding playbook and task checklist, n8n for automation (sending the welcome email, creating accounts, scheduling the 30/60/90-day check-ins), and Loom for the video walkthroughs that make async onboarding work.
n8n Automation for HR
Three HR automations that pay for themselves within the first month of implementation.
New hire welcome sequence: trigger on HRIS new record creation, send welcome email, create IT provisioning ticket, schedule calendar invites for week-1 meetings, add to relevant Slack channels. Manual time eliminated: 45 to 60 minutes per hire.
90-day check-in reminder: trigger 83 days after hire date, send reminder to manager, create draft review document in Notion, send new hire the self-reflection template. Ensures check-ins actually happen at the scheduled time without calendar management overhead.
PTO balance notification: monthly trigger, query HRIS for team PTO balances, notify managers with team members carrying more than 10 days of unused PTO. Reduces the year-end PTO payout surprise and helps teams plan around upcoming time-off.
The cost of the n8n instance: zero if self-hosted. The time to build these three automations: a Saturday afternoon.
Conclusion
The lean HR tech stack is not about finding the cheapest tools. It is about being precise about what you need at your current scale, using tools that connect cleanly with the systems you already have, and spending automation effort on the tasks that are genuinely tedious rather than on building an elaborate HR infrastructure for problems you do not yet have.
