再见，Harvest

RIP, Harvest

I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest.

Harvest was a time-tracking and invoicing service. You’d track how many hours or weeks you spent on a project, put together an invoice, email it to the client, and close it out when they paid. There was a little Stripe integration for accepting credit and ACH payments on the invoice web view. A historical chart of total billed/paid amounts over time, and a table of invoices. Harvest was exactly what you want from small-business software: it solved a well-defined problem with a reliable, simple interface, and did so at a reasonable monthly price. They managed to avoid scope creep and never tried to become an accounting platform, or a blockchain for washing machines.1 I loved Harvest and raved about it to every self-employed person I met.

Back in 2025 Harvest got bought out by Bending Spoons, the company that gutted Vimeo. I was worried they might ruin it, but was busy with other things and didn’t have time to look for new invoicing software.

Long story short, they raised my price from $13.32 to $133.98 per month by moving everyone to a new “enterprise” plan and “unlimited” usage billing model, which is, as far as I can tell, exactly what I had before. There’s also a “flex” plan which costs $12.65 per month… but that plan now skims an additional 2% on top of the usual ~3% card transaction fees. To be clear, that 3% pays for the whole credit card network, plus all the people working at Stripe and Mastercard, plus the financial risk of chargebacks and fraud, etc. Harvest isn’t doing any of that work. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I need to spend 2% of my gross revenue to send a couple PDFs a month and wrap a Stripe web form.

I wrote to Harvest about this, and discovered that they don’t read customer emails any more. Instead they have a Large Language Model repeatedly vomit thousands of words at you. I’m no stranger to enshittification, but man, I did not anticipate the speed at which Bending Spoons would drive a perfectly good company into the ground.

Time to find a new invoicing service, I guess. Maybe bookkeeping too—Intuit’s Quickbooks Online seems to have completely jumped the shark. Any of y’all freelancers have a system you like?

Yes, someone actually tried this.