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.
This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs). They'd have to find somewhere to run it and pay someone to keep an eye on that deployment for when it does something weird that affects service. Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
AI tools do show promise of being able to handle all these things in the future, but at least for the past few years these customers had an incredible bargain vs what it would have cost them to run and maintain the application even if they had the source code for free.
If they had used a desktop Win32 binary as you suggested, that would also have needed security updates, and it wouldn't have worked on phones or macbooks, and it would have needed a back end service (see above).
> If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs).
We don't have to make everything a javascript app running on the open internet. Though even an insecure node server could be perfectly fine if deployed on the corpnet behind a VPN...
Thats a very spicy threat model post the age of IoT.
Any stray device you may not even be aware of can rip that assurance apart.
A fully locked down network can in theory enable this however, very few enterprises actually are strict enough for this to be enforced across the whole network.
> This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs
Stop. This doesn't have to be true...
> Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
This worked just fine, also, until Apple decided to have meetings with devs of popular software to push for subscriptions. Not we have the current state of bullshit.
> day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js
I do not believe this is the case at all. If I'm running software locally that works on local files that I control then there is no security issue. Even if there are bugs that can be exploited, they won't be exploited because I'm in control of the data.
This whole mess is a non-issue and is only there as an excuse to push this horrible web SaaS subscription nonsense that we have. It's nothing but a stupid excuse to justify daily software updates so that companies and inject ads and remove features to push subscriptions.
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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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).
I think that Comcast is a USA only service so have no idea of what people watch or listen to on Comcast. But above all, why do they need a consultant to do the switch? There is more to it than a credit card and a subscription?
Comcast is an ISP and Cable Television provider, with a terrible reputation. When I cancelled my service when them I had to mail the modem back to them. I did it UPS shipping with tracking, because I know not to trust them. They never-the-less claimed they did not receive it, and billed me for the device. Eventually - armed with the shipping confirmation - they acknowledged receipt of the package, but insisted that the box was empty and that I mailed them an empty box.
I forget the other details, but remember to never do business with Comcast or their subsidiaries / partners.
A few years ago, someone recorded a phone call with a Comcast retention rep who kept trying to tell someone to not cancel their service; it took nearly 20 minutes for someone to cancel their service:
Oof. I upgraded my wife’s business from Comcast to AT&T. This is the only context, ever, where you’ll hear me describe AT&T as an upgrade to anything. I returned Comcast’s modem to the local office, photographed them accepting it from me, and archived the receipt and photos for safekeeping. I do not routinely do that sort of thing with other vendors.
That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damaged. I AM doing business with a Verizon MVNO (Visible, just because they provide the best deal for me, and don't really even HAVE customer service), but I will NEVER directly do business with Verizon again.
Last time I had to cancel a Comcast subscription it took half a day of phone calls, and then I still had to hand-deliver the modem to a pretty dodgy service centre the wrong side of Dorchester
Just because it's easy for say you and me, does not mean it's easy for others to do. Helper seems like a more appropriate word here, consultant being a loaded term these days!
People are fickle, resistant to change, and do not default to action broadly speaking. Various levels of handholding and potentially encouragement can be required, and even then, some folks will still be like "Nah, I'm good." Humans are tricky.
i’m sure my parents could save thousands with YouTube TV - they have FiOS as a tv + internet provider. they’ve used those DVRs for probably two decades and know the interface and how to navigate it. that’s definitely part of it.
the cable boxes finally got EoL’d, a tech on a service call promised (lying) that the contents would sync to the new boxes, and replaced them. they were empty - my mom was in tears when she realized the DVR contents were gone forever
some of the things recorded had sentimental value (a sibling being listed in the credits of a show, etc) and also that her mental model of what she watched and had in her queue to watch was gone (sports games she had yet to watch, progress through a show)
the stickiness is UI familiarity but also the value of what might not be there with a provider change are both powerful reasons to not make changes
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
There wasn't much skill involved, but if there's credit to be had for giving Claude a few screenshots, API docs and iterating on the design while doing human product testing, then I guess I'll take it!
