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.
Similar story here, except we went from Jira to a custom Plane.so build. Everyone from product to engineering loves it, gets features they want added quickly. And for me, I mainly have Claude keep track of everything (mcp).
The Jira billing administration will remain as a business school case study of dark patterns for years. Can't wait for the EU to put their nose into it.
Loom was another recent one. $10/month -> 200 something. Why? Apparently people with the same domain as me now required an account including developers who left the company 3 years ago.
That’s what I thought. I wonder if that’s true though. I’m sure 80% take no time but actually productizing it takes forever. Now you’ve got a maintenance burden too. I’m really curious how long it would take to implement harvest and the ecosystem around it these days.
Home grown product isn't going to match a saas product's features. But you dont need most of it anyway. so home grown gets the job done. Till it hits entropy or the roi is gone. Problems will show up a few months / years down till it isn't worth the effort or the savings.
Saas products that survive this AI wave are going to come out stronger on the other end.
It took me about 10 days to update an existing business app that I used to include functionality replacing harvest time tracking, invoicing (with a far superior QBO sync, saving us days of people time per month), and forecasting (Forecast was never well integrated with Harvest).
Yes, we are picking up a maintenance burden but the 10x price increase in our case made it a very easy cost/benefit equation, and I decided that as a primary technology in a consulting business it was worth controlling it.
I have a long list of features to add to the app, things that Harvest and Forecast never did to help me plan and run the business. It’s worth noting that 100% of our payments are ACH so I did not have to do Stripe integration or other payment processor integration.
But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.
Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).
We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.
If it's an internal app, you stop adding features when you have all the features you need.
I've vibe-rebuilt several apps for myself and after a certain point I don't feel like anything is missing so I just stop touching it entirely except to fix a rare bug here and there.
I argued this before. I think it makes no sense for eg an estate agents to vibe code a CRM, but if you're a tech firm (or a big firm with a tech department) I think it is worth a shot, especially if you only use 50% of the features in the software you pay for.
So, you’ve spent a good amount of time on it, to where you hope there’s only a week left, it does a lot less, is less accessible, you can’t fully use it yet, and it’s buggy.
I think the only lesson for SaaS providers, yourself and myself included, is how willing people are to cut off their noses to spite their faces. :)
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.
No matter... even a 20% RoI handsomely beats the market. This is a pump-and-dump scheme, but easier because you can directly manipulate market value of the product. No need for market-manipulating pump. SaaS gross margins are enormous, and lock-in is real, which makes this tactic possible.
Also, in such cases, the very biggest customers will probably be the last to exit. Little people will run away as soon as they can. Big ones will cut deals.
The tighter a product is bound to an organization's day-to-day, the harder it is to throw out wholesale. For agencies where hourly billing is bread-and-butter, time-tracking software is used by every single person at least once an hour (if not six minute increments). And that in turn feeds all of finops, which in turn impacts billings and collections, and therefore monthly cash flow. You can't just pluck out Harvest if it is the input to all of that.
So, a savvy PE player like bending spoons can privately bend the rules (pump prices instead of markets) and push commercial relationships to the limit where they are the necessary evil (dump all customers except those that are fully dependent).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 also does PEPPOL invoicing which will be mandatory in our jurisdiction soon and looking at their services even if you don't host yourself the prices are fair.
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?
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)?
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.
Love this. Lots of software companies are sitting on no moat. Not talking about Harvest, but your JIRAs just jam a bunch of crap that most people don't need and then have to raise prices to justify it, before PE comes along.
A software company's value is not just providing software, it's providing reliable software at a good price. The 'good price' for a ton of stuff has plummetted.
Me too. I told Claude to use Beancount for the ledger (I don't want probabilistic accounting!), and very quickly I had a little Go/SQLite/React webapp and some Python scripts that do everything I needed. Since then I've added little tweaks as necessary.
There's a time tracking page where I enter hours by project, and an invoice generation page where I select what to include and get a nice PDF invoice. The Python scripts import my bank statements and auto-reconcile expenses and invoice payments. They connect to Ramp, Expensify, and Gusto APIs for expenses, and maintain a consistent folder structure for reciepts. There's a script to give me monthly cash revenue figures for local taxes and let me know how much excess cash I have for owner distributions.
It's exactly what I need and nothing I don't, has no recurring cost, and it's completely private (all runs on my laptop).
Note, however, that I'm still using Gusto, because they take some responsibility for getting my payroll taxes right, and filing them.
