I’ve been a self-employed contractor for concerning a decade now, and I’m bummed concerning 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 near it out whenever they paid. There was a small Stripe integration for accepting credit and ACH payments on the invoice web view. A historic diagram of total billed/paid amounts complete time, and a array of invoices. Harvest was exactly what you desire from small-business software: it solved a well-defined issue alongside a reliable, uncomplicated interface, and did so at a sensible monthly price. They managed to evade range creep and never tried to rotate into an accounting platform, or a blockchain for washing machines.1 I loved Harvest and raved concerning it to all self-employed individual I met.
Back in 2025 Harvest got bought out by Bending Spoons, the business that gutted Vimeo. I was concerned they power ruin it, but was occupied alongside another things and didn’t have period to appearance for new invoicing software.
Long narrative short, they raised my cost from $13.32 to $133.98 per duration by moving everyone to a new “enterprise” scheme and “unlimited” use billing model, which is AFAICT, exactly what I had before. There’s additionally a “flex” scheme which expenses $12.65/mo… but that scheme now skims an additional 2% on top of the customary ~3% cardstock transaction fees. To be clear, that 3% pays for the entire credit cardstock network, affirmative all the group operating at Stripe and Mastercard, affirmative the financial hazard of chargebacks and fraud, etc. Harvest isn’t doing any of that work. I don’t cognize concerning you, but I don’t think I need to expend 2% of my income revenue to dispatch a brace PDFs a duration and cover a Stripe web form.
I wrote to Harvest concerning this, and discovered that they don’t peruse client emails any more. Instead they have a Large Language Model often vomit thousands of words at you. I’m no alien to enshittification, but man, I did not anticipate the speed at which Bending Spoons would run a absolutely fine business into the ground.
Time to discover a new invoicing service, I guess. Maybe bookkeeping too—Intuit’s Quickbooks Online seems to have entirely jumped the shark. Any of y’all freelancers have a scheme you like?
