Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
bbc.com
bbc.com
Since Windows, despite its many faults, has a rock solid ABI (application binary interface), that piece of proprietary software from 2006 I use today still runs fine, as does that open source game from 2005 which I don’t need to figure out how to recompile.
So, yes, if these companies were able to buy the software instead of renting a SAAS (software as a service), they wouldn’t be subject to a huge bill to continue using what they have been using. And they would be able to still use that software for the foreseeable future.
AI tools do show promise of being able to handle all these things in the future, but at least for the past few years these customers had an incredible bargain vs what it would have cost them to run and maintain the application even if they had the source code for free.
If they had used a desktop Win32 binary as you suggested, that would also have needed security updates, and it wouldn't have worked on phones or macbooks, and it would have needed a back end service (see above).
We don't have to make everything a javascript app running on the open internet. Though even an insecure node server could be perfectly fine if deployed on the corpnet behind a VPN...
Any stray device you may not even be aware of can rip that assurance apart.
A fully locked down network can in theory enable this however, very few enterprises actually are strict enough for this to be enforced across the whole network.
I do not believe this is the case at all. If I'm running software locally that works on local files that I control then there is no security issue. Even if there are bugs that can be exploited, they won't be exploited because I'm in control of the data.
This whole mess is a non-issue and is only there as an excuse to push this horrible web SaaS subscription nonsense that we have. It's nothing but a stupid excuse to justify daily software updates so that companies and inject ads and remove features to push subscriptions.
Stop. This doesn't have to be true...
> Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
This worked just fine, also, until Apple decided to have meetings with devs of popular software to push for subscriptions. Not we have the current state of bullshit.
are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.
BTW QB desktop has also been seriously enshittified.
If Bending Spoons buys your vendor, then gtfo as quickly as possible. Don't wait, don't sit around like a sucker and hope you won't get screwed over, you will.
But what happened with Harvest may be an omen.
They’d been paying $240/yr for freaking Evernote.
I’m astonished at how much abuse many people will tolerate as an alternative to changing their habits. Bending Spoons made the same discovery, but gleefully, and apparently it makes a profit for them.
I just don’t get it. I mean, I do, but I wish I didn’t. It’s depressing.
Last time I had to cancel a Comcast subscription it took half a day of phone calls, and then I still had to hand-deliver the modem to a pretty dodgy service centre the wrong side of Dorchester
I forget the other details, but remember to never do business with Comcast or their subsidiaries / partners.
(Sorry; off-topic, but I needed to rant)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/call-...
the cable boxes finally got EoL’d, a tech on a service call promised (lying) that the contents would sync to the new boxes, and replaced them. they were empty - my mom was in tears when she realized the DVR contents were gone forever
some of the things recorded had sentimental value (a sibling being listed in the credits of a show, etc) and also that her mental model of what she watched and had in her queue to watch was gone (sports games she had yet to watch, progress through a show)
the stickiness is UI familiarity but also the value of what might not be there with a provider change are both powerful reasons to not make changes
At some point you have to either migrate or smile and accept the hikes.
Oh, and the 'fix' to her busted dot-matrix printer was eBay. I found an exact model for less than $100. Ordered it. Connected it. And she was back in business. She was so happy she made me a big plate of lumpia. :)
"On your next renewal date, August 31, 2026, your account will be transitioned to a Harvest Enterprise plan with Unlimited usage billing.
You will be automatically billed $2,199.50 for your new monthly plan.
You can always downgrade to Flex usage billing, which would have an estimated price of $416.05 and would adapt to your monthly usage.".
Needless to say, after 2 days with Codex the account has been closed.
ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do
They're apparently a great employer in Italy, which is a much better cost structure than the US (from their perspective).
Bending Spoons business model is less buying failing businesses and more buying runouts; ending ongoing investment in them / shifting to maintenance; and and hiking prices to grab as much cash as possible. It's Broadcom's business model (see vmware) just pointed at b2c or software in the smb not enterprise category.
Today's pricing: https://www.getharvest.com/pricing
Pricing in 2023 (I looked at various years): https://web.archive.org/web/20230530052857/https://www.getha...
"Your base rate includes core features. As your team grows, additional invoices, projects, clients, and tasks are billed based on what you use, so you're never overpaying."
