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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

#101

Post by dofm »

penguin_booze wrote: post #100
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

[flagged]

I cannot even begin to tell you how little I care about this sort of tiny-minded obsessiveness.

ETA: For those who downvoted me — seriously, take a look at the number of times this one account has made this one correction. It's just po-faced, insubstantial, intellectual bullying behaviour at this point, correct though it is. It adds nothing to any discussion. I'll flag this behaviour the next time I see it done to anyone else, because it is shitty.

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

#102

Post by cpill »

GUYS!LLMs killed the SaaS star!

Just vibe code a vanilla Django app. No front-end frame work. No mobile app (just use your mobile's browser). Basic security baked in. It can handle 100k traffic a day easy which is 99% of small to medium businesses.

There are hundreds of cheap, easy to use hosting providers out there now (an LLM can figure out how to use). Or self host on a Raspberry Pi if you are slightly nerby (there are hundreds of videos on YouTube about it). Hit a technical hurdle: LLM will fix it.

Can't figure it out yourself, just throw a couple grand at a recent graduate to drive the LLM for you. There are tens of thousands who would do it for the experience on their CV.

SaaS is dead!

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

#103

Post by tanseydavid »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #96
carlosjobim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. Which they of course should. Paying a subscription for such a thing isn't very smart.

> The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.

QB desktop will nag you to death to get the latest but it is still a pay once arrangement.

BTW QB desktop has also been seriously enshittified.

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

#104

Post by dofm »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #96
carlosjobim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. Which they of course should. Paying a subscription for such a thing isn't very smart.

> The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.

FWIW in the UK I rather imagine many small businesses (Harvest's target) are getting their invoicing from Freeagent.

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

#105

Post by ginko »

dewey wrote: post #73
sph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingers crossed it destroys the SaaS rent extraction model and we’ll go back to purchasing software.

That made sense in times where you packaged software and sold it in a store, once. Now people barely run local-only software any more, most people live in Google Chrome and only use permanently online software. SaaS is the perfect model for software that's permanently being worked on.

>Now people barely run local-only software any more, most people live in Google Chrome and only use permanently online software.

Yes, because they were conditioned to do so by rent seeking companies.

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

#106

Post by preg_match »

metalliqaz wrote: post #25
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier 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 disagree, most off-the-shelf software is so generic that it sucks to use. It doesn't meet anyone's needs because it tries to meet everyone's needs.

Custom built in-house solutions are much less complex, while being higher quality. You can make it do EXACTLY what you need, instead of spending unbelievable amounts of time doing configuration wrangling to get it to almost work.

It doesn't work for every software, but when it works, it works.

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

#107

Post by antisthenes »

yieldcrv wrote: post #78
antisthenes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

What in the world are you talking about?

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

#108

Post by dewey »

ginko wrote: post #105
dewey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That made sense in times where you packaged software and sold it in a store, once. Now people barely run local-only software any more, most people live in Google Chrome and only use permanently online software. SaaS is the perfect model for software that's permanently being worked on.

>Now people barely run local-only software any more, most people live in Google Chrome and only use permanently online software. Yes, because they were conditioned to do so by rent seeking companies.

No because technology advanced and now everyone has a permanent online mini-computer with them at all times and we want to have the same documents we have at home/work also available on our phones.

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

#109

Post by yieldcrv »

antisthenes wrote: post #107
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? What in the world are you talking about?

what you described sounds morally benign

I’m guessing at why you don’t see it that way, I’ve seen similar value systems so I’m transposing those as the near guess onto yours in the meantime

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

#110

Post by kstrauser »

AlfeG wrote: post #98
kstrauser wrote: post #17

Every 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…

Octopus Deploy year ago raised our payment from $50 per month to $15000 per year with 3 years in advance. We were able to agree on only a 1 year. This year we with use of 200$ Claude sub - created a "clone" of Octopus for our own use. No more payments to Octopus =)

I think this is going to become a common theme over the next couple of years.
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