In this solo commentary, Lauri Eurén outlines the dramatic price hikes Harvest—a popular time‑tracking SaaS—has imposed after its acquisition by the Italian private‑equity firm Bending Spoons. He explains the typical PE acquisition playbook of cost‑cutting and aggressive monetization, and describes Harvest’s shift from a flat per‑user fee to a dynamic pricing model that adds variable charges based on the number of clients, projects, and invoices. Eurén cites anecdotal cases of 1,500% and 10‑fold bill increases, and warns that the 30‑day notice period leaves little time for migration. He then offers a practical response plan: contact Harvest for possible first‑year discounts, evaluate migration timelines, and consider alternatives. Alternatives are split into two buckets: (1) platforms for billable professional‑services firms—highlighting his own Operating.app and other enterprise‑grade tools like Workday‑style solutions; and (2) pure productivity trackers such as Toggl, Timely, ClickUp, Timeglass.ai, plus integrations with issue‑tracking systems like Jira or Linear. The video concludes with a broader observation that private‑equity takeovers often lead to price increases, and encourages viewers to research and select a new time‑tracking stack.
Chapters
So Harvest, a very popular time-tracking tool from New York, has shocked some of its customers this year by informing them of drastic price increases. This is not like a 5% index raise. We're talking about 2x, 5x, all the way up to 17x in their pricing. And you know, this is expected if you know what's happening in the background. Harvest was acquired by an Italian private equity firm called Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons is, I would say, notoriously behind acquisitions of companies like Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, Airtable, and latest Harvest and Miro. They have this playbook of buying mature software businesses that where they see a potential of making a lot more money. So what they'll do is first they'll cut down the costs. So that means reducing the workforce of the company and then centralizing operations. The second part is fixing monetization. And that's what you're seeing with Harvest. Quite arguably, Harvest has been a cheap time tracking platform for many years, at least relatively cheap. And Bending Spoons saw that. What they're doing is even if they hike the prices, you know, 80%, 90%, 10x, the profit that they will get after the mass exodus of most of their customers will be the same, even if not higher, than before the price increase. So they will run a much leaner operation, make more money, and use this to finance their further acquisitions. So let's talk about the Harvest price increase and how it looks. Harvest used to be a very simple proceed-price SaaS. So you paid a per-person price for login access to the platform, you know, billed monthly or annually. They're still keeping that piece. So you will still pay $9 per person for the Teams plan and $14 per person for the Enterprise plan. The thing that changes is they're introducing this dynamic pricing element on top of that. And it's based on how many clients, projects, and invoices you have on the platform. So the more you have of those, the bigger your variable bill might be. Harvest is not disclosing the exact amounts of the variables, but we have anecdotes. We have this one company that got reported by BBC saying that they got a 1,500% increase in their bill. Another company went from, you know, $100 to $2,300. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The internet is full of these stories. And just imagine if you're like a 200-person company and you're paying, let's say, $30,000 a year for Harvest. You know, there's a good chance that bill goes up to $80,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 with a 30-day notice. So let's talk what you can do next if you're on Harvest. So I mentioned that 30-day window that Harvest gives when they inform their customers of the price increase. Well, that's quite short for changing a time tracking platform and your invoicing platform. So it's good that you're aware of this is happening. And now you can plan accordingly. First of all, I would connect— contact Harvest. They've been knowing to give some discounts for the first year of the new price pricing model. So you have a bit more time to think about what to do next with your time tracking stack. Next up, you know, then there's obviously alternatives to Harvest. I divide these into a couple of different buckets. There are the tools that companies that bill for their time use. So agencies, consultancies, professional services firms. And then there are the companies who use Harvest and don't really use the invoicing piece. So they're just tracking time to measure productivity. In the first bucket, there are many tools. I'm the founder of a tool called Operating.app. We're a platform for time tracking, resourcing, and invoicing specifically for tech consulting firms, digital agencies, and professional services teams who need to understand the business behind complex client work. So Our platform is kind of like Harvest and Harvest Forecast put into one. So it's time tracking and resource planning plus invoicing. We usually sit in between the CRM and accounting. So we're at the heart of the professional services delivery. So we're very purpose-built for those sort of companies. So if you kind of ever thought that, you know, you might need some more power out of Harvest Operating or a similar platform, There are many different tools in our category ranging from very enterprisey tools, you know, like Workday has their own equivalent of what we do to kind of these more modern tools like Operating that provide great AI capabilities and MCP servers and whatnot. Next, if you're not really billing your time, you're kind of just using Harvest for productivity tracking, you have tons of options. The world is full of time tracking platforms, both for small teams and then larger teams. So you might look into Toggl, you might look into Timely, you might look into ClickUp. Timeglass.ai, and the likes, and the likes. If you're a product development team, so you run, you know, your issue tracking in Jira or Linear, I would first look into what are the time tracking tools that integrate with your issue tracking. If you're some kind of other team, you know, I don't know, you need to go in and do your research, you know, go to Claude, go to ChatGPT, type in your prompt, what you need, and hopefully you'll find the right tool for the future. Okay, I hope you find this video informative and hope it helped you in navigating what you're going to do next and understanding about what's happening with the Harvest price increase. This is sometimes what happens in business and life. Companies get acquired and almost often it means price increases for customers. I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Good luck with finding or figuring out what you're going to do with your time tracking in the future. Thanks.
