We recently went through a version of this with Asana when we discovered their "per seat" pricing is sold in groups of 5 seats. Going from 5->6 users adjusts your bill to 5->10 seats, doubling your price.

It isn't about the money, the principle is gross. Thankfully Asana's core business is now a prompt. We are nearly done replacing it with a native, self hosted client. Will post about it once it is hardened through use. Cancelling our Asana subscription this week.

To SaaS providers (myself included) it has never been easier to leave your service due to mistreatment. Take note.

It's a shame. They tried to increase our prices about 800%. I actually liked the software and used it for over 15 years across a couple of services businesses.

They do have this "usage based pricing" where you pay them for each user, but then also for each project and customer, and then a percentage of your billings. It's completely absurd to be paying them a percentage when you receive payments by wire and all they're doing is emailing an invoice.

Anyhow caveat emptor. Looking at their website they do not show the actual pricing. They just say it's "starting from" $9/seat or $14/seat, but you only pay that if you don't use the software at all.

As far as I can tell, what Bending Spoons has figured out is that they can raise prices 8-10x, but only maybe 60-80% of their customers will cancel because it's a big hassle, and so the profits go up massively for a while. They will probably even retain a hard core of say 10% of their original userbase for some time.

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.

Odoo CE (community edition) is open source and has built in stripe integration (along with a few other payment providers) that will invoice on time spent against projects/tasks.

If you’re in a region that has l10n for accounting (via the OCA), you’d be able to handle all your tax compliance also. Only caveat to Odoo CE is you’d need to self host, which in itself is not that difficult.

odoo.com github.com/odoo/odoo github.com/oca

Orgmode within and without Emacs, to the very bitter end.

Basically, the same reason for Excel-ops, except in plain text, version-controlled, and almost limitlessly extensible.

Speaking as an average joe indie software builder (nowhere as awesome as Aphyr), for this reason and many others for all my indie productivity / publishing / business operations workflows.

Even if I were to do time-and-materials hourly billing, which I studiously avoid, I can't think of a better base to use. In the cases where a customer's constraints would mandate I work with whatever software they are running, I can, in most cases, continue being org-first and integrate with their system (export/import / upload/download).

My aversion is because, in aggregate, unchecked SaaS-dependence for business operations becomes a part time job in itself, both cognitively and operationally. This is because SaaS means constant changes, small and big.

So I try to keep my workflow mine, and eat the "ick" of the eventually unavoidable "plug in" work to interface with third party systems. Because the third party systems will effectively go away sooner than later. My stuff needs to keep working the way I need it to, to stay sane.

(edit: add SaaS reason, reformat to put excel and orgmode up top)

Is it fair to say, the moment private equity companies like Bending Spoon acquires the company, you can start building the same product and if you complete the project by the time they mess up the product/pricing, you will get a lot of customers and have a nice business?

Bending Spoons tried to 2x my Harvest bill on the usage-based plan and 146x (yes, that's not a percentage) on the unlimited plan. I switched to Clockify [1] and it works well.

1: https://clockify.me/

We just got vimeoed (a handful of videos with hundreds to low thousands of views per year) and a 10x to our bill.

We were able to build a replacement in an afternoon with the features we use.

I know less technical orgs arent quite there yet, but the moat on this stuff is surely evaporating quickly.

I vibe coded my own harvest or toggl app in one weekend.

Yeah, my consultancy had used Harvest for over a decade. It just worked; it did what we needed, and I didn't think twice about the $1500/yr or so bill... Until this year when they dumped us over into "enterprise" and charged my business card TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. I found that charge two days after it posted when I went in to remove a seat for a contractor who had moved on. I absolutely lost my shit. I couldn't get ahold of anyone at harvest at all, and wound up executing a charge back. Finally someone reached out via email with a "deal" charging us "only" $5000/yr (for literally the same service we had used prior). I get an increase of maybe even 10% but this was pure nonsense. Ultimately harvest refunded us and the chargeback was reversed, which came with its own set of problems.

In response we have moved every SaaS we still use over to monthly billing. For time tracking, we're now using an internal vibe coded app, and it does exactly everything I need it to do. These fools really screwed themselves, IMO. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who would have just kept paying for and using the software indefinitely.

they raised my price from $13.32 to $133.98 per month by moving everyone to a new “enterprise” plan and “unlimited” usage billing model, which is, as far as I can tell, exactly what I had before.

