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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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”?
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
I forget the other details, but remember to never do business with Comcast or their subsidiaries / partners.
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
1: https://x.com/m_herrmann/status/2039876227088163161
ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do
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...
"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
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.
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
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...
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Is the correct pricing that allows growth without alienating customers somewhere in-between? Probably.
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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 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)
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?
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/the-bbc-is-introducing-a-p... (June 26, 2025)