Now there has always been software that people have used that they "could" write for themselves but they didn't because they didn't want to maintain it. Seems like things that are like that would be good candidates for this right?

But this question shares at least a spiritual geneology with the response to some new startup code that does some thing, and the comment here is "Gee, I can't believe that got this funded, I could write that in a weekend."

The problem is, there are many things that are easy to describe but difficult to pin down, and reality is complicated. So many times I've gone into a project thinking it would be "easy" only to start uncovering layer after layer that are much more involved than I expected.

So no, you cannot '1-shot prompt' pretty much any significant software, and that goes doubly true if it affects your life in any potentially devastating way.

One of the things I'm constantly amused by[1] is the Solitaire program on iOS that is clearly being vibe coded these days because it comes up with daily challenges like 'win a hand in -2739551 moves'. Like no human would ever write code that screwed up basic math but LLMs do it all the time.

[1] Obviously I am easily amused :-). But it is sort of the 'pelican riding a bike' test where you can easily tell what a human would do vs what an LLM does.

[2] EDIT: another commentator says they vibe coded it in a weekend. That would support the hypothesis that the application could be at lease a small number of shots vibe coded. That said, I'd love to see that code and the prompts that led to it.

This is entirely possible. But here's my thesis; "Things that are trivial to do, are often done." I know sounds like a tautology but think about it, even things that aren't particularly trivial are done too, just for fun. And people do them and post them to share them with others. But when things are "hard" to do, then when someone does them they have of sense of "I worked hard to make this work, I'm not gonna just let anyone have it." sort of thing. Not always, but also not uncommon.

So elsewhere in this set of comments is a comment by someone who said they had vibe coded a work alike. Several other people responded that they too vibe coded work alikes. Is my mental model so out of date that nobody actually posts that work? So let's presume for argument that 'prompts' are the new source code. Why doesn't someone share, "This is the prompt I used with model <x> and it produced a Harvest work alike:" ? Even better would be "This is the prompt I used and this is all the code it generated and how it can be built into a Harvest work alike." But has anyone shared anything like that? If not, why not?

My thesis is that one possible reason[1] for it not being done, is because people didn't actually do it. I do not doubt that people believe strongly that it could be done, but belief only goes so far, Its the putting that belief into practice that reveals the challenges that perhaps were overlooked. I have definitely had that experience where I believed I could do something easily only to find it was harder to do than I had imagined. No judgement there, it happens all the time.

What I have observed is that when you don't see a lot of copies popping up of some system that should be "easy" to reproduce, is that there is some complexity buried in that system which makes producing it "hard" and people stop trying before getting over the hump to having done the thing.

So if you think this software can be easily vibe coded, then by all means educate me by showing me how easily you've reproduced it with a few prompts. It would really help me update my world view.

[1] Not the only reason, just one that fits the evidence.

Occam's razor. What's more likely, it isn't trivial to do or multiple independent people telling an unfalsifiable lie about something they did that they feel increases their own cool factor.

Lots of comments on this thread about how 'easy' it is to create a replacement but nobody can point to a repo that replaces it? No front page story "I made a Harvest Alternative with AI and got a 'cease & desist'", there is even a comment made that google searches for 'Harvest Alternative' have skyrocketed. So which is more likely? I don't know.

My observation is that if people haven't done a thing, that is a desirable thing to do, that seems 'easy', then it is either not desirable or not easy.

I really do like to be proved wrong though, just one-shot a replacement, point me at the repo and tell me how you validated it to be functional. Because that is easy it shouldn't take much time, heck probably less time than it took for me to type all this.

But if I had a coworker/employee just constantly finding ways to one-shot tools we're paying for I'd be pretty miffed. If that's all they're doing why are they even there. Just use their salary to pay for the services at that point.

I used my Harvest data export and generated PDF invoices as the majority of the “spec”.

Feels silly to open source this, given how little effort it was… (and because I’m certainly not going to respond to others PRs) but I’m happy to if anyone wants.

Post for the planet? (power/water usage)

An unregistered lurker somewhere is too lazy, shy, or scared to ask, but they’ll start prompting soon :)

A software company's value is not just providing software, it's providing reliable software at a good price. The 'good price' for a ton of stuff has plummetted.

- Free (obviously free)

- Teams $9 a month

- Enterprise unlimited $14 a month

The writer of this article claims they got upgraded to $133.98 a month plan, but looking at the site, such plan does not even exist.

Something is a bit fishy here or they accidentally added an extra 3 to the $13.98 or mistook the yearly price for a monthly price.

> There’s also a “flex” plan which costs $12.65/mo… but that plan now skims an additional 2% on top of the usual ~3% card transaction fees.