I haven't shared it because it's rough (you know what vibe code looks like underneath!) and I only implemented the features I needed. So there's no external IFTTT-like hooks, it probably doesn't internationalize well, and I didn't need collaboration features. I also don't want to be on the hook for supporting a codebase that isn't the core of what I do. My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
But I'm surprised to see Harvest is still in the news about this... so, maybe! Thanks for the encouragement!
No worries, and you're welcome! My ask for you to share wasn't to have to provide support (as an open source project maintainer, I completely understand), but I am gathering examples of this type of build mode, I think there is great value in building a positive feedback loop where it becomes easier to build replacements when the rug is pulled. This potentially "outruns the enshittification" if you will, a meta version of open source that sits on top of the building via tokens.
> My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
Indeed. Yes we can, and we can continually improve upon this process. Onward! Thanks again for sharing!
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.
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
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 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. :)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Oracle has joined the chat :) (and them joining the chat is an additional clause to the initial contract, billed at 300% hourly rate, with a minimum block of 900 man-hours)
> 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...
This is why generative AI is great imho, it allows us to rapidly replicate capabilities that might experience enshittification without the historical moat of capital for investment in bespoke software engineering time.
Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interests. Private equity (or rather, capital driven operating models in general) cannot enshittify what they cannot capture. If models continue to improve, this cycle can accelerate if generating "good code" continues to become more efficient and less resource intensive over time.
TLDR Building an anti-enshittification software factory.
I agree -- and I think that the applications should be open-sourced and in general provided to the public commons.
Some people won't like AI no matter what, but it's hard to argue with results that clearly benefit the public good and empower the little guy vs. public equity or the megacorp.
I understand this kind of thinking was the driver behind the so-called "SAS-pocalypse" in the stock market.
I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
> I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
I think you are mistaken. You still need to pay someone to host the service, but that someone can be a non profit or coop who operates the open source software for you. For example, Karakeep is open source (https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/) but I pay monthly for it so I don't have to maintain an instance. At any time, I can dump my data, startup the open source software elsewhere, and I'm off to the races. Another example is OpenTofu and OpenBao (part of the Linux Foundation) replacing Hashicorp's Terraform and Vault commercial offerings, if your org has the appetite to operate those open source infrastructure offerings.
If the code is open source, I/we can pay anyone willing to run it to run it, either as an individual or a corporation. I can incorporate a non profit or B Corp to run it. The code belongs to anyone, not an entity to be passed around for future potential cashflows by squeezing the customers who require the software it has ownership of. Certainly, maintenance of the subject software and its operation will still require resources and people, but those consuming the software have the control instead of a for profit entity.
Organize software starting with the most profitable and start building with the software factory. For profit software industry margin is software consumer and user opportunity. Someone will still need to operate the open source outputs of this process, that is the economic opportunity. It is no longer "Who will build this?" The question is now "Who will operate this open code for me?"
(i have both worked as an early employee at a SaaS startup and currently have a budget for buying software and SaaS products in the context of risk management and cybersecurity, and also am encouraged by my org to build solutions using AI whenever potentially more advantageous than purchasing a product or SaaS solution, so I am very familiar with this topic)
One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently).
Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK.
It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health care and selling bottled water in the desert for $1million/bottle.
That depends. There's a few different trading scams in Eve but it does implement a pretty standard trading book, and so the way that works someone listing a price way above what anyone else is offering is never going to have their order filled. (if you do happen to accidentally offer to buy something at a wildly inflated price, then the person offering it for cheapest gets a windfall).
A willing buyer and seller engaging in a transaction for a digital luxury good is not as bad as “American healthcare”, but better than killing someone by depriving them of life saving water?
Or is it not as bad as killing someone by depriving them of life saving water, but better than “American healthcare”?
your moral system relies on infantilizing the consumer and removing agency from them
do you think there is not enough transparency or something? a UX problem in the interface that makes you sympathize more? a fundamental and unexplained discomfort with seeking to earn instead of spend?
what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant?
> what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant?
