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?
Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
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Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#22https://archive.ph/3xFCY (when did BBC.com become paywalled?)
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#23> 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 f…
But it's not enterprise SaaS, is it? It's just a time tracking and invoicing tool. And it's not the only SaaS they will need?
Companies with 25 employees generally don't have money to pay a dozen SaaS vendors $2k each every month.
Maybe certain niche products that are critical to the business might be worth that much. But a time tracking & invoicing tool? Definitely not. Source: am actively moving away from Harvest due to this ridiculous price hike.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#24Some 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…
This reminds me of the game Eve Online. One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently). Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK. It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health c…
A willing buyer and seller engaging in a transaction for a digital luxury good is not as bad as “American healthcare”, but better than killing someone by depriving them of life saving water?
Or is it not as bad as killing someone by depriving them of life saving water, but better than “American healthcare”?
The use of that scale is not making sense to me.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes it does, but this kind of abuse is also inherent in the system we have built I remember fondly the time when computing was build on common interfaces and open formats. A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced. Now we have closed platforms and enshitification.
This is why generative AI is great imho, it allows us to rapidly replicate capabilities that might experience enshittification without the historical moat of capital for investment in bespoke software engineering time. Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interes…
I understand this kind of thinking was the driver behind the so-called "SAS-pocalypse" in the stock market.
I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#26always great to see reminders that software is not a commodity.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#27Some 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…
This reminds me of the game Eve Online. One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently). Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK. It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health c…
That depends. There's a few different trading scams in Eve but it does implement a pretty standard trading book, and so the way that works someone listing a price way above what anyone else is offering is never going to have their order filled. (if you do happen to accidentally offer to buy something at a wildly inflated price, then the person offering it for cheapest gets a windfall).
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#28How is any of this overpriced crudware going to survive a person with domain knowledge and a ChatGPT Pro sub?
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#29> 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 f…
> Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing Buzzword nonsense. Wasn’t the $130 they were being charged before the market pricing? You’re basically justifying that a 25-strong company can afford to pay more. Yes, that is true, but not all products have to extract as much profit as possible from their clients. Turn the problem around, how much does it cost Harvest to run their service for 25 additional users?…
Nobody sells their company to Bending Spoons if they are thriving. So, clearly $130 was not the correct pricing.
Is the correct pricing that allows growth without alienating customers somewhere in-between? Probably.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why generative AI is great imho, it allows us to rapidly replicate capabilities that might experience enshittification without the historical moat of capital for investment in bespoke software engineering time. Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interes…
I understand this kind of thinking was the driver behind the so-called "SAS-pocalypse" in the stock market. I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Softw…
> I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
I think you are mistaken. You still need to pay someone to host the service, but that someone can be a non profit or coop who operates the open source software for you. For example, Karakeep is open source (https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/) but I pay monthly for it so I don't have to maintain an instance. At any time, I can dump my data, startup the open source software elsewhere, and I'm off to the races. Another example is OpenTofu and OpenBao (part of the Linux Foundation) replacing Hashicorp's Terraform and Vault commercial offerings, if your org has the appetite to operate those open source infrastructure offerings.
If the code is open source, I/we can pay anyone willing to run it to run it, either as an individual or a corporation. I can incorporate a non profit or B Corp to run it. The code belongs to anyone, not an entity to be passed around for future potential cashflows by squeezing the customers who require the software it has ownership of. Certainly, maintenance of the subject software and its operation will still require resources and people, but those consuming the software have the control instead of a for profit entity.
Organize software starting with the most profitable and start building with the software factory. For profit software industry margin is software consumer and user opportunity. Someone will still need to operate the open source outputs of this process, that is the economic opportunity. It is no longer "Who will build this?" The question is now "Who will operate this open code for me?"
(i have both worked as an early employee at a SaaS startup and currently have a budget for buying software and SaaS products in the context of risk management and cybersecurity, and also am encouraged by my org to build solutions using AI whenever potentially more advantageous than purchasing a product or SaaS solution, so I am very familiar with this topic)
Edit: Similar vibes to https://huddleup.substack.com/p/the-savannah-bananas-just-co... | https://x.com/JoePompliano/status/2085007330748383441
> The Savannah Bananas spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building their own secondary ticketing platform.
> No fees, every user is verified, tickets can only be sold for face value
> In just 5 months, it's already saved fans $13.69M.