Fable built me a version that covered all of my needs in an hour. (Clients pay me via ACH/wire - maybe it would have taken a day if I needed a stripe integration?). Runs on localhost with SQLite - incredibly basic, but I enjoy it twice as much as Harvest.
I used my Harvest data export and generated PDF invoices as the majority of the “spec”.
Feels silly to open source this, given how little effort it was… (and because I’m certainly not going to respond to others PRs) but I’m happy to if anyone wants.
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.
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).
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 started with mercury recently and absolutely love it. The Books stuff seems to be OK, which is a huuuuge improvement over QuickBooks Online which is now an unwieldy pile of crap that nobody should use.
As of Jan 1 Mercury says they will start charging $30/month, which is cheaper than other alternatives I've found. My vibecoded Beancount-based system probably cost me more in time than using a year of Mercury Books.
Damn, I've been trying to get another job for pretty much this entire year to work up to the $240/yr, now it's going to be $360/yr? That sucks. I mean, I'd pay a lot more for Mercury, but it sucks that I probably won't get to take advantage of the $240 for my first year.
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?
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 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.
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.
Yeah I think a few things are going to bite some people in the ass. Odoo, for example, is "open source" until you need "enterprise" things. Well, it turns out you can point a robot at it and just add those things on your own now. Bonus for releasing your fork under the same license as the community edition... Strange times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe your question answers itself, if you could do this then people would[2]. The next question might be 'What prevents the current LLM based coding tools from being able to do this?"
Now there has always been software that people have used that they "could" write for themselves but they didn't because they didn't want to maintain it. Seems like things that are like that would be good candidates for this right?
But this question shares at least a spiritual geneology with the response to some new startup code that does some thing, and the comment here is "Gee, I can't believe that got this funded, I could write that in a weekend."
The problem is, there are many things that are easy to describe but difficult to pin down, and reality is complicated. So many times I've gone into a project thinking it would be "easy" only to start uncovering layer after layer that are much more involved than I expected.
So no, you cannot '1-shot prompt' pretty much any significant software, and that goes doubly true if it affects your life in any potentially devastating way.
One of the things I'm constantly amused by[1] is the Solitaire program on iOS that is clearly being vibe coded these days because it comes up with daily challenges like 'win a hand in -2739551 moves'. Like no human would ever write code that screwed up basic math but LLMs do it all the time.
[1] Obviously I am easily amused :-). But it is sort of the 'pelican riding a bike' test where you can easily tell what a human would do vs what an LLM does.
[2] EDIT: another commentator says they vibe coded it in a weekend. That would support the hypothesis that the application could be at lease a small number of shots vibe coded. That said, I'd love to see that code and the prompts that led to it.
A lot of people use "one-shot" things not to sell it or provide links but for personal usage and to replace tools etc they used to pay for (as few did in this thread).
But if I had a coworker/employee just constantly finding ways to one-shot tools we're paying for I'd be pretty miffed. If that's all they're doing why are they even there. Just use their salary to pay for the services at that point.
I’ve found that while vibe coding can be effective, anything with complexity takes more than a 1-shot prompt to get there. The amount of work that comprises a single scrum story is about the right amount to do with a single prompt and even that requires some review and revision. So 1-shot your payment system, hell no, but writing a payment system without writing code is possible although I would think it still would take enough time that I wouldn’t choose that over a reasonably priced SaaS.
Come on now, we need a blog post blaming the LLM model when this happens. It always crackw me up when people want to vibe code finance related applications. Let's not devoid ourselves of entertainment, please.
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.
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.
Judging by the conversation elsewhere in the thread, the pricing page isn't nearly clear enough to capture the real impact. I'd wager that'll be true elsewhere as well.
Not saying I like their business model, but if they acquire a company, 10x revenue, lose half their customers, and keep margins the same... they've quintupled that company's profits.
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'm guessing because there are some NSFW pictures that show up at a large size as son as you click on the "photos" page? Surprised they don't just block access to that specifically, instead of the whole website
Also an NSFW warning might have been nice on that page link, website owner. Hopefully the IT guy at work will understand
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?
It may be investors forcing a sale. A lot of 2005-2015 era venture funds have hit their default age limits and may force exits, even at a wash or loss for the investment, just to close out the fund.
Maybe, just maybe, founders sometimes need a way out. Maybe they've given enough of their life, they just want to cash in, and they decide to put up with the downsides (which they almost certainly know about).
Disclaimer: I have never founded a company, so I'm just guessing at what the motivations could be.
