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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

#81

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #20
dofm wrote: post #12

A tale as old as time… Bending Spoons is who you sell to when you have developed contempt for your customers. ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do

They’re literally just a big private equity firm with maybe above average PR

Same model, but they're more like a holding company for a bunch of tech stuff.

They're apparently a great employer in Italy, which is a much better cost structure than the US (from their perspective).

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#82

Post by csomar »

kstrauser wrote: post #69
csomar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not habit. Some people build complex workflows on these and hold substantial data. Moving requires re-building these workflows which is both time and money consuming. Not everyone will have the proper time and capacity to move at a moment’s notice.

I get that. I do. And yet, once things like this start to happen, it’s exceedingly likely to continue, and you have to start making contingency plans. Evernote increased their annual prices like 40% in early 2024 and it’s been nothing but up since then. That $360 plan was a $125 plan in 2023. At some point you have to either migrate or smile and accept the hikes.

People migrate at a different cadence but they eventually do. It happened to me before. You are busy with other stuff and just accept the $xx/month cost until you have free time to do the migration.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#83

Post by yieldcrv »

ydat wrote: post #80
yieldcrv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your moral system relies on infantilizing the consumer and removing agency from them do you think there is not enough transparency or something? a UX problem in the interface that makes you sympathize more? a fundamental and unexplained discomfort with seeking to earn instead of spend? what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting…

> what exactly would have to change in this relationship for you to not infantilize the consumer and put them on equal moral weighting as the merchant? Lmao lolbertarians now steeping to blank slatism to defend their degeneracy.

asking for an ELI5 after noticing a pattern doesn't seem like defending something to me, and I don't know how else to word it if it does seem like that even after carefully choosing my words

I asked a lot of questions, what are the answers?

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#84

Post by dehrmann »

dboreham wrote: post #40
strenholme wrote: post #15

This 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…

Even shrinkwrapped software is subscription-based. It's just whether the subscription is monthly or every 5 years.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#85

Post by dehrmann »

dofm wrote: post #12

A tale as old as time… Bending Spoons is who you sell to when you have developed contempt for your customers. ETA: and contempt for your staff, too, since they basically always lose their jobs after explaining what they do

We're going to see more of this as the web 2.0 and mobile development booms fade, and I don't have a good solution. What do you do when you're a mature SaaS with a solid customer base, stalled growth, headcount for hypergrowth, and investors looking to move on.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#86

Post by x0x0 »

drbscl wrote: post #21

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?

Airtable and Harvest weren't failing. They just weren't as profitable as hoped, and appear to have eaten most of their TAM and were wasting the engineering dollars being spent building features to increase the TAM.

Bending Spoons business model is less buying failing businesses and more buying runouts; ending ongoing investment in them / shifting to maintenance; and and hiking prices to grab as much cash as possible. It's Broadcom's business model (see vmware) just pointed at b2c or software in the smb not enterprise category.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#87

Post by cagey »

ClarityJones wrote: post #63
pmontra wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Comcast is a USA only service so have no idea of what people watch or listen to on Comcast. But above all, why do they need a consultant to do the switch? There is more to it than a credit card and a subscription?

Comcast is an ISP and Cable Television provider, with a terrible reputation. When I cancelled my service when them I had to mail the modem back to them. I did it UPS shipping with tracking, because I know not to trust them. They never-the-less claimed they did not receive it, and billed me for the device. Eventually - armed with the shipping confirmation - they acknowledged receipt of the package, but insisted that t…

That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damaged. I AM doing business with a Verizon MVNO (Visible, just because they provide the best deal for me, and don't really even HAVE customer service), but I will NEVER directly do business with Verizon again.

(Sorry; off-topic, but I needed to rant)

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#88

Post by dabeeeenster »

orliesaurus wrote: post #34

I 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…

I used to write that software - the answer is that most of it can be vibe coded in a day now.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#89

Post by HumblyTossed »

dboreham wrote: post #40
strenholme wrote: post #15

This 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…

> 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

Stop. This doesn't have to be true...

> 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.

This worked just fine, also, until Apple decided to have meetings with devs of popular software to push for subscriptions. Not we have the current state of bullshit.

Re: Harvest hikes bills by 1500% after purchased by Bending Spoons

#90

Post by kstrauser »

cagey wrote: post #87
ClarityJones wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast is an ISP and Cable Television provider, with a terrible reputation. When I cancelled my service when them I had to mail the modem back to them. I did it UPS shipping with tracking, because I know not to trust them. They never-the-less claimed they did not receive it, and billed me for the device. Eventually - armed with the shipping confirmation - they acknowledged receipt of the package, but insisted that t…

That sounds eerily like my experience 8 months ago with 'Verizon 5g Home Internet'. Lied to by the used-car salesman: "we'll give you $100 in credits", and when I canceled (mostly due to customer service saying "I see your $100 of credits, they are pending approval", then a few weeks later "credits? there are no credits showing on your account"), got nothing but runaround and a claim that my returned modem was damage…

You can take the Verizon out of the Southwest Bell, but you can’t take the Southwest Bell out of the Verizon.
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