You searched “Virtual Assistant services.”
You clicked on a few results. Then a few more. And pretty quickly, you noticed something.
They. All. Say. The. Same. Thing.
“Boost your productivity.”
“Free up your time.”
“Get a world-class assistant.”
“Save up to 99.7% compared to hiring locally.”
One has a stock photo of a smiling woman holding a laptop. Another has a family running through a field — for reasons nobody can explain. A third has a sleek dark homepage that says “Get everything done” without explaining how. A fourth says “Boost Business, Free Up Time” like it was written by a motivational poster from 2004.
You could swap the logos on every single one of these websites and nobody would notice.
And that, right there, is the first sign that you’re dealing with factories…not services.
I’ve placed over 1,000 remote workers from Eastern Europe and Latin America into US and UK businesses through my company, HireUA. I’ve seen every model, every pricing trick, and every marketing lie in this industry.
Here’s what none of those 50 identical websites will tell you.
Last Updated: February 2026
Table of Contents
- The 3 Models of Virtual Assistant Services
- The Markup Problem Nobody Talks About
- Why Most Virtual Assistant Services Are Terrible (The Real Reasons)
- The “US-Based” Premium — Is It Worth It?
- Red Flags — How to Spot a Bad VA Service Before You Sign
- What to Actually Ask Before Choosing a Virtual Assistant Service
- How We Do It Differently at HireUA
- Real Story: From Solopreneur to Million-Dollar Agency
- What AI Changed for Virtual Assistants — and What It Didn’t
- When to Skip a Virtual Assistant Service Entirely
- The Bottom Line
- FAQ
The 3 Models of Virtual Assistant Services
Before you compare companies, you need to understand what you’re actually comparing. Because not all Virtual Assistant services work the same way — and the model you choose matters more than the company you choose.
There are three models:
1. Managed / Subscription Services
This is the most common model you’ll find when searching for Virtual Assistant services. You sign up. They assign you someone from their pool. You pay the service. The service pays the VA.
You don’t hire the person. You rent them.
Here’s the thing:
The appeal is obvious — it’s plug and play. Someone else handles the recruiting, the vetting, the payroll. You just show up and start delegating.
But there’s a catch. Actually, several catches.
First, you don’t own the relationship.
The VA works for them, not you. If they leave, you start over. If the service decides to reassign them, you start over. You’re building institutional knowledge inside a person who could disappear tomorrow — and you have zero control over that.
Second, the plug-and-play model only works if you have airtight processes.
You can’t just pull someone off the street and drop them into your business. If your SOPs aren’t bulletproof, the VA will follow them to the letter — and break the moment anything falls outside the workflow. Anything outside the box? Forget it.
Third — and this is the big one — the markup.
More on that in a minute…
2. Marketplaces and Platforms
These are the freelance platforms and job boards. You browse profiles, message candidates, hire directly. The platform takes a cut or charges fees, but the person works for you.
The upside is cost. You’ll find the lowest rates here because there’s no middleman taking 50-70% off the top.
The downside is everything else. You’re the recruiter. You’re the screener. You’re the HR department. You’re sorting through hundreds of profiles trying to find someone decent, and you’re doing it with zero infrastructure to evaluate whether someone is actually good or just good at writing a profile.
If you have time and know what to look for, this can work. If you’re a hiring manager at a growing company who needs someone reliable fast — this is usually a waste of your time.
3. Placement Agencies
This is the HireUA model. A placement agency finds the person, vets them, presents you candidates, and you hire them directly. They become your team member — on your tools, in your systems, dedicated to you.
The agency doesn’t sit between you and the hire forever. They do the hard part (sourcing, screening, matching) and then you take it from there.
We also offer a monthly option for companies that prefer not to handle payroll and admin — but even in that model, the person is still dedicated to you, working only for you, and embedded in your business. It’s not a rental. It’s a fully managed placement with transparent pricing — contractor cost plus a flat 35% management fee. No hidden markups. You can see exactly what the person earns and exactly what the management layer costs.