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.
You need to read the “Starting from” text on their pricing page right before those prices you see.
You can have those lower monthly fees if you pay a higher percentage of your billings.
The article acknowledged that.
> There’s also a “flex” plan which costs $12.65/mo… but that plan now skims an additional 2% on top of the usual ~3% card transaction fees.
The problems with the Harvest acquisition driving up prices has been discussed a lot among consultants and contractors. This isn’t one person reading their billing page wrong. This is happening to all of their customers.
It’s how the acquiring company operates: Acquire companies, increase billing, accept that most customers will leave but some will stay and make up for the losses.
Indeed, if aphyr billed $5000 a month, just to use a conservative figure if it's a small but significant part of business, that would be $12.65/mo + $100/mo. Oh, that would actually be cheaper. That hike is a doozy. And I think I went way too conservative on the figure.
Those are seat fees, which do not include the new usage fees. I got this email:
> “Looking at your account, you're currently on the Basic plan at $40.00/month with 5 seats, and you're scheduled to renew … on the Enterprise Unlimited plan at $586.50/month…”
So, from $40 to $586.50 for “unlimited” use. Same product. I think the goal was to force everyone onto usage based plans. I dropped spare seats and shifted off unlimited, and its about $75/mo per seat.
But if someone wanted to take over angry Harvest customers, it would probably be a good little business. Guess I just need to rip the bandaid off, and let a prompt run overnight.
I think it's including pay for usage. From the pricing page, beneath both Teams and Enterprise:
> 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.
That's a bit bewildering, lol. Especially since they have annual plans.
This clarifies it:
> On Flex billing your first (sign-up) invoice usually covers seats only, because no projects, tasks, clients, or invoices have been tracked yet. Usage-based charges are calculated from the previous billing period, so they first appear at your renewal — not at sign-up. This is why a bill can jump (e.g. from a seats-only $44 to $404 once usage is added).
That's roughly a 10x multiplier, just like aphyr's jump from $13.32 to $133.98!
You're right something doesn't ad up, and seems fishy (to me, bizarre even). But that isn't the author, it's Harvest after the Bending Spoons aquisition.
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.
Similar story here, except we went from Jira to a custom Plane.so build. Everyone from product to engineering loves it, gets features they want added quickly. And for me, I mainly have Claude keep track of everything (mcp).
The Jira billing administration will remain as a business school case study of dark patterns for years. Can't wait for the EU to put their nose into it.
Loom was another recent one. $10/month -> 200 something. Why? Apparently people with the same domain as me now required an account including developers who left the company 3 years ago.
same, I transitioned my teams from asana to linear this week, saving money for better product
> Asana's core business is now a prompt
What do you mean? Like a claude code one shot prompt?
> one shot prompt
Not OP, but definitely not a one shot prompt. However because of AI it takes far less resources to replicate services like these rather quickly.
That’s what I thought. I wonder if that’s true though. I’m sure 80% take no time but actually productizing it takes forever. Now you’ve got a maintenance burden too. I’m really curious how long it would take to implement harvest and the ecosystem around it these days.
Its a problem but it isn't.
Home grown product isn't going to match a saas product's features. But you dont need most of it anyway. so home grown gets the job done. Till it hits entropy or the roi is gone. Problems will show up a few months / years down till it isn't worth the effort or the savings.
Saas products that survive this AI wave are going to come out stronger on the other end.
It took me about 10 days to update an existing business app that I used to include functionality replacing harvest time tracking, invoicing (with a far superior QBO sync, saving us days of people time per month), and forecasting (Forecast was never well integrated with Harvest).
Yes, we are picking up a maintenance burden but the 10x price increase in our case made it a very easy cost/benefit equation, and I decided that as a primary technology in a consulting business it was worth controlling it.
How much time do you expect you’ll spend improving it? In other words, are you going to keep adding features?
Trying to understand what the LLMs mean to the saas world. Will you have to become a time tracking/invoicing pro? Where’s the break even I wonder.
I have a long list of features to add to the app, things that Harvest and Forecast never did to help me plan and run the business. It’s worth noting that 100% of our payments are ACH so I did not have to do Stripe integration or other payment processor integration.
But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.
Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).
We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.
If it's an internal app, you stop adding features when you have all the features you need.
I've vibe-rebuilt several apps for myself and after a certain point I don't feel like anything is missing so I just stop touching it entirely except to fix a rare bug here and there.