Lmao lolbertarians now steeping to blank slatism to defend their degeneracy.
asking for an ELI5 after noticing a pattern doesn't seem like defending something to me, and I don't know how else to word it if it does seem like that even after carefully choosing my words
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.
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.
Industry? Source? This does not match my experience to date. I see subscriptions everywhere from telephony, CMS, slack, quip, etc.
Note the word "invoicing" there in my comment.
> The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software.
are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.
This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs). They'd have to find somewhere to run it and pay someone to keep an eye on that deployment for when it does something weird that affects service. Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
AI tools do show promise of being able to handle all these things in the future, but at least for the past few years these customers had an incredible bargain vs what it would have cost them to run and maintain the application even if they had the source code for free.
If they had used a desktop Win32 binary as you suggested, that would also have needed security updates, and it wouldn't have worked on phones or macbooks, and it would have needed a back end service (see above).
> If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs).
We don't have to make everything a javascript app running on the open internet. Though even an insecure node server could be perfectly fine if deployed on the corpnet behind a VPN...
Thats a very spicy threat model post the age of IoT.
Any stray device you may not even be aware of can rip that assurance apart.
A fully locked down network can in theory enable this however, very few enterprises actually are strict enough for this to be enforced across the whole network.
Even shrinkwrapped software is subscription-based. It's just whether the subscription is monthly or every 5 years.
> This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs
Stop. This doesn't have to be true...
> Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
This worked just fine, also, until Apple decided to have meetings with devs of popular software to push for subscriptions. Not we have the current state of bullshit.
> day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js
I do not believe this is the case at all. If I'm running software locally that works on local files that I control then there is no security issue. Even if there are bugs that can be exploited, they won't be exploited because I'm in control of the data.
This whole mess is a non-issue and is only there as an excuse to push this horrible web SaaS subscription nonsense that we have. It's nothing but a stupid excuse to justify daily software updates so that companies and inject ads and remove features to push subscriptions.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. You have until the end of your subscription to migrate. After that the thumb screws come out.
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.
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 =)
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).
I think that Comcast is a USA only service so have no idea of what people watch or listen to on Comcast. But above all, why do they need a consultant to do the switch? There is more to it than a credit card and a subscription?
Comcast is an ISP and Cable Television provider, with a terrible reputation. When I cancelled my service when them I had to mail the modem back to them. I did it UPS shipping with tracking, because I know not to trust them. They never-the-less claimed they did not receive it, and billed me for the device. Eventually - armed with the shipping confirmation - they acknowledged receipt of the package, but insisted that the box was empty and that I mailed them an empty box.
I forget the other details, but remember to never do business with Comcast or their subsidiaries / partners.
A few years ago, someone recorded a phone call with a Comcast retention rep who kept trying to tell someone to not cancel their service; it took nearly 20 minutes for someone to cancel their service:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/call-...
Oof. I upgraded my wife’s business from Comcast to AT&T. This is the only context, ever, where you’ll hear me describe AT&T as an upgrade to anything. I returned Comcast’s modem to the local office, photographed them accepting it from me, and archived the receipt and photos for safekeeping. I do not routinely do that sort of thing with other vendors.
That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damaged. I AM doing business with a Verizon MVNO (Visible, just because they provide the best deal for me, and don't really even HAVE customer service), but I will NEVER directly do business with Verizon again.
(Sorry; off-topic, but I needed to rant)
You can take the Verizon out of the Southwest Bell, but you can’t take the Southwest Bell out of the Verizon.
> why do they need a consultant to do the switch?
Last time I had to cancel a Comcast subscription it took half a day of phone calls, and then I still had to hand-deliver the modem to a pretty dodgy service centre the wrong side of Dorchester
Just because it's easy for say you and me, does not mean it's easy for others to do. Helper seems like a more appropriate word here, consultant being a loaded term these days!
