> abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Rose colored glasses much? We've never had the environment you're describing.
Do you recall the 00's and '10s? It was cluttered with closed systems that had ridiculously high costs to move away from. Look at Oracle, or 15-20 year dominance of MS Outlook and Exchange that was so difficult for many customers to deal with it forced the creation of the hosted exchange business model. Heck, go back another decade and look at Novell and WordPerfect.
We've always had closed platforms, and we've always had alternatives. Some businesses choose between them based on priorities that don't align with yours...
In general, I would agree, but I think some small businesses are romanticized.
I have a house and have been with every small/medium local landscape company in town, finally settled on a landscape company that was bought by private equity.
The pricing is about the same, but they actually do a good job, the employees are nice, and they answer the phone. You don't have to beg them to come do work and hunt them down, and they can usually come out pretty quick.
That made sense in times where you packaged software and sold it in a store, once. Now people barely run local-only software any more, most people live in Google Chrome and only use permanently online software.
SaaS is the perfect model for software that's permanently being worked on.
No because technology advanced and now everyone has a permanent online mini-computer with them at all times and we want to have the same documents we have at home/work also available on our phones.
> Haldenby, whose business consists of up to 15 staff in the UK at any one time, with sister companies also in the US and Australia, said he was "in shock" when he received an email detailing the price changes.
> Richard Haldenby, head of UK consultancy firm Salentis, told the BBC his monthly bill had risen from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110.
If you estimate 25 employees total, that's $100/seat/mo. That's on the high end for enterprise SaaS but not really shocking enough to be a news scandal. The $130 they paid was laughably low. I also would migrate to a cheaper service ofc but Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing (at least the pre-2025 market) more than anything.
> Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing
Buzzword nonsense. Wasn’t the $130 they were being charged before the market pricing?
You’re basically justifying that a 25-strong company can afford to pay more. Yes, that is true, but not all products have to extract as much profit as possible from their clients. Turn the problem around, how much does it cost Harvest to run their service for 25 additional users? It’s certainly not two grand a month.
But it's not enterprise SaaS, is it? It's just a time tracking and invoicing tool. And it's not the only SaaS they will need?
Companies with 25 employees generally don't have money to pay a dozen SaaS vendors $2k each every month.
Maybe certain niche products that are critical to the business might be worth that much. But a time tracking & invoicing tool? Definitely not. Source: am actively moving away from Harvest due to this ridiculous price hike.
If you’re leaving and the replacement is still “timer in one app, invoice in another,” that’s the hole. Send a Harvest detailed-time export to lucasstafford.nc@gmail.com and I’ll invoice two clients free from the uninvoiced rows. If Clockify plus Wave already does the whole job for you, ignore this.
We're going to see more of this as the web 2.0 and mobile development booms fade, and I don't have a good solution. What do you do when you're a mature SaaS with a solid customer base, stalled growth, headcount for hypergrowth, and investors looking to move on.
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.
The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. Which they of course should. Paying a subscription for such a thing isn't very smart.
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.
It’s not habit. Some people build complex workflows on these and hold substantial data. Moving requires re-building these workflows which is both time and money consuming. Not everyone will have the proper time and capacity to move at a moment’s notice.
I get that. I do. And yet, once things like this start to happen, it’s exceedingly likely to continue, and you have to start making contingency plans. Evernote increased their annual prices like 40% in early 2024 and it’s been nothing but up since then. That $360 plan was a $125 plan in 2023.
At some point you have to either migrate or smile and accept the hikes.
People migrate at a different cadence but they eventually do. It happened to me before. You are busy with other stuff and just accept the $xx/month cost until you have free time to do the migration.
Octopus Deploy year ago raised our payment from $50 per month to $15000 per year with 3 years in advance. We were able to agree on only a 1 year. This year we with use of 200$ Claude sub - created a "clone" of Octopus for our own use. No more payments to Octopus =)
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.
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?
Airtable and Harvest weren't failing. They just weren't as profitable as hoped, and appear to have eaten most of their TAM and were wasting the engineering dollars being spent building features to increase the TAM.
Bending Spoons business model is less buying failing businesses and more buying runouts; ending ongoing investment in them / shifting to maintenance; and and hiking prices to grab as much cash as possible. It's Broadcom's business model (see vmware) just pointed at b2c or software in the smb not enterprise category.
I sure hope their advertisers are asking for huge amounts of money back since thay can no longer reach millions of people which they were paying to reach previously.
I posted about my friend Igor who had a similar experience on my LI [1] - from a few hundred to $3000+ a month - and a lot of people reacted saying you could simply vibe-code an alternative in hours and save thousands of dollars.
it does seem like either people drank the kool-aid on vibecoding...or it's actually really possible that shitty software that we once relied upon can now be vibed into existence in hours at most.
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.
I'm curious, can you get into trouble by patching their desktop app inside your org?
The whole thing can be coded in a week (reverse-engineer the app, create backend and frontend). Keep the desktop app the same, so that the users don't have to learn anything new.
For 1000 seats, that's more than $100k of money saved per year.
"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."
Harvest / Bending Spoons moved to charging for usage on top of the per-seat cost. Want to bill a new client? Now you need to pay more per month. Client gave you a new project? That's now a higher monthly fee again. Previously the Solo plan could have as many projects as you liked.
I commented when it happened to me on HN here:
"They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year."
They doubled my bill from $130 to $280 per year and graciously also offered me a $19,000 per year plan [1]. Needless to say, I am no longer their customer. Clockify is a decent alternative.
