alt Hacker NewsHarvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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?
"What's Changing"
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
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. :)
What is newsworthy here? Price goes up, customers leave.
Bending Spoons just bought Airtable too, correct?
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...
always great to see reminders that software is not a commodity.
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)
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.
Bending Spoons's entire business model is product enshittification. Once they acquire a company, it's time to jump ship to a competing product.
https://archive.ph/3xFCY (when did BBC.com become paywalled?)
Bending Spoons are scumbags.
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.