Harvest / Bending Spoons moved to charging for usage on top of the per-seat cost. Want to bill a new client? Now you need to pay more per month. Client gave you a new project? That's now a higher monthly fee again. Previously the Solo plan could have as many projects as you liked.
I commented when it happened to me on HN here:
"They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810
Click through to the comment if you want the punchline on how I solved this for myself.
EDIT: Found my Twitter post at the time with my screenshot from inside the Harvest interface: "Your plan is changing soon! You're on a Solo plan and will be moved to the Enterprise plan." mhermann above has an even better screenshot.
https://x.com/syneryder/status/2060707054709567582/photo/1 https://x.com/syneryder/status/2060844948250087816
I haven't shared it because it's rough (you know what vibe code looks like underneath!) and I only implemented the features I needed. So there's no external IFTTT-like hooks, it probably doesn't internationalize well, and I didn't need collaboration features. I also don't want to be on the hook for supporting a codebase that isn't the core of what I do. My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
But I'm surprised to see Harvest is still in the news about this... so, maybe! Thanks for the encouragement!
> My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
Indeed. Yes we can, and we can continually improve upon this process. Onward! Thanks again for sharing!
> Richard Haldenby, head of UK consultancy firm Salentis, told the BBC his monthly bill had risen from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110.
If you estimate 25 employees total, that's $100/seat/mo. That's on the high end for enterprise SaaS but not really shocking enough to be a news scandal. The $130 they paid was laughably low. I also would migrate to a cheaper service ofc but Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing (at least the pre-2025 market) more than anything.
Buzzword nonsense. Wasn’t the $130 they were being charged before the market pricing?
You’re basically justifying that a 25-strong company can afford to pay more. Yes, that is true, but not all products have to extract as much profit as possible from their clients. Turn the problem around, how much does it cost Harvest to run their service for 25 additional users? It’s certainly not two grand a month.
Is the correct pricing that allows growth without alienating customers somewhere in-between? Probably.
Companies with 25 employees generally don't have money to pay a dozen SaaS vendors $2k each every month.
Maybe certain niche products that are critical to the business might be worth that much. But a time tracking & invoicing tool? Definitely not. Source: am actively moving away from Harvest due to this ridiculous price hike.
Just vibe code a vanilla Django app. No front-end frame work. No mobile app (just use your mobile's browser). Basic security baked in. It can handle 100k traffic a day easy which is 99% of small to medium businesses.
There are hundreds of cheap, easy to use hosting providers out there now (an LLM can figure out how to use). Or self host on a Raspberry Pi if you are slightly nerby (there are hundreds of videos on YouTube about it). Hit a technical hurdle: LLM will fix it.
Can't figure it out yourself, just throw a couple grand at a recent graduate to drive the LLM for you. There are tens of thousands who would do it for the experience on their CV.
SaaS is dead!
To be fair, apparently Evernote was not profitable, so some sort of price hike was going to be required no matter what. Bending Spoons is not a good steward of said increase though. Lots of poor communication on price increases from what I've heard from Evernote users.
In case you wanna give it a try: https://www.invoices-templates.com/
Feedback is welcome.
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
But obviously you need 16 seats to drop for every paying seat in order for that to earn less money
It also opens up a new market that takes them more seriously
I dabbled in dropshipping and would literally put the same ebay ad at a 1,000% market next to the (seemingly undervalued) supplier I would buy from
If you searched the item you would see both ads
and people bought from me
(you can’t do that at scale without getting flagged on that platform but a $8,000 pick me up was fine)
One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently).
Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK.
It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health care and selling bottled water in the desert for $1million/bottle.
Or is it not as bad as killing someone by depriving them of life saving water, but better than “American healthcare”?
The use of that scale is not making sense to me.
do you think there is not enough transparency or something? a UX problem in the interface that makes you sympathize more? a fundamental and unexplained discomfort with seeking to earn instead of spend?
what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant?
Lmao lolbertarians now steeping to blank slatism to defend their degeneracy.
I asked a lot of questions, what are the answers?
What in the world are you talking about?
