Your Time Tracking Tool Just Changed Owners. Here's Why That Matters.

I used Harvest for five years.

It was the tool I relied on to run internal audit engagements across financial institutions in Brazil — logging hours, tracking project budgets, keeping teams accountable. It was simple, predictable, and it worked. For a practitioner managing multiple concurrent engagements, that simplicity was the entire value proposition.

When I heard that Bending Spoons had acquired Harvest in mid-2025, I did what most long-term users probably did: I looked up who Bending Spoons was. And then I started paying very close attention.

What happened to Harvest

Bending Spoons, an Italian technology conglomerate founded in 2013, acquired Harvest in June 2025. Within months, the pricing structure changed significantly. Harvest moved from a straightforward per-seat model to a hybrid system that combines a base per-seat rate with usage-based fees for projects, clients, invoices, and tasks.

For some users, the impact was dramatic. Reports on review platforms and community forums describe renewal notices arriving with increases that ranged from three to ten times the previous bill. Some users who had been paying modest monthly fees for a single seat reported being automatically moved to plans costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month — in some cases without prior notice.

On Trustpilot, one reviewer described receiving a renewal notice showing a jump from roughly $600 per year to nearly $8,700. Another reported a monthly bill increasing from $12 to over $2,000. A third described being notified of an automatic switch to an enterprise plan that would have cost over $19,000 annually — up from $130.

These are not isolated complaints. They reflect a pattern that Bending Spoons has followed consistently across its portfolio of acquired products.

The Bending Spoons pattern

To understand what happened to Harvest, it helps to look at what happened to the other products Bending Spoons acquired before it. The pattern is remarkably consistent.

Evernote, acquired in early 2023: the majority of approximately 250 US-based employees were laid off within months. The personal annual subscription increased from around $70 to $130 — and later to $250 for some tiers. The company relocated operations to Europe.

WeTransfer, acquired in July 2024: approximately 75 percent of staff were cut within weeks of the deal closing. The free plan was subsequently restricted. Monthly subscription prices for paid users roughly doubled.

Vimeo, acquired for $1.38 billion in September 2025: by January 2026, reports described layoffs affecting most of the global workforce, including the entire video team.

Brightcove, acquired for $233 million in late 2024: more than 85 percent of roughly 200 employees were let go.

In every case, the sequence has been the same: acquisition, followed by significant workforce reductions, followed by pricing restructuring that substantially increases revenue per user. The CEO of Bending Spoons has described this as maximizing the business's success in the long run. Investigative reporting by Follow the Money documented it as a replicable extraction pattern.

On July 1, 2026, Bending Spoons went public on the Nasdaq at a valuation approaching $25 billion. The company reported $1.31 billion in revenue for 2025 — a 95 percent year-over-year increase. In its SEC filing, the company disclosed plans to pursue approximately 1,000 additional acquisition targets.

Why this matters for professional services teams

For a freelancer tracking hours on a few projects, switching time tracking tools is a minor inconvenience. For a consulting firm or auditing team with years of historical data, established workflows, and dozens of team members relying on the system daily, it is a significant operational disruption.

The real cost of a pricing change like this is not the invoice itself. It is the uncertainty.

When your time tracking tool is owned by a company whose stated strategy is to acquire products and restructure their pricing for maximum revenue extraction, you lose something that matters more than any feature: predictability. You can no longer plan your operational costs with confidence. You cannot trust that the price you are paying today will resemble the price you will pay at renewal.

For professional services firms that operate on tight margins and need to track budget execution in real time, this kind of pricing instability introduces a risk that has nothing to do with the quality of the product itself. It undermines the very discipline that keeps projects on time and on budget.

What I learned from being on the other side

Having spent five years as a Harvest user and over thirty years managing audit and consulting teams, I have a perspective on this that goes beyond the pricing spreadsheet.

The tools we use to manage our teams' time are not commodity products. They sit at the center of how we plan, execute, and bill for our work. They hold historical data that informs future estimates. They shape how team members think about logging their hours — whether it feels like a natural part of the workflow or an administrative burden they defer until Friday.

When that tool changes ownership and the new owner's primary strategy is pricing optimization, the relationship between the tool and the team fundamentally shifts. The tool is no longer working for you. You are working for the tool's revenue model.

That realization is what led me to build something different.

What to look for in a time tracking tool right now

If you are evaluating alternatives — whether because of the Harvest situation or for any other reason — here is what I would recommend looking for, based on three decades of managing professional services teams:

Pricing transparency. The price on the website should be the price you pay. No usage-based surprises, no hidden fees per project or per client. You should be able to calculate your annual cost in five seconds.

Independence. Who owns the company matters. A tool built by practitioners who depend on the product's reputation has fundamentally different incentives than a tool owned by a conglomerate optimizing for revenue per user across a portfolio of 100+ acquired products.

Built for your workflow. Most time tracking tools were designed for freelancers or general-purpose project management. If you run consulting engagements, audit projects, or professional services teams, the tool should understand concepts like squad allocation, planned versus executed hours, and budget execution — not just a start/stop timer. The consequences of teams that stop tracking time properly are well documented and expensive.

Data portability. You should be able to export your data at any time, in a standard format, without friction. If you have learned anything from the Harvest situation, it is that you may need to move faster than you expected.

The bigger picture

The Harvest acquisition is not an isolated event. It is part of a broader trend in the software industry where established tools with loyal user bases are being acquired specifically because those users represent predictable, extractable revenue.

This trend is unlikely to slow down. Bending Spoons has publicly stated its intention to make approximately 1,000 more acquisitions. Other firms are following similar playbooks.

For professional services teams, the implication is clear: the tool you rely on today may not be the same tool — or the same price — tomorrow. The best protection is to choose tools built by people whose success depends on your continued trust, not on your switching costs.

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