But hey please tell me again how the US banking system is so advanced

> Your base rate includes core features. As your team grows, additional invoices, projects, clients, and tasks are billed based on what you use, so you're never overpaying.

That's a bit bewildering, lol. Especially since they have annual plans.

This clarifies it:

> On Flex billing your first (sign-up) invoice usually covers seats only, because no projects, tasks, clients, or invoices have been tracked yet. Usage-based charges are calculated from the previous billing period, so they first appear at your renewal — not at sign-up. This is why a bill can jump (e.g. from a seats-only $44 to $404 once usage is added).

https://support.getharvest.com/hc/en-us/articles/31447072608...

You're right something doesn't ad up, and seems fishy (to me, bizarre even). But that isn't the author, it's Harvest after the Bending Spoons aquisition.

> “Looking at your account, you're currently on the Basic plan at $40.00/month with 5 seats, and you're scheduled to renew … on the Enterprise Unlimited plan at $586.50/month…”

So, from $40 to $586.50 for “unlimited” use. Same product. I think the goal was to force everyone onto usage based plans. I dropped spare seats and shifted off unlimited, and its about $75/mo per seat.

But if someone wanted to take over angry Harvest customers, it would probably be a good little business. Guess I just need to rip the bandaid off, and let a prompt run overnight.

My first tech job ever pretended we were supposed to track our hours in harvest. Which of course no one did. So long ago.

It isn't about the money, the principle is gross. Thankfully Asana's core business is now a prompt. We are nearly done replacing it with a native, self hosted client. Will post about it once it is hardened through use. Cancelling our subscription Asana this week.

To SaaS providers (myself included) it has never been easier to leave your service due to mistreatment. Take note.

What do you mean? Like a claude code one shot prompt?

Not OP, but definitely not a one shot prompt. However because of AI it takes far less resources to replicate services like these rather quickly.

Yes, we are picking up a maintenance burden but the 10x price increase in our case made it a very easy cost/benefit equation, and I decided that as a primary technology in a consulting business it was worth controlling it.

Trying to understand what the LLMs mean to the saas world. Will you have to become a time tracking/invoicing pro? Where’s the break even I wonder.

I've vibe-rebuilt several apps for myself and after a certain point I don't feel like anything is missing so I just stop touching it entirely except to fix a rare bug here and there.

But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.

Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).

We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.

Home grown product isn't going to match a saas product's features. But you dont need most of it anyway. so home grown gets the job done. Till it hits entropy or the roi is gone. Problems will show up a few months / years down till it isn't worth the effort or the savings.

Saas products that survive this AI wave are going to come out stronger on the other end.

I built a markdown editor and viewer to better than the best I've bought or used in the macos App Store in 81 prompts.

I've built a very good ticketing system and it took a lot more prompts than that.

I think the only lesson for SaaS providers, yourself and myself included, is how willing people are to cut off their noses to spite their faces. :)

I already pay for Zoom, so dropped Loom in a heartbeat.

Berkshire Hathaway invests further $330M in Bending Spoons

https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/berkshire-hatha...

I knew it was going to be more expensive, but when I got the bill this month and saw the price was over $200 and the Bending Spoons LLC tagline at the bottom, that was the end.

Claude is backing up all of my data via the API and will be vibe coding my next invoice.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50420733

They have recently expanded into bookkeeping, but I haven't used that. If you're just using the bank account & manual invoices, it's free.

Used Bonsai happily for years before that. I see they have been bought by Zoom, so I would expect some changes.

As of Jan 1 Mercury says they will start charging $30/month, which is cheaper than other alternatives I've found. My vibecoded Beancount-based system probably cost me more in time than using a year of Mercury Books.

Books is the new accounting offering, and is an additional $30/month.

https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen

Also, hope your night is going well. I'm quite tired!

Also an NSFW warning might have been nice on that page link, website owner. Hopefully the IT guy at work will understand

But then I thought I am on a 5g travel router in the UK and they have more rigid blocking with a lot of false positive so I just assumed it was that.

I had to use Harvest when I did some consulting last year. I don't know the revenue numbers for Harvest. But, the company that asked me to use Harvest was a tiny software consultancy. I always assumed Harvest was something small companies used, not big ones.

Those small companies would be very sensitive to price changes, and very motivated to use Claude to build their own alternative if it meant keeping $100 in the bank.

I think this might be the moment when Bending Spoons business model is exposed. I cannot imagine large enterprises using Harvest en masse and those are the only companies who will stick with BS when they run their playbook. Small orgs will certainly take five minutes with Claude. This isn't a SaaS that is really sticky.

They do have this "usage based pricing" where you pay them for each user, but then also for each project and customer, and then a percentage of your billings. It's completely absurd to be paying them a percentage when you receive payments by wire and all they're doing is emailing an invoice.