I argued this before. I think it makes no sense for eg an estate agents to vibe code a CRM, but if you're a tech firm (or a big firm with a tech department) I think it is worth a shot, especially if you only use 50% of the features in the software you pay for.
I think it is a figure of speech.
I built a markdown editor and viewer to better than the best I've bought or used in the macos App Store in 81 prompts.
I've built a very good ticketing system and it took a lot more prompts than that.
So, you’ve spent a good amount of time on it, to where you hope there’s only a week left, it does a lot less, is less accessible, you can’t fully use it yet, and it’s buggy.
I think the only lesson for SaaS providers, yourself and myself included, is how willing people are to cut off their noses to spite their faces. :)
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.
They also laid off a bunch of people. One of my friends was there for nearly a decade and was part of the layoffs.
I guess the original owners just wanted out and Bending Spoons was the best option for that.
If they are taking a percentage of billings, that dwindling 10% will just be the smallest customers.
No matter... even a 20% RoI handsomely beats the market. This is a pump-and-dump scheme, but easier because you can directly manipulate market value of the product. No need for market-manipulating pump. SaaS gross margins are enormous, and lock-in is real, which makes this tactic possible.
Also, in such cases, the very biggest customers will probably be the last to exit. Little people will run away as soon as they can. Big ones will cut deals.
The tighter a product is bound to an organization's day-to-day, the harder it is to throw out wholesale. For agencies where hourly billing is bread-and-butter, time-tracking software is used by every single person at least once an hour (if not six minute increments). And that in turn feeds all of finops, which in turn impacts billings and collections, and therefore monthly cash flow. You can't just pluck out Harvest if it is the input to all of that.
So, a savvy PE player like bending spoons can privately bend the rules (pump prices instead of markets) and push commercial relationships to the limit where they are the necessary evil (dump all customers except those that are fully dependent).
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)
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.
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.
Maybe PE needs some serious ball and chains added to it by the law to prevent playing robber baron with no consequences.
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.
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.
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)
"private equity needs to think twice before gouging folks these days"
And yet, they never do.
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
Odoo also does PEPPOL invoicing which will be mandatory in our jurisdiction soon and looking at their services even if you don't host yourself the prices are fair.
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?
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)?
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/
I vibe coded my own harvest or toggl app in one weekend.
Love this. Lots of software companies are sitting on no moat. Not talking about Harvest, but your JIRAs just jam a bunch of crap that most people don't need and then have to raise prices to justify it, before PE comes along.
A software company's value is not just providing software, it's providing reliable software at a good price. The 'good price' for a ton of stuff has plummetted.
Me too. I told Claude to use Beancount for the ledger (I don't want probabilistic accounting!), and very quickly I had a little Go/SQLite/React webapp and some Python scripts that do everything I needed. Since then I've added little tweaks as necessary.
There's a time tracking page where I enter hours by project, and an invoice generation page where I select what to include and get a nice PDF invoice. The Python scripts import my bank statements and auto-reconcile expenses and invoice payments. They connect to Ramp, Expensify, and Gusto APIs for expenses, and maintain a consistent folder structure for reciepts. There's a script to give me monthly cash revenue figures for local taxes and let me know how much excess cash I have for owner distributions.
It's exactly what I need and nothing I don't, has no recurring cost, and it's completely private (all runs on my laptop).
Note, however, that I'm still using Gusto, because they take some responsibility for getting my payroll taxes right, and filing them.
Fable built me a version that covered all of my needs in an hour. (Clients pay me via ACH/wire - maybe it would have taken a day if I needed a stripe integration?). Runs on localhost with SQLite - incredibly basic, but I enjoy it twice as much as Harvest.
I used my Harvest data export and generated PDF invoices as the majority of the “spec”.
Feels silly to open source this, given how little effort it was… (and because I’m certainly not going to respond to others PRs) but I’m happy to if anyone wants.
Same. Feels like there's no point of open source it. I mean, everyone can basically do it on their side.
> but I’m happy to if anyone wants.
Post for the planet? (power/water usage)
An unregistered lurker somewhere is too lazy, shy, or scared to ask, but they’ll start prompting soon :)
Do you have a repo you could point people too? That would be interesting to see.
Same, works great.
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 have never once heard anything positive about Bending Spoons. Sheesh.
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.
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
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!
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...
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 started with mercury recently and absolutely love it. The Books stuff seems to be OK, which is a huuuuge improvement over QuickBooks Online which is now an unwieldy pile of crap that nobody should use.
