Harvest users balk as Bending Spoons raises prices after 2025 buyout
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
A longtime Harvest user says his price rose from $13.32 to $133.98 a month after Bending Spoons bought the service.
The contractor is now looking for new invoicing software, a warning for other small-business tools.
Background
Harvest is a time-tracking and invoicing service with a Stripe integration, historical billing charts and an invoice table. Bending Spoons, the company that bought Harvest in 2025 and that the author says gutted Vimeo, moved customers onto a new "enterprise" plan and "unlimited" usage billing model. A self-employed contractor of about a decade, who had recommended Harvest to every self-employed person he met, wrote about the change and says it is now time to find a new invoicing service.
How it unfolded
- 2025Harvest was bought out by Bending Spoons, the company that gutted Vimeo.
- recentlyThe author's price rose from $13.32 to $133.98 per month after everyone was moved to a new "enterprise" plan and "unlimited" usage billing model.
- recentlyThe author wrote to Harvest about the price change and found they no longer read customer emails, responding instead with a Large Language Model.
Key terms
- Stripe
- A financial services and software company providing payment-processing software and APIs for online businesses.
- Large Language Model
- A machine learning model trained on huge amounts of text to generate, summarize, translate, and analyze language.
Source: Wikipedia
Who’s saying what
- Caution
- The author says Harvest was exactly what you want from small-business software — a well-defined problem solved with a reliable, simple interface at a reasonable monthly price — and he did not anticipate the speed at which Bending Spoons would drive a perfectly good company into the ground.
- Public
- Commenter Lucas Cherkewski says it was such a quality service that he switched years back to Cushion, which has invoicing integrated with Stripe with no markup.
Still unverified
The author states the "unlimited" enterprise plan is "AFAICT" exactly what he had before.