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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by jjice
  • Bending Spoons just bought Airtable too, correct?
    by etrautmann
  • Yes, that's correct
    by drbscl
  • GUYS!LLMs killed the SaaS star!

    Just vibe code a vanilla Django app. No front-end frame work. No mobile app (just use your mobile's browser). Basic security baked in. It can handle 100k traffic a day easy which is 99% of small to medium businesses.

    There are hundreds of cheap, easy to use hosting providers out there now (an LLM can figure out how to use). Or self host on a Raspberry Pi if you are slightly nerby (there are hundreds of videos on YouTube about it). Hit a technical hurdle: LLM will fix it.

    Can't figure it out yourself, just throw a couple grand at a recent graduate to drive the LLM for you. There are tens of thousands who would do it for the experience on their CV.

    SaaS is dead!

    by cpill
  • > 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.

    by bpodgursky
  • Absolutely enormous money just for invoicing.
    by pjc50
  • > 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.

    by sph
  • 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.

    by molf
  • Something seems off here, I don't see a huge climb in pricing. I feel $9 a month a seat is inline with SAAS pricing.

    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...

    by havaloc
  • The current prices are labelled starting from. That doesn't tell you what it actually costs.
    by masfuerte
  • It's explained in the article. They now charge for number of projects, clients and tasks, as well as active users.
    by drcongo
  • The small print here is the gotcha:

    "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.

    EDIT: Found my Twitter post at the time with my screenshot from inside the Harvest interface: "Your plan is changing soon! You're on a Solo plan and will be moved to the Enterprise plan." mhermann above has an even better screenshot.

    https://x.com/syneryder/status/2060707054709567582/photo/1 https://x.com/syneryder/status/2060844948250087816

    by SyneRyder
  • 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?
    by drbscl
  • It is if you enjoy feeling indignation rather than acknowledging the fact that some businesses don’t have an upward trajectory.
    by lotsofpulp
  • 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.

    by x0x0
  • A tale as old as time… Bending Spoons is who you sell to when you have developed contempt for your customers.

    ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do

    by dofm
  • They’re literally just a big private equity firm with maybe above average PR
    by coffeebeqn
  • 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.
    by dehrmann
  • They doubled my bill from $130 to $280 per year and graciously also offered me a $19,000 per year plan [1]. I declined and am now using Clockify.

    1: https://x.com/m_herrmann/status/2039876227088163161

    by mherrmann
  • We've been paying ~100 a month for the last 13 years and got an email earlier this month:

    "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.

    by agsqwe
  • 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. :)

    by jimt1234
  • 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.

    by kstrauser
  • 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 =)
    by AlfeG
  • 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.
    by csomar
  • I do some tech consulting on the side and beg people (literally) to switch from Comcast (US TV and Internet Provider) to say YouTube TV, saving them hundreds of dollars a month. They WILL NOT do it, even though I would do all the work, show them how to do it, explain how it's essentially the same but much cheaper, how to use it, and not charge very much to do so (I bill typically less than $60 an hour, and it would only take a few hours to do all that).
    by havaloc
  • The message is obviously:

    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.

    by freediddy
  • I was worried about Komoot when they purchased it but so far no issues -- has even improved somewhat (was already quite good).

    But what happened with Harvest may be an omen.

    by insane_dreamer
  • Absolutely. You have until the end of your subscription to migrate. After that the thumb screws come out.
    by kstrauser
  • I wonder how Bending Spoons categorizes their approaches internally. Komoot is much better than the competition and only slightly premium in terms of cost. It seems that some of their platforms they intend to evolve, and others are there for bleeding dry.
    by browningstreet
  • 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.

    by strenholme