A self-employed contractor of about a decade says he is bummed about the end of Harvest, a time-tracking and invoicing service he once recommended to every freelancer he met. Harvest let users track hours, create invoices, email them to clients and close them out when paid, with a simple Stripe integration for card and ACH payments. Its appeal lay in solving one well-defined problem at a reasonable monthly price without expanding into accounting.
Harvest was bought in 2025 by Bending Spoons, the company that previously reworked Vimeo. The author feared the acquisition would hurt the product but stayed with the service. Soon after, his monthly price rose from $13.32 to $133.98 as users were moved to a new "enterprise" plan with "unlimited" usage billing. A cheaper "flex" plan at $12.65 per month now adds a 2% fee on top of the usual roughly 3% card transaction costs.
The author argues that the extra fee is hard to justify, since the card processing fees already cover the payment networks, Stripe, Mastercard and chargeback risk, while Harvest contributes none of that work. When he wrote to Harvest about the changes, he found that customer emails are answered by a large language model producing lengthy, unhelpful replies.
He plans to look for a new invoicing provider and may also replace his bookkeeping software, Intuit's QuickBooks Online, which he feels has declined. He asks fellow freelancers which systems they recommend.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing