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Comment by reynoldsalec | Hacker News Reader

Used Harvest for many years. Was talking to an agency owner friend of mine who had been using it, but once Bending Spoons jacked up the price they jumped for their own self-cooked version.

The "SaaS is dead" narrative is a bit overblown, but private equity needs to think twice before gouging folks these days.

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Maybe PE needs some serious ball and chains added to it by the law to prevent playing robber baron with no consequences.

How is that supposed to work when they are often the same people writing the laws?

As the article points out, the market is in the process of fixing the problem. No violence required.

This law seems really hard to write, doesn't it? And what's Bending Spoons done that should actually be wrong? I could imagine such a law helping them. As a small company, companies Bending Spoons is making opportunity for me to build competing products at a price people actually like (in my case, it's actually IBM, but similar disregard for customers). So please, Bending Spoons, buy more companies so we can get some churn on these companies. As long as we can avoid regulatory capture.

Bending Spoon is not owned by a PE, but they act like so. They somehow managed to borrow huge amounts of money from banks and investors on their own and use that money to buy other companies like a PE would do. Did not know Harvest, but Komoot, Vimeo and more, all of them ruined.

I'm guessing the calculation they made was the increase in price times a lower number of customers is the same or higher and requires fewer support "resources" (humans).

What people don't realize is that if the business sold in the first place it's because the original owners weren't being able to make it profit as it should

Economies of scale are a big deal, hence why the comparison between the Stripe fee and Harvey fee is meaningless

(of course you're free to go to the competition or Vibe your own, but then you start noticing the actual cost of the service vs value added)

Business sometimes sell because the people who own them just want to move on. It’s not always that they are failing.

"private equity needs to think twice before gouging folks these days"

And yet, they never do.

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