Private Equity destroys everything.
Fingers crossed it destroys the SaaS rent extraction model and we’ll go back to purchasing software.
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
#32Every now and then I check out the Evernote Reddit out of morbid curiosity. One person recently announced they’d finally had enough and were leaving because Bending Spoons increased their monthly bill from $20 to $30. They’d been paying $240/yr for freaking Evernote. I’m astonished at how much abuse many people will tolerate as an alternative to changing their habits. Bending Spoons made the same discovery, but gleef…
I do some tech consulting on the side and beg people (literally) to switch from Comcast (US TV and Internet Provider) to say YouTube TV, saving them hundreds of dollars a month. They WILL NOT do it, even though I would do all the work, show them how to do it, explain how it's essentially the same but much cheaper, how to use it, and not charge very much to do so (I bill typically less than $60 an hour, and it would only take a few hours to do all that).
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#33"What's Changing"
That warning infobox triggers an AI flag in my brain instantly.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#34I posted about my friend Igor who had a similar experience on my LI [1] - from a few hundred to $3000+ a month - and a lot of people reacted saying you could simply vibe-code an alternative in hours and save thousands of dollars.
it does seem like either people drank the kool-aid on vibecoding...or it's actually really possible that shitty software that we once relied upon can now be vibed into existence in hours at most.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7491638...
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#35I never used Evernote (thankfully), but since their Bending Spoons acquisition, they seem to have between 50% to 150% increases to their various plans in three years. Doubling the price of your product in such a short time is one thing, but being able to do so because people have 15+ years of data in your service is the icing on the cake.
To be fair, apparently Evernote was not profitable, so some sort of price hike was going to be required no matter what. Bending Spoons is not a good steward of said increase though. Lots of poor communication on price increases from what I've heard from Evernote users.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#36The message is obviously: If Bending Spoons buys your vendor, then gtfo as quickly as possible. Don't wait, don't sit around like a sucker and hope you won't get screwed over, you will.
I wonder how Bending Spoons categorizes their approaches internally. Komoot is much better than the competition and only slightly premium in terms of cost. It seems that some of their platforms they intend to evolve, and others are there for bleeding dry.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#37Bending Spoons just bought Airtable too, correct?
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#38They're taking patio11's advice!
I mean, you're not wrong.
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#39[deleted]
Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons
#40This is the problem with subscription based software. In the days when people owned the software they used, a price increase like this would simply not be possible. People would be able to upgrade their own software on their own timeline. Since Windows, despite its many faults, has a rock solid ABI (application binary interface), that piece of proprietary software from 2006 I use today still runs fine, as does that o…
This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs). They'd have to find somewhere to run it and pay someone to keep an eye on that deployment for when it does something weird that affects service. Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.
AI tools do show promise of being able to handle all these things in the future, but at least for the past few years these customers had an incredible bargain vs what it would have cost them to run and maintain the application even if they had the source code for free.
If they had used a desktop Win32 binary as you suggested, that would also have needed security updates, and it wouldn't have worked on phones or macbooks, and it would have needed a back end service (see above).