Bending Spoons Destroys Harvest With 10x Price Hike and LLM Support

Harvest was a purpose-built time-tracking and invoicing service that tracked billable hours, generated invoices, and processed payments through Stripe. The appeal was focused simplicity—solving a single problem well for self-employed contractors and small businesses without attempting to become a full accounting suite or chasing unrelated features. The pricing was reasonable and the interface reliable.

Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in 2025 and immediately restructured pricing. All users were forced onto an “enterprise” tier that boosted costs from $13.32 to $133.98 monthly—roughly a 10x increase—for functionally identical service. A lower-cost “flex” option at $12.65/month exists but adds a 2% surcharge on credit card transactions beyond the standard ~3% processor fees. Since Harvest doesn’t operate the payment network, this represents pure margin extraction. Customer support shifted to an LLM system that generates lengthy automated responses instead of addressing customer emails directly.

The pattern mirrors Bending Spoons’ earlier dismantling of Vimeo—acquire functional products and extract value through price hiking and cost-cutting rather than improvement. The collapse signals another loss in the category of focused, reliable business tools designed for actual user needs.