What is the logic here? Do they really think people wouldn't notice or wouldn't get pissed? Or have they run the numbers and decided one "enterprise" customer is worth a 100 small businesses? This makes no sense even before AI, but now? If anything, SaaS providers should be providing much better service for a reasonable price to fight off homegrown AI solutions, no?

I have never once heard anything positive about Bending Spoons. Sheesh.

Bending Spoons recently bought MileIQ, the drive tracking, quick classification & team drive reporting app that we use for our vehicle logbooks for the Australian Fringe Benefits Tax record-keeping requirements. Going to have to find a new solution now! Mostly likely something OSS. I might even ask Claude/Codex to integrate that app’s background tracking features into our own staff iOS app, so I don’t need to rely on an underpaid OSS iOS dev for the App Store publishing!

Mercury bank handles invoicing quite well. If you're manually preparing invoices (as I assume OP is given the need to include hours), invoicing is free. Obviously payments are included (cards via Stripe).

They have recently expanded into bookkeeping, but I haven't used that. If you're just using the bank account & manual invoices, it's free.

Used Bonsai happily for years before that. I see they have been bought by Zoom, so I would expect some changes.

I'm not quite sure SaaS is dead but I can't see the price not being depressed by AI clones.

Maybe hard to see "Workday" being replaced but I also never thought AI could one-shot all the stuff it does today.

Especially because you end up using half the features, building integrations, and working around all the limitations in off the shelf software - the cost benefit to just clone and get exactly what you need is hard to deny.

We experienced the same thing. The cost of moving is high because you have been on their platform for years. The cost of staying is high because of the price increases. Either choice feels bad.

We decided to move in the end to our self-built platform [1]. As a software company we had the experience to do it: the application development, the infrastructure... It still took a lot of work.

We opened it to the public some time ago, and people seem to like it. We hope to have enough people on the platform one day so it is self-sustaining. At the moment it's a cost that we willingly pay to have something that works well for our own business. Staying would have been cheaper in the end, but this one is more fun.

EDIT: feel free to let us know if something important is missing for you. We are open to suggestions. The current plan is to add invoicing next (including peppol integration).

[1] https://www.abejora.com

I get the complaining but very profitable businesses don't sell themselves to Bending Spoons.

Typically Bending Spoons buys a successful product with lots of user by a company that couldn't control the spending, took too much investment and sells so that investors can recoup some of the money.

Great product, badly managed business.

This might not apply to Harvest. The details of their business before acquisition or the sale price are not public but logic dictates that the business wasn't doing that well, and owners sold it to salvage as much as possible or it was doing well and owners sold to get a big, one-time paycheck and be free from day to day drudgery of running a company.

I always wonder: why couldn't the management of the company that sold to Bending Spoons do what Bending Spoons does.

It's not rocket science: reduce the cost and increase revenue (by increasing prices)?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=harvest%...

Searches for "harvest alternatives" has skyrocketed in the last year or so.

I started monitoring/snapshotting the pricing pages of all bending spoon companies, which could become an interesting timeseries dataset.

I loved there JavaScript library chosen last updated 13 years ago. Thanks y'all

https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen

We also just encountered the new pricing structure when we received the notice for our annual renewal. I am able to limit the impact to a roughly $200/30% increase due to the prior year basis, but with no changes to the pricing structure, I’ll jump another $2k when I renew next year.

The big impact will be due to us trying to serve a larger number of small clients. Since pricing tracks clients/projects/tasks, our 2028 pricing will rise substantially as we add clients (or decide to track projects more granularly for existing clients).

The move feels like enough of a price gouge that I have also decided to move away from harvest. With a year to plan and execute, I will likely build a solution into our client portal. It won’t take much effort to replace what we got from harvest, and there’s an opportunity to create something that further automates the rest of our billing and tax workflow.

I don’t tend to wish ill for others, but I’m happy to see similar anecdotes in this case. My gut is that bending spoons has done lasting damage to the brand. I wasn’t considering a change before I encountered the new pricing. But now I can confidently say that there’s not much they could offer to keep me as a customer beyond 2027. The trust is broken, and they have vastly overestimated their value proposition.

Freelancer here, I also ran my own cheap SaaS for time tracking / invoicing from around 2005 to 2010.

I've used Waveapps since I shut my own service down. It's pretty complete as an invoicing and report generator, free if you're not taking payments through them, reasonably priced if you are. I don't accept credit cards anyway, since as the OP pointed out, why would I want to give away 3% of my annual income?

