RIP, Harvest

The author expresses sadness over the demise of Harvest, a time-tracking and invoicing service they had used for a decade. Harvest offered a reliable, simple interface at a reasonable monthly price, with features like tracking hours or weeks spent on projects, generating and emailing invoices, and accepting credit and ACH payments. The author was amazed by how Harvest successfully avoided scope creep and focused solely on invoicing, never attempting to evolve into an accounting platform or a blockchain solution.

However, in 2025, Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons, a company that had previously gutted Vimeo. The author had not had time to seek out alternative invoicing software and was caught off guard when they noticed a significant price increase. Harvest raised its prices from $13.32 to $133.98 per month, transitioning users to a new "enterprise" plan with an "unlimited" usage billing model. The author was dismayed by the move, as they had never exceeded the previous plan's limits.

Furthermore, Harvest implemented a "flex" plan at $12.65 per month, adding an additional 2% fee on top of the typical 3% card transaction fees. The author contends that this fee is unnecessary, as Harvest is not handling any of the credit card network costs, Stripe and Mastercard expenses, or the financial risks associated with chargebacks and fraud. They argue that a 2% fee per month is excessive for merely sending a few PDFs and hosting a Stripe web form.

The author reached out to Harvest regarding their concerns but discovered that customer emails were no longer read. Instead, they received responses from a Large Language Model that generated thousands of words in response. The author mentions their familiarity with the phenomenon of enshittification but is astonished by the rapid decline of Harvest under Bending Spoons' leadership.

They express their intention to seek out a new invoicing service and mention the potential need for bookkeeping software, suggesting that Intuit's Quickbooks Online has also become unmanageable.