As of Jan 1 Mercury says they will start charging $30/month, which is cheaper than other alternatives I've found. My vibecoded Beancount-based system probably cost me more in time than using a year of Mercury Books.
Damn, I've been trying to get another job for pretty much this entire year to work up to the $240/yr, now it's going to be $360/yr? That sucks. I mean, I'd pay a lot more for Mercury, but it sucks that I probably won't get to take advantage of the $240 for my first year.
The $240/yr is for the personal bank account, I think? Business bank accounts are different, and at least I'm getting it for free.
Books is the new accounting offering, and is an additional $30/month.
I've been looking at Mercury Personal, yeah.
If you do have a business with an account at Mercury, you get a free personal account with it. I haven't used that yet, just the business account.
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?
I had allmost same expirience with evernote. I ended up making a custom software solution. Works unbelivable well :-).
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 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.
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.
Yeah I think a few things are going to bite some people in the ass. Odoo, for example, is "open source" until you need "enterprise" things. Well, it turns out you can point a robot at it and just add those things on your own now. Bonus for releasing your fork under the same license as the community edition... Strange times.
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.
Well, sure, but it takes years to build trust like that
And it takes mere moments to lose that trust.
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.
I loved there JavaScript library chosen last updated 13 years ago. Thanks y'all
https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen
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?
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.
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.
Bending Spoons did the same thing with Evernote over the last couple years. That seems to be their playbook.
Bending Spoons is known in VC industry as a buyer of failed startups for peanuts. It's their business niche, the "last resort" for founders.
If you're a sole trader in Australia, Rounded (https://rounded.com.au/) is the best.
Can you not 1-shot prompt an agent to build an equivalent piece of software for yourself?
I believe your question answers itself, if you could do this then people would[2]. The next question might be 'What prevents the current LLM based coding tools from being able to do this?"
Now there has always been software that people have used that they "could" write for themselves but they didn't because they didn't want to maintain it. Seems like things that are like that would be good candidates for this right?
But this question shares at least a spiritual geneology with the response to some new startup code that does some thing, and the comment here is "Gee, I can't believe that got this funded, I could write that in a weekend."
The problem is, there are many things that are easy to describe but difficult to pin down, and reality is complicated. So many times I've gone into a project thinking it would be "easy" only to start uncovering layer after layer that are much more involved than I expected.
So no, you cannot '1-shot prompt' pretty much any significant software, and that goes doubly true if it affects your life in any potentially devastating way.
One of the things I'm constantly amused by[1] is the Solitaire program on iOS that is clearly being vibe coded these days because it comes up with daily challenges like 'win a hand in -2739551 moves'. Like no human would ever write code that screwed up basic math but LLMs do it all the time.
[1] Obviously I am easily amused :-). But it is sort of the 'pelican riding a bike' test where you can easily tell what a human would do vs what an LLM does.
[2] EDIT: another commentator says they vibe coded it in a weekend. That would support the hypothesis that the application could be at lease a small number of shots vibe coded. That said, I'd love to see that code and the prompts that led to it.
So many one shot opportunities and yet so few actual links
A lot of people use "one-shot" things not to sell it or provide links but for personal usage and to replace tools etc they used to pay for (as few did in this thread).
Hmm right. Personal usage I can get behind.
But if I had a coworker/employee just constantly finding ways to one-shot tools we're paying for I'd be pretty miffed. If that's all they're doing why are they even there. Just use their salary to pay for the services at that point.
Go ahead and vibe code your payment system. What could go wrong?
Harvest is a stripe wrapper with time keeping. They are not suggesting to vibe code stripe.
I’ve found that while vibe coding can be effective, anything with complexity takes more than a 1-shot prompt to get there. The amount of work that comprises a single scrum story is about the right amount to do with a single prompt and even that requires some review and revision. So 1-shot your payment system, hell no, but writing a payment system without writing code is possible although I would think it still would take enough time that I wouldn’t choose that over a reasonably priced SaaS.
Come on now, we need a blog post blaming the LLM model when this happens. It always crackw me up when people want to vibe code finance related applications. Let's not devoid ourselves of entertainment, please.
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.
> 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)
I was thinking something like the Spirit Halloween of the SaaS world.
RIP Freshbooks which was a simple way to invoice for projects.
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.
I started monitoring/snapshotting the pricing pages of all bending spoon companies, which could become an interesting timeseries dataset.