People are fickle, resistant to change, and do not default to action broadly speaking. Various levels of handholding and potentially encouragement can be required, and even then, some folks will still be like "Nah, I'm good." Humans are tricky.
i’m sure my parents could save thousands with YouTube TV - they have FiOS as a tv + internet provider. they’ve used those DVRs for probably two decades and know the interface and how to navigate it. that’s definitely part of it.
the cable boxes finally got EoL’d, a tech on a service call promised (lying) that the contents would sync to the new boxes, and replaced them. they were empty - my mom was in tears when she realized the DVR contents were gone forever
some of the things recorded had sentimental value (a sibling being listed in the credits of a show, etc) and also that her mental model of what she watched and had in her queue to watch was gone (sports games she had yet to watch, progress through a show)
the stickiness is UI familiarity but also the value of what might not be there with a provider change are both powerful reasons to not make changes
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.
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.
It is if you enjoy feeling indignation rather than acknowledging the fact that some businesses don’t have an upward trajectory.
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
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.
They’re literally just a big private equity firm with maybe above average PR
Same model, but they're more like a holding company for a bunch of tech stuff.
They're apparently a great employer in Italy, which is a much better cost structure than the US (from their perspective).
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...
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
Can you share what you vibe coded? Well done!
There wasn't much skill involved, but if there's credit to be had for giving Claude a few screenshots, API docs and iterating on the design while doing human product testing, then I guess I'll take it!
I haven't shared it because it's rough (you know what vibe code looks like underneath!) and I only implemented the features I needed. So there's no external IFTTT-like hooks, it probably doesn't internationalize well, and I didn't need collaboration features. I also don't want to be on the hook for supporting a codebase that isn't the core of what I do. My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
But I'm surprised to see Harvest is still in the news about this... so, maybe! Thanks for the encouragement!
No worries, and you're welcome! My ask for you to share wasn't to have to provide support (as an open source project maintainer, I completely understand), but I am gathering examples of this type of build mode, I think there is great value in building a positive feedback loop where it becomes easier to build replacements when the rug is pulled. This potentially "outruns the enshittification" if you will, a meta version of open source that sits on top of the building via tokens.
> My real goal was to see if I could implement a replacement for myself in less than the cost of one annual seat, even at API pricing.
Indeed. Yes we can, and we can continually improve upon this process. Onward! Thanks again for sharing!
The current prices are labelled starting from. That doesn't tell you what it actually costs.
It's explained in the article. They now charge for number of projects, clients and tasks, as well as active users.
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
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.
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.
"What's Changing"
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
Or even when not AI, it definitely triggers the “we’re screwing you” sense!
Bending Spoons just bought Airtable too, correct?
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
What is newsworthy here? Price goes up, customers leave.
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.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7491638...
I used to write that software - the answer is that most of it can be vibe coded in a day now.
always great to see reminders that software is not a commodity.
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. :)
How is any of this overpriced crudware going to survive a person with domain knowledge and a ChatGPT Pro sub?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Nobody sells their company to Bending Spoons if they are thriving. So, clearly $130 was not the correct pricing.
Is the correct pricing that allows growth without alienating customers somewhere in-between? Probably.
Absolutely enormous money just for invoicing.
Private Equity destroys everything.
These companies that they bought were not doing so great to begin with otherwise they would not be for sale for a price where this makes sense.
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.
Fingers crossed it destroys the SaaS rent extraction model and we’ll go back to purchasing software.
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.
yes it does, but this kind of abuse is also inherent in the system we have built
I 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.
> A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Oracle has joined the chat :) (and them joining the chat is an additional clause to the initial contract, billed at 300% hourly rate, with a minimum block of 900 man-hours)
> 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...
This is why generative AI is great imho, it allows us to rapidly replicate capabilities that might experience enshittification without the historical moat of capital for investment in bespoke software engineering time.
Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interests. Private equity (or rather, capital driven operating models in general) cannot enshittify what they cannot capture. If models continue to improve, this cycle can accelerate if generating "good code" continues to become more efficient and less resource intensive over time.
TLDR Building an anti-enshittification software factory.
I agree -- and I think that the applications should be open-sourced and in general provided to the public commons.
Some people won't like AI no matter what, but it's hard to argue with results that clearly benefit the public good and empower the little guy vs. public equity or the megacorp.