Pros: You own the relationship. The person is dedicated to you. No rotating VAs, no shared talent pool. Transparent pricing.
Cons: You’re responsible for managing the person once they’re hired. It requires more involvement from you upfront.
Which Model Is Right for You?
It depends on two things:
Do you want flexibility or dedication?
And here’s where you need to be honest with yourself.
If you’re buying 5 hours a week from a managed service and someone else is buying 20 hours from the same VA — you are never going to be the priority. Ever. They’re not going to care about your tasks the way they care about the client paying four times more. That’s just human nature.
The fractional model works if you truly only need a few hours of simple, repeatable work. But the moment you need someone embedded in your business — knowing your clients, understanding your workflows, caring about outcomes — you need dedication. And dedication requires a direct hire.
The Markup Problem Nobody Talks About
This is the part the managed services hope you never ask about.
When you pay a managed Virtual Assistant service $2,000 a month, how much of that actually goes to the person doing the work?
In many cases — especially with services sourcing from Asia — the split is roughly 70/30. The company keeps 70%. The VA gets 30%.
Read that again.
You’re paying $2,000. The person doing the work gets $600. The company pockets $1,400 for… what exactly? Matching you with a profile? Sending you a weekly check-in email?
And it gets worse. A lot of these companies operate what are essentially offices where they herd workers together, pay them a small salary, provide some basic benefits, and bill clients at massive multiples of what the worker earns.
It’s an office, and effectively..a factory. Long commutes, even longer days, effectively just an assembly line.
Now, pay attention:
Some services use Employer of Record platforms like Deel or Remote.io — and those come with their own costs. We’re talking $500-$700 per month just for the EOR layer. Sometimes that’s close to what the VA themselves is earning. And on top of that, there are often 12-month commitments baked in due to local labor laws.
So the “simple” managed service is actually:
VA salary + massive company markup + EOR fees + long-term commitment.
And nobody mentions any of this on their pretty landing page.
Here’s a question you should ask any Virtual Assistant service before you sign anything:
“How much do you actually pay your people?”
Most of the time, the answer is pretty ugly.
Why Most Virtual Assistant Services Are Terrible (The Real Reasons)
Here are the actual diseases:
They Use Low-End Talent From the Start
If you’re paying $700 a month for a VA service and they’re sourcing from a $300/month freelance recruiter — what exactly do you expect?
The talent pool at the bottom is massive and undifferentiated.
You’re not getting someone special. You’re getting a body.
They Pattern-Match Instead of Actually Screening
Most Virtual Assistant services look at a resume and try to match keywords. This person worked at a marketing agency? Send them to the client who runs a marketing company.
That’s the depth of the analysis.
What they don’t look at:
- Does this person genuinely want to work with a Western company?
- Do they have the cultural understanding to communicate directly and push back when needed?
- Is their English truly strong, or just “good enough”?
- Are they personally motivated by this kind of opportunity, or is this just another gig?
These are the things that actually determine whether a hire succeeds or fails. And they can’t be assessed from a resume.
The Ocean of Minnows Problem
This is especially brutal in countries where English is essentially a national language. When you have a population of 100+ million people who all speak English, the pool is enormous.
This sounds like a good problem to have — right?
Unfortunately…wrong.
You’re looking for a shark in an ocean full of minnows.
Everybody speaks it. So how do you tell who’s truly exceptional? You can’t — unless you have a screening system built for it.
Compare that to Eastern Europe, where English proficiency is less universal but the people who speak it well really stand out. It’s a smaller pond, but finding a shark is significantly easier because the differentiation is obvious.
The Factory Problem
Most managed Virtual Assistant services are, functionally, call centers with better marketing. They herd people into an operation, pay them as little as possible, and charge clients as much as the market will bear.
The individual VA is just another body in the system. They don’t feel like part of your team because they’re not — they’re part of someone else’s workforce, temporarily assigned to you.
