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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Buying unloved spoons and then bending them (sorry)

> 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)

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

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

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

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.

Meanwhile in October...

Berkshire Hathaway invests further $330M in Bending Spoons

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

Just keep rewarding these guys....

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.

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?

You could try plinx

"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"

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

> 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.

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

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

Hall of fame.

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.