I understand this kind of thinking was the driver behind the so-called "SAS-pocalypse" in the stock market.
I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
> I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
I think you are mistaken. You still need to pay someone to host the service, but that someone can be a non profit or coop who operates the open source software for you. For example, Karakeep is open source (https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/) but I pay monthly for it so I don't have to maintain an instance. At any time, I can dump my data, startup the open source software elsewhere, and I'm off to the races. Another example is OpenTofu and OpenBao (part of the Linux Foundation) replacing Hashicorp's Terraform and Vault commercial offerings, if your org has the appetite to operate those open source infrastructure offerings.
If the code is open source, I/we can pay anyone willing to run it to run it, either as an individual or a corporation. I can incorporate a non profit or B Corp to run it. The code belongs to anyone, not an entity to be passed around for future potential cashflows by squeezing the customers who require the software it has ownership of. Certainly, maintenance of the subject software and its operation will still require resources and people, but those consuming the software have the control instead of a for profit entity.
Organize software starting with the most profitable and start building with the software factory. For profit software industry margin is software consumer and user opportunity. Someone will still need to operate the open source outputs of this process, that is the economic opportunity. It is no longer "Who will build this?" The question is now "Who will operate this open code for me?"
(i have both worked as an early employee at a SaaS startup and currently have a budget for buying software and SaaS products in the context of risk management and cybersecurity, and also am encouraged by my org to build solutions using AI whenever potentially more advantageous than purchasing a product or SaaS solution, so I am very familiar with this topic)
Edit: Similar vibes to https://huddleup.substack.com/p/the-savannah-bananas-just-co... | https://x.com/JoePompliano/status/2085007330748383441
> The Savannah Bananas spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building their own secondary ticketing platform.
> No fees, every user is verified, tickets can only be sold for face value
> In just 5 months, it's already saved fans $13.69M.
Your alternative is that companies shouldn't be allowed to change because the changes they want to make will make some people upset?
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.
Edit: Appreciate the haters as always but can somebody please explain what they believe a company should be forced to do?
Some existing customers might drop off
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)
This reminds me of the game Eve Online.
One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently).
Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK.
It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health care and selling bottled water in the desert for $1million/bottle.
I would've assumed it's small scale laundering. What you're saying is it may just be a very cheeky and brazen sales tactic? "Doesn't hurt to try"...
That depends. There's a few different trading scams in Eve but it does implement a pretty standard trading book, and so the way that works someone listing a price way above what anyone else is offering is never going to have their order filled. (if you do happen to accidentally offer to buy something at a wildly inflated price, then the person offering it for cheapest gets a windfall).
Probably the same people who doordash a $43 big mac at 8pm because "I'm hungry and I don't want to have to get up and drive over there"
A willing buyer and seller engaging in a transaction for a digital luxury good is not as bad as “American healthcare”, but better than killing someone by depriving them of life saving water?
Or is it not as bad as killing someone by depriving them of life saving water, but better than “American healthcare”?
The use of that scale is not making sense to me.
your moral system relies on infantilizing the consumer and removing agency from them
do you think there is not enough transparency or something? a UX problem in the interface that makes you sympathize more? a fundamental and unexplained discomfort with seeking to earn instead of spend?
what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant?
> what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant?
Lmao lolbertarians now steeping to blank slatism to defend their degeneracy.
asking for an ELI5 after noticing a pattern doesn't seem like defending something to me, and I don't know how else to word it if it does seem like that even after carefully choosing my words
I asked a lot of questions, what are the answers?
https://archive.ph/3xFCY (when did BBC.com become paywalled?)
I think they realized that deapite their paid-for-by-TV-license status, they can do whatever they want to non-UK traffic.
bbc.com is part of BBC Worldwide, a separate commercial subsidy of the BBC, and not part of the TV license funding.
>The BBC is introducing a paywall in the U.S.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-p... (June 26, 2025)
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.
Bending Spoons's entire business model is product enshittification. Once they acquire a company, it's time to jump ship to a competing product.
Bending Spoons are scumbags.
They're taking patio11's advice!
I mean, you're not wrong.