Harvest's Price Increase: Why Bills Jumped 1,500% and What to Do
Richard Haldenby had been a Harvest customer for around fifteen years when the renewal notice arrived. His consultancy, Salentis, had been paying $130 a month. The new figure was $2,110 a month, an increase of roughly 1,500%. When he queried it, Harvest offered a discount that brought the year down to $1,309, payable up front. He told the BBC the move put "corporate greed over valuing customers", and in August 2026 his story, along with a US customer whose annual bill went from $2,800 to $23,000, made national news.
If you use Harvest, the unsettling part is that none of this happened because those customers did anything unusual. It happened because Harvest changed how it charges, and the change reaches each account at its next renewal. This article covers what actually changed, why the numbers get so large, and what to check on your own account before your renewal date does the checking for you.
What actually changed
For most of its life, Harvest charged a flat rate per seat. You paid $11 or $14 per person per month depending on the plan, and that was the whole bill. Add a person, pay for a seat; remove a person, stop paying. It was one of the most predictable pricing models in the category, and plenty of firms, Salentis among them, built a decade or more of billing on it.
The new model, introduced after Bending Spoons bought Harvest in mid-2025, looks cheaper at first glance. The Teams plan starts at $9 per seat per month billed annually ($11 monthly), and Enterprise at $14 ($17.50 monthly). The catch is the second layer: on top of the seat price, Harvest now charges for usage. Invoices you send, projects you create, clients you manage, and tasks you log all feed the bill.
Harvest's pricing page describes this as costs aligning with usage. What it doesn't publish is the per-unit rates, so you cannot sit down with your project list and work out what next year will cost. The advertised seat price is a floor. Everything a working consultancy actually does with a time tracking tool, which is to say run projects, manage clients and send invoices, sits on the meter.
The change is not retroactive. Monthly accounts moved quickly; annual accounts move when they renew. That is why the horror stories arrive in waves, and why some long-standing customers still haven't seen theirs yet.
Why the increases are so large
A price rise of 10% or 20% is an annoyance. The reported Harvest increases are of a different kind: 600% for a 20-person firm in one verified review, 721% for the US customer in the BBC's report, roughly 1,500% for Salentis. Increases like that aren't a rate going up. They're a different question being asked.
The old question was "how many people do you have?". The new one is "how much of your business runs through us?". A small consultancy might have three seats but forty active clients, hundreds of projects accumulated over the years, and an invoice going out for every one of them every month. Under flat per-seat pricing all of that was included. Under usage pricing all of it is billable, and fifteen years of accumulated projects and clients suddenly reads as heavy usage rather than loyalty.
It lands hardest on exactly the accounts that were the best customers under the old model: small teams that used Harvest for everything, kept their history in it, and invoiced through it. Mark Peacock, who runs the UK pricing consultancy PriceMaker, told the BBC the way the change was handled failed the basic test of transparency, and it's hard to argue. A pricing model you cannot forecast from your own account data is not one you can plan a business around.
The Bending Spoons pattern
Bending Spoons is a Milan-based company that has made more than fifty acquisitions since 2013, including Evernote in 2022, and more recently Vimeo and WeTransfer. The playbook after an acquisition has been consistent: cut costs, restructure pricing, and monetise the existing user base harder. Evernote users watched this exact film a few years ago.
That context matters for one practical reason: this is unlikely to be a mistake that gets rolled back after a bad news cycle. The BBC approached Harvest for comment and got nothing. Individual customers who push back are being offered discounts, as Haldenby was, but a discount on $2,110 a month is still a multiple of $130, and it resets the negotiation every year. If the new pricing doesn't work for your firm, the realistic options are to negotiate knowing that, or to leave.
What to do before your renewal
First, find your renewal date. It's in Settings, under Billing. If you pay annually and haven't had a pricing email yet, that date is when the new model reaches you, and you want to be making decisions months before it, not the week the invoice lands.
Second, get a real quote. Because the usage rates aren't published, the only reliable number is the one Harvest gives you for your actual account. Ask for it in writing before you renew, and ask what it assumes about your project, client and invoice counts, since those are the levers.
