RIP, Harvest

dimes

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

lawgimenez

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

asutekku

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.

hyraki

You could try plinx

singpolyma3

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.

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.

ChrisArchitect

Meanwhile in October... Berkshire Hathaway invests further $330M in Bending Spoons https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/berkshire-hatha... Just keep rewarding these guys....

tcdent

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.

hubraumhugo

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

runako

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.

imagetic

Hall of fame.

drob518

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

w-ll

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

gourneau

I loved there JavaScript library chosen last updated 13 years ago. Thanks y'all https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen

My_Name

"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"

DecoPerson

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!

xrd

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.

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.

ashton314

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

8ig8

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