Bending Spoons turned a $13 invoicing tool into a $134 'enterprise' plan
RIP, Harvest
A self-employed contractor who loved Harvest for its simple time-tracking and invoicing now watches Bending Spoons — the company that gutted Vimeo — raise the price from $13.32 to $133.98 a month by moving everyone to an 'enterprise' plan, while a cheaper 'flex' tier skims an extra 2% on top of card fees. Customer emails now get answered by an LLM. He's looking for a replacement.
I'm no stranger to enshittification, but man, I did not anticipate the speed at which Bending Spoons would drive a perfectly good company into the ground.
- liquidise
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.
- adityaathalye
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)
- cameldrv
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.
- throwaw12
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?
- reynoldsalec
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.
- jamesbfb
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
- noduerme
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?
- mherrmann
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.