Judging by the conversation elsewhere in the thread, the pricing page isn't nearly clear enough to capture the real impact. I'd wager that'll be true elsewhere as well.
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50420733
Meanwhile in October...
Berkshire Hathaway invests further $330M in Bending Spoons
https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/berkshire-hatha...
Just keep rewarding these guys....
Not saying I like their business model, but if they acquire a company, 10x revenue, lose half their customers, and keep margins the same... they've quintupled that company's profits.
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.
They killed the free plan I used so i vibed a replacement and haven’t looked back.
Buying unloved spoons and then bending them (sorry)
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.
"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"
I'm guessing because there are some NSFW pictures that show up at a large size as son as you click on the "photos" page? Surprised they don't just block access to that specifically, instead of the whole website
Also an NSFW warning might have been nice on that page link, website owner. Hopefully the IT guy at work will understand
I don't see any NSFW pictures.
The first one it shows, tagged with "Leather" and "Rope"
https://web.archive.org/web/20261109035326/https://aphyr.com...
Also, hope your night is going well. I'm quite tired!
Yeah I got that as well. For a mostly text based blog post it seemed a bit harsh.
But then I thought I am on a 5g travel router in the UK and they have more rigid blocking with a lot of false positive so I just assumed it was that.
There is only one ending I hope to see for Eshittifying Spoons.
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.
You could try plinx
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?
It may be investors forcing a sale. A lot of 2005-2015 era venture funds have hit their default age limits and may force exits, even at a wash or loss for the investment, just to close out the fund.
Maybe, just maybe, founders sometimes need a way out. Maybe they've given enough of their life, they just want to cash in, and they decide to put up with the downsides (which they almost certainly know about).
Disclaimer: I have never founded a company, so I'm just guessing at what the motivations could be.
I don't blame anyone for that choice. But it makes me sad to think that private equity is the only option for founders that want a way out.
why not vibe coding one to replace this service?
Incredible story from the ones who own their platform and how they evolved during time.
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
Well yeah I suppose you can always create your Invoice Generator with M4 and feet boogers
I wouldn't recommend it though
vim suffices. almost all generic native text editors suffice
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
> 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.
Hall of fame.
"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.
You need to read the “Starting from” text on their pricing page right before those prices you see.
You can have those lower monthly fees if you pay a higher percentage of your billings.
The article acknowledged that.
> There’s also a “flex” plan which costs $12.65/mo… but that plan now skims an additional 2% on top of the usual ~3% card transaction fees.
The problems with the Harvest acquisition driving up prices has been discussed a lot among consultants and contractors. This isn’t one person reading their billing page wrong. This is happening to all of their customers.
It’s how the acquiring company operates: Acquire companies, increase billing, accept that most customers will leave but some will stay and make up for the losses.
Indeed, if aphyr billed $5000 a month, just to use a conservative figure if it's a small but significant part of business, that would be $12.65/mo + $100/mo. Oh, that would actually be cheaper. That hike is a doozy. And I think I went way too conservative on the figure.
Funny how nobody gets that the joke here is losing 3% of every invoice even on ACH
But hey please tell me again how the US banking system is so advanced
Those are seat fees, which do not include the new usage fees. I got this email:
> “Looking at your account, you're currently on the Basic plan at $40.00/month with 5 seats, and you're scheduled to renew … on the Enterprise Unlimited plan at $586.50/month…”
So, from $40 to $586.50 for “unlimited” use. Same product. I think the goal was to force everyone onto usage based plans. I dropped spare seats and shifted off unlimited, and its about $75/mo per seat.
But if someone wanted to take over angry Harvest customers, it would probably be a good little business. Guess I just need to rip the bandaid off, and let a prompt run overnight.
I think it's including pay for usage. From the pricing page, beneath both Teams and Enterprise:
> 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.
That's a bit bewildering, lol. Especially since they have annual plans.
This clarifies it:
> On Flex billing your first (sign-up) invoice usually covers seats only, because no projects, tasks, clients, or invoices have been tracked yet. Usage-based charges are calculated from the previous billing period, so they first appear at your renewal — not at sign-up. This is why a bill can jump (e.g. from a seats-only $44 to $404 once usage is added).
https://support.getharvest.com/hc/en-us/articles/31447072608...
That's roughly a 10x multiplier, just like aphyr's jump from $13.32 to $133.98!
You're right something doesn't ad up, and seems fishy (to me, bizarre even). But that isn't the author, it's Harvest after the Bending Spoons aquisition.
Or you're just wrong.