And that’s exactly why clients from these services consistently complain about the same thing:
“They can follow a perfect SOP, but the second anything goes off-script, they freeze.”
Or: “I got tired of the “Yes Sir”, “Yes Boss” responses and zero initiative.”
That’s not a people problem. It’s a model problem.
Their Marketing Says Nothing…Because They Have Nothing to Say
Pull up 50 different Virtual Assistant service websites. They all say:
- Save costs.
- Save time.
- Focus on what matters.
None of them talk about what actually makes their VAs different. None of them address the cultural dynamics of working with someone from another country. None of them show you real case studies with real numbers from real clients.
Because they don’t have them.
They have stock photos and taglines. That’s it.
The “US-Based” Premium — Is It Worth It?
A lot of managed Virtual Assistant services market heavily on one thing: US-based VAs.
And look, there are legitimate situations where a US-based VA makes sense.
If the role involves phone work with American clients who expect a native speaker. If there’s specific regulatory or compliance knowledge required. If timezone overlap is absolutely critical and the person needs to be available during exact US business hours.
But here’s the question nobody asks:
If a US-based Virtual Assistant service is charging you $25-40 per hour — who is actually willing to work for that rate in the United States right now?
Think about it. Pre-COVID, $20 an hour felt like a reasonable wage for remote admin work. Then inflation happened. The cost of everything — rent, groceries, gas, insurance — went up 20-30% in the span of two years. That $20/hour hasn’t kept pace. It’s worth significantly less than it was in 2019. Hell, hamburger places pay $20/hour these days.
A fully remote administrative job paying $20-25 an hour in 2026 is not attracting the cream of the crop in the US market. It’s attracting people who couldn’t find something better. There are exceptions — stay-at-home parents, semi-retirees, people in extremely low cost-of-living areas. But on average, the quality you get at that price point domestically is not what you’d expect given the premium you’re paying.
Meanwhile, that same budget gets you a highly motivated, well-educated professional from Eastern Europe or Latin America who treats the opportunity as a career — not a side gig. The person in Bogotá or Kyiv earning $1,500-$2,000 a month is living well, building a real career, and genuinely invested in your success.
To put that in perspective, here are the average professional salaries in the countries we source from:
Ukraine: ~$550-$650/month average salary
Poland: ~$2,100/month average salary
Colombia: ~$850-$1,000/month average salary
Mexico: ~$1,000-$1,400/month average salary
Argentina: ~$450/month average salary
United States: ~$5,600+/month average salary
When you’re paying someone in Bogotá or Kyiv $1,500-$2,000 a month, you’re not paying them a discount. You’re paying them a premium over their local market — which is exactly why they show up every day motivated, loyal, and invested in the work. They’re building something. The person in the US collecting $20/hour while scrolling job boards for something better? Different energy entirely.
That changes the dynamic completely.
The premium for “US-based” often isn’t buying you better quality. It’s buying you a label.
Here is a video of one of our team members breaking down her cost of living in Ukraine, to illustrate the point:
Red Flags — How to Spot a Bad VA Service Before You Sign
Here’s your quick-hit checklist. If you see more than two of these, keep moving.
Generic stock photos everywhere. If the website is full of smiling models holding laptops and not a single real employee or client, that tells you everything. They don’t have real people to show you because the real people are anonymous cogs in the machine.
No named case studies or video testimonials. Any company that’s done great work has clients willing to talk about it. If there’s no video proof, no named clients, no specific results — ask yourself why.
Vetting they can’t explain. Ask them: “Walk me through exactly how you screen candidates.” If the answer is vague — “We have a rigorous process” or “We give them a test” — push harder.
What test? What does it measure? Why does it work?
If they can’t answer, the vetting is probably a resume review and a 15-minute Zoom call.