I helped a friend-of-a-friend around 2010 with a 'computer issue'. She ran the original version of QuickBooks on an old-ass PC, connected only to a dot-matrix printer (no internet). Everything worked fine, except the printer was toast; she wanted me to fix it. She said she went to Best Buy for a replacement dot-matrix printer, and the staff pretty much laughed at her, told her to just upgrade. I asked her why she has never done that, upgrade her setup - PC, Windows, QuickBooks, printer, etc. She said everything worked fine for her, so why pay money to upgrade? Back then I thought she was kinda crazy, just being stubborn. But after a few years of reading about companies like Broadcom and Being Spoons, I get it. Good for her.
Oh, and the 'fix' to her busted dot-matrix printer was eBay. I found an exact model for less than $100. Ordered it. Connected it. And she was back in business. She was so happy she made me a big plate of lumpia. :)
This is the same playbook Bending Spoons used for Meetup.com, where they jacked up prices so high after acquiring it that it's no longer a viable platform for consumers
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadI remember fondly the time when computing was build on common interfaces and open formats. A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Now we have closed platforms and enshitification.
Rose colored glasses much? We've never had the environment you're describing.
Do you recall the 00's and '10s? It was cluttered with closed systems that had ridiculously high costs to move away from. Look at Oracle, or 15-20 year dominance of MS Outlook and Exchange that was so difficult for many customers to deal with it forced the creation of the hosted exchange business model. Heck, go back another decade and look at Novell and WordPerfect.
We've always had closed platforms, and we've always had alternatives. Some businesses choose between them based on priorities that don't align with yours...
Raise prices 1500% and you'll find out that you were way underpriced, you'll create an opportunity for a competitor, etc.
This isn't cancer medication we're talking about here, it's some dumb SAAS product.
I have a house and have been with every small/medium local landscape company in town, finally settled on a landscape company that was bought by private equity.
The pricing is about the same, but they actually do a good job, the employees are nice, and they answer the phone. You don't have to beg them to come do work and hunt them down, and they can usually come out pretty quick.
SaaS is the perfect model for software that's permanently being worked on.
Yes, because they were conditioned to do so by rent seeking companies.
> Richard Haldenby, head of UK consultancy firm Salentis, told the BBC his monthly bill had risen from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110.
If you estimate 25 employees total, that's $100/seat/mo. That's on the high end for enterprise SaaS but not really shocking enough to be a news scandal. The $130 they paid was laughably low. I also would migrate to a cheaper service ofc but Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing (at least the pre-2025 market) more than anything.
Buzzword nonsense. Wasn’t the $130 they were being charged before the market pricing?
You’re basically justifying that a 25-strong company can afford to pay more. Yes, that is true, but not all products have to extract as much profit as possible from their clients. Turn the problem around, how much does it cost Harvest to run their service for 25 additional users? It’s certainly not two grand a month.
Companies with 25 employees generally don't have money to pay a dozen SaaS vendors $2k each every month.
Maybe certain niche products that are critical to the business might be worth that much. But a time tracking & invoicing tool? Definitely not. Source: am actively moving away from Harvest due to this ridiculous price hike.
But obviously you need 16 seats to drop for every paying seat in order for that to earn less money
It also opens up a new market that takes them more seriously
I dabbled in dropshipping and would literally put the same ebay ad at a 1,000% market next to the (seemingly undervalued) supplier I would buy from
If you searched the item you would see both ads
and people bought from me
(you can’t do that at scale without getting flagged on that platform but a $8,000 pick me up was fine)
They're apparently a great employer in Italy, which is a much better cost structure than the US (from their perspective).
Whom
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.
are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.
BTW QB desktop has also been seriously enshittified.
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.
At some point you have to either migrate or smile and accept the hikes.
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.
But what happened with Harvest may be an omen.
Bending Spoons business model is less buying failing businesses and more buying runouts; ending ongoing investment in them / shifting to maintenance; and and hiking prices to grab as much cash as possible. It's Broadcom's business model (see vmware) just pointed at b2c or software in the smb not enterprise category.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-p... (June 26, 2025)
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
it does seem like either people drank the kool-aid on vibecoding...or it's actually really possible that shitty software that we once relied upon can now be vibed into existence in hours at most.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7491638...
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.
The whole thing can be coded in a week (reverse-engineer the app, create backend and frontend). Keep the desktop app the same, so that the users don't have to learn anything new. For 1000 seats, that's more than $100k of money saved per year.
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...
"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."
Harvest / Bending Spoons moved to charging for usage on top of the per-seat cost. Want to bill a new client? Now you need to pay more per month. Client gave you a new project? That's now a higher monthly fee again. Previously the Solo plan could have as many projects as you liked.
I commented when it happened to me on HN here:
"They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810
Click through to the comment if you want the punchline on how I solved this for myself.
1: https://x.com/m_herrmann/status/2039876227088163161
"On your next renewal date, August 31, 2026, your account will be transitioned to a Harvest Enterprise plan with Unlimited usage billing.
You will be automatically billed $2,199.50 for your new monthly plan.
You can always downgrade to Flex usage billing, which would have an estimated price of $416.05 and would adapt to your monthly usage.".
Needless to say, after 2 days with Codex the account has been closed.
Oh, and the 'fix' to her busted dot-matrix printer was eBay. I found an exact model for less than $100. Ordered it. Connected it. And she was back in business. She was so happy she made me a big plate of lumpia. :)