Bending Spoons 10x Harvest's Price Post-Acquisition
Original: RIP, Harvest
Why This Matters
Serial acquirer Bending Spoons is becoming a cautionary name in niche SaaS circles.
Harvest, a time-tracking and invoicing tool popular with freelancers, raised its monthly price from $13.32 to $133.98 after Bending Spoons acquired it in 2025, while replacing email support with an LLM.
Harvest was, by most accounts, a model small-business SaaS: simple, focused, and reasonably priced. It handled time tracking, invoicing, and Stripe payment integration without trying to expand into full accounting. That changed after Bending Spoons—the same firm that gutted Vimeo—acquired it in 2025.
The new pricing structure moved users onto an 'enterprise' plan at $133.98/month, a 10x jump from the previous $13.32. A cheaper 'flex' plan exists at $12.65/month, but it adds a 2% fee on top of existing card processing costs—meaning Harvest takes a cut of gross revenue simply for wrapping a Stripe form and emailing PDFs.
When longtime user Kyle Kingsbury (aphyr) emailed to complain, he found no human on the other end—just an LLM generating lengthy boilerplate responses. 'I did not anticipate the speed at which Bending Spoons would drive a perfectly good company into the ground,' he wrote. The post drew comments recommending alternatives including Cushion, Odoo, and Billy. Intuit's QuickBooks Online also came up as a cautionary tale, leaving freelancers with few obvious safe harbors.