You could swap the logo and the page reads the same. This is the big one. If their “About” page, their “How It Works” page, and their FAQ section could belong to literally any other VA company with zero edits — they have no differentiator. They’re just a factory.
Non-transparent pricing. If you can’t find pricing on the website, or the pricing requires a “consultation” to unlock — they’re hiding something. Usually the markup.
“Trained backup VAs” as a selling point. This sounds nice in theory. In practice, it means they’re admitting people leave — and their solution is to throw another body at you. Unless the role is extremely simple and well-documented, a backup VA who doesn’t know your business is not a benefit. It’s a disruption.
Rotating VAs or shared talent pools. If you’re not getting a dedicated person, you’re not getting a team member. You’re getting whoever is available. And whoever is available is splitting their attention across multiple clients who all think they’re the priority.
What to Actually Ask Before Choosing a Virtual Assistant Service
If you’re a hiring manager evaluating VA services for your company, here are the questions that will separate the real operators from the factories:
“How much do you pay your VAs?” The transparency of the answer tells you everything. If they dodge it, the spread is ugly. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t make any margin (they’re a business after all), but there is a certain point that crosses the line.
“Walk me through your screening process — step by step.” You want specifics. What assessments do you use? What are you scoring for? How many candidates do you screen to fill one role? “We carefully vet all candidates” is not an answer.
“Do I get a dedicated person, or a pool?” And if it’s dedicated — what happens when they go on vacation? What happens if they leave?
“Can I see video testimonials from real clients?” Not written quotes on a landing page. Actual videos of actual people talking about actual results.
(Don’t ask to call or “reference check” clients — you don’t give out your client/customer data, right?)
“What’s your markup on the VA’s salary?” If they won’t answer, you already have your answer.
“Do you do direct hire placements, or does the VA remain your employee?” This determines who actually controls the relationship.
“What happens when it doesn’t work out?” Every service should have a replacement guarantee. But the details matter — how fast? At what cost? How many replacements before it’s a problem?
How We Do It Differently at HireUA
I built HireUA after years of living abroad — I got married abroad, bought property abroad, raised my kid abroad. I didn’t just study remote work from behind a desk. I lived in the same cities, ate at the same restaurants, navigated the same bureaucracies as the people we place. That’s where the perspective comes from.
I’ve been in the trenches. Literally:
After personally placing over 1,000 remote workers into Western businesses, the vetting system isn’t something we copied from a competitor or outsourced to an HR consultant. It’s built from what I’ve seen actually work — and fail — across hundreds and hundreds of placements.
The 7-Point Scoring Rubroic
Every candidate we present is scored across 7 key points, weighted by what matters most to the typical Western hiring manager. This scoring system was built from analyzing what actually predicts success in remote placements — not from a textbook.
Certain scores are non-negotiable. If a candidate doesn’t clear the threshold, they don’t get presented. Period.
I’ll be the first to tell you:
Not every candidate we present is going to be perfect. But every candidate we present has passed a screening process that most of our competitors don’t even attempt.
No Hourly Billing, No Shared VAs
We don’t bill by the hour. We don’t put people on multiple clients. When you hire through HireUA, that person is YOUR team member. Dedicated to you. On your tools. In your systems. With your email address.
For direct hire, we do the hard part — sourcing, screening, presenting candidates — and then you take it from there. We don’t sit between you and your employee forever, clipping a percentage every month.
For companies that want us to handle admin and payroll, our monthly model is fully transparent: The contractor’s cost plus a flat 35% management fee that covers payroll, replacement guarantee, and ongoing support. No hidden markups. You see exactly what the person earns.
We Actually Figure Out What You Need
About half the people who come to us asking for a “Virtual Assistant” actually need something different.
Sometimes they need an Executive Assistant — a completely different role with a different skill set and different expectations. Sometimes they need a specialist — a Social Media Manager, an Inbox Manager, a bookkeeping person. Sometimes they want a specialist but really just need a solid VA at VA rates.
