Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after Bending Spoons acquisition
Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
Harvest, acquired by Bending Spoons in 2025, has raised prices by as much as 1500%, with one UK customer's monthly bill rising from $130 to $2,110. The new usage-based pricing charges for projects, clients, and invoiced revenue, drawing criticism as 'extremely bad practice' and prompting customers to migrate.
It's a classic example of corporate greed over valuing customers.
- strenholme
This is the problem with subscription based software. In the days when people owned the software they used, a price increase like this would simply not be possible. People would be able to upgrade their own software on their own timeline.
Since Windows, despite its many faults, has a rock solid ABI (application binary interface), that piece of proprietary software from 2006 I use today still runs fine, as does that open source game from 2005 which I don’t need to figure out how to recompile.
So, yes, if these companies were able to buy the software instead of renting a SAAS (software as a service), they wouldn’t be subject to a huge bill to continue using what they have been using. And they would be able to still use that software for the foreseeable future.
- freediddy
The message is obviously:
If Bending Spoons buys your vendor, then gtfo as quickly as possible. Don't wait, don't sit around like a sucker and hope you won't get screwed over, you will.
- kstrauser
Every now and then I check out the Evernote Reddit out of morbid curiosity. One person recently announced they’d finally had enough and were leaving because Bending Spoons increased their monthly bill from $20 to $30.
They’d been paying $240/yr for freaking Evernote.
I’m astonished at how much abuse many people will tolerate as an alternative to changing their habits. Bending Spoons made the same discovery, but gleefully, and apparently it makes a profit for them.
I just don’t get it. I mean, I do, but I wish I didn’t. It’s depressing.
- dofm
A tale as old as time… Bending Spoons is who you sell to when you have developed contempt for your customers.
ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do
- mherrmann
They doubled my bill from $130 to $280 per year and graciously also offered me a $19,000 per year plan [1]. I declined and am now using Clockify.
- drbscl
Bending Spoons' entire business model is buying businesses that are failing/non-profitable despite having customers. Is it much of a surprise that the first thing they do is to massively increase pricing to make RoI?
- havaloc
Something seems off here, I don't see a huge climb in pricing. I feel $9 a month a seat is inline with SAAS pricing.
Today's pricing: https://www.getharvest.com/pricing
Pricing in 2023 (I looked at various years): https://web.archive.org/web/20230530052857/https://www.getha...
- jjice
I never used Evernote (thankfully), but since their Bending Spoons acquisition, they seem to have between 50% to 150% increases to their various plans in three years. Doubling the price of your product in such a short time is one thing, but being able to do so because people have 15+ years of data in your service is the icing on the cake.
To be fair, apparently Evernote was not profitable, so some sort of price hike was going to be required no matter what. Bending Spoons is not a good steward of said increase though. Lots of poor communication on price increases from what I've heard from Evernote users.