This seems to be the gist of the story for those of us in the UK not allowed to read it [1].

When I was self-employed in the UK, I used Freeagent which worked very well.

[1] https://news.lavx.hu/article/bending-spoons-raises-harvest-p...

Hello! As someone who also went through this nightmare after nearly 15 years on Harvest, I've built what I really believe is a worthy competitor, Zebu: https://zebu.work - for only €5/month (no usage based pricing).

Please make use of our free trial, I really stand behind it, have been using it for my freelance/studio now and it has a full Harvest migration.

My only real difficulty has been marketing/gaining traction as buying advertising for such a low-fee project has proved to be very difficult/impossible!

My family's small business went through a similar saga with Harvest and I built an alternative for them. They now do all their time tracking and invoicing through it, and it's used by a handful of other practices too. Flat rate pricing not seat based!

https://billable.to/

I went through the same process earlier this year after receiving a note that they intended to raise my annual charge to over $1100, from the $150 or so I’d been paying for a decade or more.

In the end I opted to roll my own invoicing solution and keep Harvest for time tracking, since it saved me having to reimplement the Mac app and meant my costs actually dropped to $110 or so. I’m under no illusion that the vampires won’t close that loophole as well, but since I’ve had good success vibecoding some Swift apps in recent months I’ll be happy to take on the time tracking app next time too. It’ll be nice to stop sending them any money regardless.

Shortly after the acquisition I logged in to Harvest to send the month's invoices, and found that doing so [without using their payment portal] was no longer possible with a free account.

Annoying, but worth the $10 / month for the basic plan not to have to migrate to another service so I decided to upgrade.

Helpfully there was a "Upgrade your account to send this invoice" button which I clicked. I'd filled out my credit card details and was about to hit submit when I realised the payment total was for more than $10 / month.

Turns out the upgrade flow subscribes you to the Super Mega Deluxe plan, even though the CTA implied it would just do the upgrade necessary to send invoices again.

A scummy dark pattern. I abandoned the upgrade and migrated to Zoho invoice instead.

This merely opens up an avenue for a competitor to step in and take away market share from Harvest / Bending Spoons. Simply buying companies and increasing prices by 1000% is only going to get you so far.

A company i used to work in actually ditched harvest and implemented their own solution (before age of llms) because their pricing was quite steep even before the price ramp. They paid hundreds of dollars monthly just for project mamagement and time tracking tool, and this can be big for someone not us based.

Should try PotatoTimer! It's a bit different, I haven't built a stripe integration into it, but it's something I've been building for myself for my freelance work and for tracking my time learning piano, working out, etc.

I haven't shared it around much (not fully finished) so any feedback would be welcome. It works offline, no account needed.

time tracking, payroll and invoicing software is ridiculously overpriced

really eats into margins for what should be simple

that being said, I can also see that the market can bear it

there is still room for undercutting competitors or rolling it out yourself much easier now, but only for your specific use case

Can you not 1-shot prompt an agent to build an equivalent piece of software for yourself?

Bending Spoons did the same thing with Evernote over the last couple years. That seems to be their playbook.

Hah, back in my consulting days I was a Harvest customer, too. It was the only time-tracking/invoicing service out there that wasn't bloated and slow. Sad (but unsurprising) end.

If you're a sole trader in Australia, Rounded (https://rounded.com.au/) is the best.

It's 2026. You don't need to pay for simple integration stuff anymore. You don't need to pay for a Stripe wrapper.

Have you tried any of the agentic AIs?

I've had a Harvest account for over a decade, and it was always admittedly a little bit too cheap. But two months ago, they changed the pricing based on what you gross, so essentially putting a flat tax on my earnings.

I knew it was going to be more expensive, but when I got the bill this month and saw the price was over $200 and then noticed the Bending Spoons LLC tagline at the bottom, that was the end.

Claude is backing up all of my data via the API and will be vibe coding my next invoice.

Meanwhile in October...

Berkshire Hathaway invests further $330M in Bending Spoons

https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/berkshire-hatha...

Just keep rewarding these guys....

Trying using Meetup without paying a ridiculous amount without a shitty screen popping up on literally every operation dinging you to pay it. As far as I can tell, Bending Spoons' specialty is buying decaying but popular sites then doing nothing to improve the software while trying to charge far more than it was ever worth.

> but I don’t think I need to spend 2% of my gross revenue to send a couple PDFs a month and wrap a Stripe web form.