We catch this on the discovery call. We have a framework of questions designed to bring out what’s actually important about the role — not just what the job title says.
If what you need is a VA, great. If what you need is something else, we’ll tell you that before you waste time and money hiring the wrong person.
Speed
VA roles: We present candidates within 5 days.
Interviews are typically scheduled within 2 weeks.
Total time to hire is 3 weeks or less. Often less.
Transparent Pricing
VA pricing through HireUA, so you can compare apples to apples:
Latin America: $400/month (10 hours) | $700-$900/month (20 hours) | $1,200-$1,600/month (40 hours)
Eastern Europe: $500/month (10 hours) | $900-$1,000/month (20 hours) | $1,300-$1,800/month (40 hours)
These are what the person actually costs. Not the cost buried under a 70% company markup.
Real Story: From Solopreneur to Million-Dollar Agency
Marcos Ruiz came to us as a one-man show. He was running a Twitter marketing agency, barely cracking six figures, doing literally everything himself. He didn’t even know what position he needed — he just knew he was drowning.
We helped him figure out that what he actually needed was an Executive Assistant — someone who could handle the miscellaneous operational work that was eating his day. Client reporting, DMs, project management, a little bit of everything.
We placed Sophia.
Within a year and a half, Sophia had grown from a jack-of-all-trades EA into the operations manager running the entire backbone of what had become a million-dollar agency.
Marcos flew to Warsaw to meet her in person. That’s how valuable she became to the business.
But here’s the important part — Sophia didn’t walk in the door running the company. She grew into it because Marcos invested in her development, gave her clear direction, and expanded her responsibilities as she proved herself. That’s the trajectory a great Virtual Assistant placement creates.
And Marcos isn’t the only one…
Kanon Clark, who runs a lead generation company out of Texas, came to us after wasting time on freelance platforms trying to find someone who could think independently. We placed a data scraper/EA hybrid who saved him 15-20 hours a week and — his words — “makes my life a whole lot easier.”
Support Pets, an e-commerce company, has hired three people through us — a designer, an EA, and a QA team member — and estimates they’re saving over $150,000 per year in salary alone.
These aren’t hypotheticals. These are real businesses, real people, real results. And we have the video testimonials to prove it.
What AI Changed for Virtual Assistants — and What It Didn’t
Every Virtual Assistant service is now marketing “AI-fluent assistants” or “AI-powered workflows.” Let’s talk about what that actually means.
Here’s what AI did change:
A lot of the manual tasks that VAs used to spend hours on — data entry, moving content between platforms, basic research compilation, formatting — can now be done faster with AI tools. This is genuinely useful and any good VA should be using AI to move faster.
Here’s what AI didn’t change:
Judgment.
AI can draft an email. It can’t decide whether that email should be sent. AI can compile research. It can’t tell you which finding actually matters for your business. AI can write a social media post. It probably shouldn’t — unless you want to sound like every other AI-generated piece of content on the internet.
But here’s the real problem…
Most people in the world cannot prompt AI effectively.
The average person types “write me an email” and gets back “In today’s dynamic business environment…” garbage.
And that’s exactly what happens when these Virtual Assistant services claim their people are “AI-trained.” They probably gave them a few generic SOPs about prompting that have absolutely nothing to do with your specific business, your specific tone, your specific use cases. Useless.
A VA who is genuinely good with AI knows how to build context-specific prompts, iterate on output, and apply judgment to what the AI produces. That’s not something you learn from a company-wide training deck. That’s something you develop by being smart, curious, and deeply embedded in the client’s business.
So when you see “AI-fluent” on a VA service’s landing page — it’s marketing fluff until proven otherwise.
When to Skip a Virtual Assistant Service Entirely
There are two situations where you should bypass Virtual Assistant services altogether:
When You’ve Already Found Your Person
If you hired through a service and it’s been 6 months, the person is embedded, the relationship is working — seriously consider transitioning to a direct hire arrangement. You’ll save the ongoing markup and you’ll give that person more stability, which keeps them motivated and loyal.