I’m guessing at why you don’t see it that way, I’ve seen similar value systems so I’m transposing those as the near guess onto yours in the meantime
I just made a not-great comparison, since the stakes of a video game item and things like health care are not the same.
What I was trying to get at it is a situation where little value is provided at great cost to the consumer in an imperfect information scenario.
it does seem like either people drank the kool-aid on vibecoding...or it's actually really possible that shitty software that we once relied upon can now be vibed into existence in hours at most.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7491638...
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-p... (June 26, 2025)
I remember fondly the time when computing was build on common interfaces and open formats. A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Now we have closed platforms and enshitification.
Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interests. Private equity (or rather, capital driven operating models in general) cannot enshittify what they cannot capture. If models continue to improve, this cycle can accelerate if generating "good code" continues to become more efficient and less resource intensive over time.
TLDR Building an anti-enshittification software factory.
Some people won't like AI no matter what, but it's hard to argue with results that clearly benefit the public good and empower the little guy vs. public equity or the megacorp.
I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
I think you are mistaken. You still need to pay someone to host the service, but that someone can be a non profit or coop who operates the open source software for you. For example, Karakeep is open source (https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/) but I pay monthly for it so I don't have to maintain an instance. At any time, I can dump my data, startup the open source software elsewhere, and I'm off to the races. Another example is OpenTofu and OpenBao (part of the Linux Foundation) replacing Hashicorp's Terraform and Vault commercial offerings, if your org has the appetite to operate those open source infrastructure offerings.
If the code is open source, I/we can pay anyone willing to run it to run it, either as an individual or a corporation. I can incorporate a non profit or B Corp to run it. The code belongs to anyone, not an entity to be passed around for future potential cashflows by squeezing the customers who require the software it has ownership of. Certainly, maintenance of the subject software and its operation will still require resources and people, but those consuming the software have the control instead of a for profit entity.
Organize software starting with the most profitable and start building with the software factory. For profit software industry margin is software consumer and user opportunity. Someone will still need to operate the open source outputs of this process, that is the economic opportunity. It is no longer "Who will build this?" The question is now "Who will operate this open code for me?"
(i have both worked as an early employee at a SaaS startup and currently have a budget for buying software and SaaS products in the context of risk management and cybersecurity, and also am encouraged by my org to build solutions using AI whenever potentially more advantageous than purchasing a product or SaaS solution, so I am very familiar with this topic)
Edit: Similar vibes to https://huddleup.substack.com/p/the-savannah-bananas-just-co... | https://x.com/JoePompliano/status/2085007330748383441
> The Savannah Bananas spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building their own secondary ticketing platform.
> No fees, every user is verified, tickets can only be sold for face value
> In just 5 months, it's already saved fans $13.69M.
Custom built in-house solutions are much less complex, while being higher quality. You can make it do EXACTLY what you need, instead of spending unbelievable amounts of time doing configuration wrangling to get it to almost work.
It doesn't work for every software, but when it works, it works.
Oracle has joined the chat :) (and them joining the chat is an additional clause to the initial contract, billed at 300% hourly rate, with a minimum block of 900 man-hours)
Rose colored glasses much? We've never had the environment you're describing.
Do you recall the 00's and '10s? It was cluttered with closed systems that had ridiculously high costs to move away from. Look at Oracle, or 15-20 year dominance of MS Outlook and Exchange that was so difficult for many customers to deal with it forced the creation of the hosted exchange business model. Heck, go back another decade and look at Novell and WordPerfect.
We've always had closed platforms, and we've always had alternatives. Some businesses choose between them based on priorities that don't align with yours...
Raise prices 1500% and you'll find out that you were way underpriced, you'll create an opportunity for a competitor, etc.
This isn't cancer medication we're talking about here, it's some dumb SAAS product.
Edit: Appreciate the haters as always but can somebody please explain what they believe a company should be forced to do?
I have a house and have been with every small/medium local landscape company in town, finally settled on a landscape company that was bought by private equity.
The pricing is about the same, but they actually do a good job, the employees are nice, and they answer the phone. You don't have to beg them to come do work and hunt them down, and they can usually come out pretty quick.
SaaS is the perfect model for software that's permanently being worked on.
Yes, because they were conditioned to do so by rent seeking companies.