Third, prune before you're measured. If you do stay, archived projects and old clients may be the difference between tiers of usage. Fifteen years of dormant projects is history you can export to a spreadsheet rather than an asset worth paying rent on.
Fourth, export everything regardless. Reports, invoices, project lists, client records. Even if you end up staying, every option you have, including negotiating, gets stronger when your data is portable and Harvest knows it.
Where Harvest customers can go
The obvious moves are the other big trackers, and they come with their own caveats. This has been the year of time-tracking tools squeezing their cheap tiers: Clockify moved billable hours, exports and shared reports to its paid plans in April, and Toggl has never included billable rates in its free plan. Both are still solid paid products with per-seat prices that stay flat, which after this year is worth more than it used to be. If you go that way, check the specific tier that restores what you actually use, and we'd gently suggest reading the pricing page dated, not cached.
A spreadsheet remains the option no acquirer can reprice. Date, client, project, hours, rate, a billable flag and a SUMIF. Our free weekly timesheet template has the formulas done, and for a sole trader with a couple of clients it's genuinely enough. Its weakness is the same as ever: you do all the remembering, and the remembering is where billable time leaks.
VibaCloud is our tool, so read this paragraph knowing that. It takes a different route to a timesheet: instead of a timer, it connects to the Outlook or Google calendar you already keep and turns the week's meetings and appointments into a draft timesheet, which you tag to clients and projects. Every project carries its own hourly rate, so billable hours and their value total themselves, and a submitted week can become a PDF invoice without leaving the app. It's free, and the pricing sting this article is about doesn't exist here: no usage fees, no charge per invoice, per client or per project. For consultancies whose weeks are mostly meetings, the calendar-first approach is honestly a better fit than a timer ever was. For workshop-timer workflows, where you start a stopwatch on each task, it isn't a like-for-like swap, and Toggl or Clockify will suit you better.
For a wider look at the field, our comparison of free timesheet apps that still track billable hours covers the trade-offs one by one.
How to switch without losing your data
Export while you still have access. Harvest lets you export time reports, invoices and contacts to CSV. Do the full history, not just this year, and store it somewhere boring and safe. Your invoice history in particular is a financial record you're expected to keep for years, whatever software it came from.
Rebuild the structure, not the history. In the new tool, recreate your clients, projects and rates first. You almost never need old time entries imported; you need next Monday to be easy. The exported CSVs cover the rare "what did we bill them in 2023" question.
Run a parallel week before you commit. Track one normal week in the new tool while Harvest still works. That's the test that finds the gaps, and if the new system builds the week from your calendar, it's a cheap test to run.
Mind the invoice numbers. If you invoice from your time tracker, your next invoice number needs to continue the sequence your clients already have, not restart at 001. Any tool worth moving to lets you set the starting number; set it before the first invoice goes out, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Harvest's prices go up so much?
After Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in mid-2025, it replaced the flat per-seat pricing with a model that also charges for usage: invoices sent, projects created, clients managed and tasks logged. Accounts with years of accumulated projects and clients saw the largest increases, in reported cases between 600% and roughly 1,500%.
How much does Harvest cost in 2026?
The advertised seat prices are $9 per person per month on the Teams plan and $14 on Enterprise, billed annually. Usage fees are added on top, and Harvest does not publish the per-unit rates, so the real cost for an active account can be several times the seat price. The only reliable figure is a written quote for your own account.
When does the new Harvest pricing affect my account?
At your next renewal. Monthly accounts moved to the new model quickly, while annual accounts change when their year rolls over, so check your renewal date under Settings and Billing before it arrives.
Who owns Harvest now?
Bending Spoons, a Milan-based company that has made more than fifty acquisitions since 2013, including Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer. Price restructuring after acquisition has been common across its portfolio.
What is the best alternative to Harvest?
It depends on how you track. Toggl Track and Clockify are the closest timer-based replacements, both paid for billable-hours work. A spreadsheet is free and can't be repriced, but it's entirely manual. VibaCloud is free and builds the timesheet from your Outlook or Google calendar instead of a timer, with per-project rates and invoicing included and no usage fees.