The 6-month mark is usually when you know. Either it’s working or it isn’t.
When You Don’t Actually Need a VA
This happens more often than you’d think.
Half the people who come to us asking for a VA actually need something more specialized. And the other half want something specialized but really just need a solid VA.
A “Social Media Manager” who schedules posts in Canva three times a week? That’s a VA. A “Project Coordinator” who updates Trello and sends check-in messages? That’s a VA.
But an Inbox Manager who converts cold email replies into booked calls? That’s more specialized. An Operations Manager who builds systems and manages your team? That’s a completely different hire.
Call the role what it is. Set expectations accordingly. Hire at the right level and pay the right rate. Everyone’s happier.
The Bottom Line
You’re comparing Virtual Assistant services that all say the same thing because they all ARE the same thing. Most of them are call centers with marketing departments. Stock photos, generic taglines, and a pricing page that hides more than it reveals.
The few that are different — the ones with real case studies, transparent pricing, actual screening methodology, and named clients willing to go on camera — those are the ones worth your time.
If you want a Virtual Assistant service that places someone dedicated to your business, vetted through a real system, at a transparent cost — that’s what we do at HireUA.
We’ll figure out what you actually need on a discovery call, present candidates within 5 days, and have someone hired in 3 weeks or less.
One monthly bill. Lifetime replacement guarantee. No HR headaches. No markup games.
Click here to get started: https://Hire-UA.com
FAQ
What is a Virtual Assistant service?
A Virtual Assistant service is a company that provides remote administrative and operational support. There are three main types:
- Managed services (they assign you a VA from their pool)
- Marketplaces (you browse and hire directly)
- Placement agencies (they find and vet candidates, you hire them directly).
- The model determines the cost, the quality, and how much control you have over the relationship.
How much do Virtual Assistant services cost?
It depends entirely on the model and the region. Managed US-based services run $1,200-$3,000+ per month. Managed offshore services range from $500-$1,500 per month — but with significant markups over what the VA actually earns. Direct hire through a placement agency from Latin America or Eastern Europe runs $700-$1,800 per month for a full-time VA with no ongoing markup.
Marketplace rates from Asia start at $6-8/hour, while LatAm and Eastern Europe are typically $8-10/hour.
What’s the best Virtual Assistant service for small businesses?
There’s no universal “best” — it depends on what you need.
If you want maximum flexibility with minimal commitment and you only need a few hours per week, a managed service can work. If you want a dedicated team member embedded in your business, a placement agency is better.
If you have time to recruit yourself and know what you’re looking for, marketplaces are the cheapest option. The most important thing is understanding the three models, the markup structures, and what you’re actually paying for.
Are US-based Virtual Assistant services worth the premium?
For most businesses, no.
The premium buys you a US-based label, but at $20-25/hour in a post-COVID economy, the talent pool domestically is limited.
That same budget gets you a highly motivated, well-educated professional from Eastern Europe or Latin America who treats the role as a career, not a side gig. US-based makes sense when the role requires native English for phone work, specific US regulatory knowledge, or exact timezone overlap with no flexibility.
How do I evaluate a Virtual Assistant service?
Ask five questions:
- How much do you pay your VAs?
- Walk me through your screening process step by step.
- Do I get a dedicated person or a pool?
- Can I see video testimonials from real clients?
- What’s your markup?
- If the answers are vague or dodgy on any of these, keep looking.
Virtual Assistant services vs. a direct hire — what’s better?
If you have the time and knowledge to recruit, screen, and manage someone yourself — direct hiring through a marketplace will always be cheapest.
If you want the recruiting done for you but want to own the hire, a placement agency is the middle ground. Managed services are best for people who want completely hands-off delegation and are willing to pay a premium (and accept the trade-offs) for that convenience.
Most growing businesses get the best value from the placement model — expert recruiting, direct hire, no ongoing markup.
