Harvest's $130 bill became $2,110, and annual renewals hid it until the invoice landed

Richard Haldenby, who runs the UK consultancy Salentis, told the BBC that his monthly Harvest bill went from $130 to $2,110 after the time-tracking and invoicing app moved to a new pricing model ^[1]. That is a 1,523% increase on the same workflow, or an extra $23,760 a year if annualised ^[1][2], and it is the cleanest available illustration of a line item that was too small to govern becoming large enough to require a decision.

The mechanism matters more than the number. Until the change, Harvest charged a flat monthly fee per user, and customers could add or remove seats as staffing moved, paying only for people who needed access ^[5]. The replacement is usage-based: charges can now key off the number of active projects, clients and tasks, plus the revenue a business invoices through the platform ^[6]. Every one of those is a variable a growing services firm cannot hold flat, which is the point.

Harvest was acquired by the Italian company Bending Spoons in 2025 and changed its pricing the following year, according to the BBC ^[3]. The reporting also says many customers who pay annually are only discovering the increase now, as renewals come due ^[4]. That lag is the operational lesson: an annual contract does not protect you from a repricing, it just defers the moment you learn about it, and it removes the monthly signal that would have shown the change while there was still time to plan a migration.

Salentis runs up to 15 staff in the UK at any one time, with sister companies in the US and Australia, and has used Harvest for at least 15 years ^[8]. Haldenby said accepting the increase would double his IT spend for the year and was unaffordable ^[7]. He was then offered a discount taking next year to $1,309, payable up front ^[9]. That is still roughly ten times the old rate, and about $15,708 of cash committed in advance ^[4]. He said it would only delay the inevitable and that he is planning to migrate to a similar but less good service ^[10]. Others report the same shape of change: the BBC cites a US customer whose annual charge went from $2,800 to $23,000, an 8.2-fold rise ^[2][3], and describes increases of as much as 1500%, with one person calling it "daylight robbery" ^[18].

Two pricing specialists told the BBC what they thought was happening. Mark Peacock of PriceMaker said Harvest had "completely failed at the transparency test" and that there is no way for a customer to work out the cost until the bill arrives at the end of the month ^[11]; he said many users report a tenfold increase ^[12]. Damian Foks of Valueships called it a clear shift from growth to monetisation, likely a result of new ownership ^[13]. Bending Spoons has acquired more than 50 major tech firms since 2013, including Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer ^[14], raised Evernote subscription prices sharply after its 2022 acquisition alongside layoffs in the US and Chile ^[15], and tightened free tiers at WeTransfer and Vimeo while moving legacy users onto more expensive plans ^[16].

The BBC has approached Harvest for comment ^[17]. Watch whether the discount offered to Haldenby becomes a general retention tier, and check your own stack for tools whose owner changed hands in the last two years and whose renewal is priced on a metric that grows with your revenue.