These are not employees, they're freelancers from all around the world.

Even so, surely must be an equivalent of a payroll company that can make all these payments for you? We use Deel and upwork for our freelancers

I think the difference is that the freelancers in our business can be paid very different amounts in a month, from ~$10-5000 in range. Deel is probably fine for you with what you're paying freelancers with its price, but imagine we have a freelancer only do, let's say, $30 worth of work in a month. Deel's cheapest plan is $49/mo. That is more than we're paying the FL! If you're paying the FL e.g. $3000/mo it's worth your money, but for us this would be a 163% fee. And with 50+ freelancers, that's at least ~$2.5k per month. At that price I might as well hire someone to click the buttons for me.

Have you looked at Upwork? We pay some of our offshore Customer Service people through Upwork. I'm not directly involved in that but presumably the economics work as their hourly rates are between $5-$15 per hour.

I think I wasn't clear enough in my initial post, but we personally reach out to and recruit and manage the freelancers ourselves, not through a jobs platform. Our business needs very specialized people you can't really find on Upwork