The question still is: why a SaaS that generates a couple PDFs a month and a Stripe wrapper needed (I suppose) so many employees and VC funding?

BS is reminding us all of those follies. It’s the company that, after calling out that the emperor is naked, gets to choose what he wears next.

Incredible unforced error by Bending Spoons to en*tificate Aphyr himself. As usual, his analysis is clear, calm and compelling.

Is this the company that bought AOL. lol are they just pe for millennials (or by millennials)

RIP Freshbooks which was a simple way to invoice for projects.

I had allmost same expirience with evernote. I ended up making a custom software solution. Works unbelivable well :-).

You could try plinx

Wow, harvest still exists?

My first tech job ever pretended we were supposed to track our hours in harvest. Which of course no one did. So long ago.

"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"

Freshbooks is another one that is quickly going downhill.

In the last couple of years...

They switched all Stripe accounts to their own Freshbooks branded new Stripe account. This meant the last 7 years of my business transactions are now on a "Legacy" Stripe account and archived and all new transaction go through the new Freshbooks branded Stripe account. They are also taking a % of every transaction now.

In addition to this they have increased the monthly price twice claiming new features and the cost for building them. I'm not using any of the new features and I haven't increased my usage (e.g., no more recurring invoices during this time).

They also redesigned (rewrote?) the entire application which requires additional clicks and screens to perform daily functions.

My dream would be for companies to keep their interface / UI the same and incorporate new features into that design.

In closing, it doesn't make sense to me that organizations like Bending Spoon would buy a much loved service and change anything. It's profitable, just go through the feature request list and incrementally improve it, don't change the whole application, billing structure, and UI. People used Harvest for all of the reasons you removed. Or, even better, follow the Basecamp model, it's worked very well for DHH.

an invoice can be a small gob of digital (or if printed, ink on paper) text. it can be emailed. it can be generated from a template by a tiny shell script. feels like an easily solved problem for many decades now. its hard only if we want it to be.

and no AI needed, youngsters

I got annoyed of all the crappy invoicing tools, so we built something custom for https://m9rx.com/

I've also had to build a bunch of small tools since we don't want to be locked into crappy cloud services.

We also funded a small improvement into hledger, because we are trying to use a % of our income to vote with our feet.

If people really want to use our invoicing and other small tools, we'll consider open sourcing them or selling them for cheap. Not sure if this is useful or a distraction.

Incredible story from the ones who own their platform and how they evolved during time.

They killed the free plan I used so i vibed a replacement and haven’t looked back.

There is only one ending I hope to see for Eshittifying Spoons.

Buying unloved spoons and then bending them (sorry)

I know a lot of people who have been laid off when Bending Spoons acquired their company so I'm a little miffed when I see this.

I had to use Harvest when I did some consulting last year. I don't know the revenue numbers for Harvest. But, the company that asked me to use Harvest was a tiny software consultancy. I always assumed Harvest was something small companies used, not big ones.

Those small companies would be very sensitive to price changes, and very motivated to use Claude to build their own alternative if it meant keeping $100 in the bank.

I think this might be the moment when Bending Spoons business model is exposed. I cannot imagine large enterprises using Harvest en masse and those are the only companies who will stick with BS (pun not intended) when they run their playbook. Small orgs will certainly take five minutes with Claude. This isn't a SaaS that is really sticky.

The question is, is Harvest truly network partition tolerant? How about under clock skew condition

> Any of y’all freelancers have a system you like?

I do all of my company accounts, including invoicing, via FreeAgent, which these days I have a Claude Code instance running via API key.

Why is it that so many decent companies ends up being sold to private equity? Is it a reality of the economics, do people get greedy, do people get burned out?

Private equity almost always ruins a company, normally the culture first and the product thereafter. I can't imagine the creators being completely ignorant or feeling good about that?

why not vibe coding one to replace this service?

What a shitty way to treat your loyal customers, cashing out for a pure value extraction acquisition.

Hall of fame.

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"You’d track how many hours or weeks you spent on a project, put together an invoice, email it to the client, and close it out when they paid."

But you can more easily do that with AI nowadays. The AI can even figure out what you're working on, and when.

The Harvest website lists the following (annually billed) plans:

- Free (obviously free)

- Teams $9 a month

- Enterprise unlimited $14 a month

The writer of this article claims they got upgraded to $133.98 a month plan, but looking at the site, such plan does not even exist.

Something is a bit fishy here or they accidentally added an extra 3 to the $13.98 or mistook the yearly price for a monthly price.