2026-09-11

Harvest's owner has done this before: the Bending Spoons pattern, product by product

A Harvest customer cancelled over a tenfold increase, then got an offer of a year for about $200. Was that regret? The record of the company that owns Harvest says no. Here is that record, product by product, with the source for every number.

The company, in one paragraph

Bending Spoons is a Milan company that buys software with a loyal user base, runs it with a fraction of the previous team, and changes the pricing. It listed on Nasdaq on 1 July 2026 (TechCrunch). Its CEO, Luca Ferrari, put the pricing half plainly to Follow the Money: “I agree that we often increase prices for users who use an application most frequently.” The staffing half is in its own IPO paperwork: AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo brought about 1,830 people, and the company expected only a few hundred to remain after 2026.

The purchases, and what followed each

Figures are what the linked source reports. Where a number comes from one outlet and the company has not confirmed it, the entry says “reported”.

Evernote bought 2022, closed early 2023

About 129 people were laid off soon after the deal closed, per TechCrunch; headcount is reported to have gone from 341 to about 60 (Colin Keeley). The free plan was capped at 50 notes and one notebook in December 2023, existing users included (TechCrunch), and the personal plan went from about $70 a year to $130 (Taming the Trunk).

Filmic Pro bought 2022

The entire original team of 22, the CEO included, was let go in late 2023 (AppleInsider).

Meetup bought January 2024

Organizer costs more than doubled, per the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money, which also carries the CEO quote at the top of this page.

StreamYard bought from Hopin, early 2024

Staff reported cut from 154 to 44, and the monthly plan from $25 to $45 (Colin Keeley).

WeTransfer bought July 2024

The CEO said 75% of staff would be let go (Reuters, via AOL). The free plan later got a limit of ten transfers a month (TechCrunch).

komoot bought March 2025

Most of a team of about 150 was let go within weeks (BikeRadar), and the premium price has since more than doubled (BikeRadar).

Harvest bought 2025

Flat per-seat pricing became a per-seat base plus usage fees on projects, clients, tasks and invoices (Productive). The BBC reported one consultancy going from about $130 a month to $2,110 (Subscription Insider). Our own read of the structure is in what Harvest’s 2026 pricing actually charges for.

Vimeo $1.38 billion, closed November 2025

Layoffs in the second half of 2025 were described as hitting most of the workforce (TechCrunch).

AOL about $1.5 billion, announced October 2025

Bought from Yahoo (Variety). See the staffing line under the IPO, below.

Eventbrite $500 million, closed early 2026

The founder CEO left, staff were cut across engineering, marketing and support, the Flex plan was retired and email marketing moved into paid Pro tiers (SimpleTix).

Airtable $1.285 billion, announced August 2026

Their first purchase as a public company, a month after the IPO (OfficeChai). Too early to say what changes.

Also owned: Brightcove ($233 million, 2024), Issuu, Splice, Remini, MileIQ, Mosaic Group’s apps and Tractive, among more than fifty in all.

What the win-back offer is

Read against the list, a discount after cancelling is not a change of mind. It is the same move at a smaller scale: raise the list price hard, let the long tail leave, and quietly keep anyone who pushes back. Nothing above suggests the discounted number is the new price, so the question to ask before accepting is what next year’s renewal looks like, in writing.

The other question is what leaving looks like. Harvest exports exist, in five parts (we listed them). Get them before the renewal date, whichever way you decide.

Where Winnows sits, and where it does not

We built Winnows after our own multiple-times increase. It is the Harvest core, clients, projects, tasks, rates with dates, timesheets, approvals and reports, at $9 per active member per month, free for two people and one project, with no usage fees on anything. It imports a whole Harvest account and ends with a report that reconciles every total to Harvest’s (how that works).

It does not do invoicing; approved hours become invoice-ready lines for QuickBooks or Xero. No expenses, estimates or retainers, no native phone apps, no SSO. If you invoice from the time tool, it is not for you, and the comparison page names the tools that are. Winnows is new, and the way to find out whether it fits is the import, which runs on the free plan.