Anyhow caveat emptor. Looking at their website they do not show the actual pricing. They just say it's "starting from" $9/seat or $14/seat, but you only pay that if you don't use the software at all.

As far as I can tell, what Bending Spoons has figured out is that they can raise prices 8-10x, but only maybe 60-80% of their customers will cancel because it's a big hassle, and so the profits go up massively for a while. They will probably even retain a hard core of say 10% of their original userbase for some time.

Also, in such cases, the very biggest customers will probably be the last to exit. Little people will run away as soon as they can. Big ones will cut deals.

The tighter a product is bound to an organization's day-to-day, the harder it is to throw out wholesale. For agencies where hourly billing is bread-and-butter, time-tracking software is used by every single person at least once an hour (if not six minute increments).

So, a savvy PE player like bending spoons can privately bend the rules (pump prices instead of markets) and push commercial relationships to the limit where they are the necessary evil (dump all customers except those that are fully dependent).

I guess the original owners just wanted out and Bending Spoons was the best option for that.

The "SaaS is dead" narrative is a bit overblown, but private equity needs to think twice before gouging folks these days.

And yet, they never do.

Economies of scale are a big deal, hence why the comparison between the Stripe fee and Harvey fee is meaningless

(of course you're free to go to the competition or Vibe your own, but then you start noticing the actual cost of the service vs value added)

I haven't shared it around much (not fully finished) so any feedback would be welcome. It works offline, no account needed.

We were able to build a replacement in an afternoon with the features we use.

I know less technical orgs arent quite there yet, but the moat on this stuff is surely evaporating quickly.

really eats into margins for what should be simple

that being said, I can also see that the market can bear it

there is still room for undercutting competitors or rolling it out yourself much easier now, but only for your specific use case

In response we have moved every SaaS we still use over to monthly billing. For time tracking, we're now using an internal vibe coded app, and it does exactly everything I need it to do. These fools really screwed themselves, IMO. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who would have just kept paying for and using the software indefinitely.

Maybe hard to see "Workday" being replaced but I also never thought AI could one-shot all the stuff it does today.

Especially because you end up using half the features, building integrations, and working around all the limitations in off the shelf software - the cost benefit to just clone and get exactly what you need is hard to deny.

If you’re in a region that has l10n for accounting (via the OCA), you’d be able to handle all your tax compliance also. Only caveat to Odoo CE is you’d need to self host, which in itself is not that difficult.

odoo.com github.com/odoo/odoo github.com/oca

I've also had to build a bunch of small tools since we don't want to be locked into crappy cloud services.

We also funded a small improvement into hledger, because we are trying to use a % of our income to vote with our feet.

If people really want to use our invoicing and other small tools, we'll consider open sourcing them or selling them for cheap. Not sure if this is useful or a distraction.

The big impact will be due to us trying to serve a larger number of small clients. Since pricing tracks clients/projects/tasks, our 2028 pricing will rise substantially as we add clients (or decide to track projects more granularly for existing clients).

The move feels like enough of a price gouge that I have also decided to move away from harvest. With a year to plan and execute, I will likely build a solution into our client portal. It won’t take much effort to replace what we got from harvest, and there’s an opportunity to create something that further automates the rest of our billing and tax workflow.

I don’t tend to wish ill for others, but I’m happy to see similar anecdotes in this case. My gut is that bending spoons has done lasting damage to the brand. I wasn’t considering a change before I encountered the new pricing. But now I can confidently say that there’s not much they could offer to keep me as a customer beyond 2027. The trust is broken, and they have vastly overestimated their value proposition.

and no AI needed, youngsters

I wouldn't recommend it though

1: https://clockify.me/

I do all of my company accounts, including invoicing, via FreeAgent, which these days I have a Claude Code instance running via API key.

The question still is: why a SaaS that generates a couple PDFs a month and a Stripe wrapper needed (I suppose) so many employees and VC funding?

BS is reminding us all of those follies. It’s the company that, after calling out that the emperor is naked, gets to choose what he wears next.

Private equity almost always ruins a company, normally the culture first and the product thereafter. I can't imagine the creators being completely ignorant or feeling good about that?

Disclaimer: I have never founded a company, so I'm just guessing at what the motivations could be.

Searches for "harvest alternatives" has skyrocketed in the last year or so.

In the last couple of years...

They switched all Stripe accounts to their own Freshbooks branded new Stripe account. This meant the last 7 years of my business transactions are now on a "Legacy" Stripe account and archived and all new transaction go through the new Freshbooks branded Stripe account. They are also taking a % of every transaction now.

In addition to this they have increased the monthly price twice claiming new features and the cost for building them. I'm not using any of the new features and I haven't increased my usage (e.g., no more recurring invoices during this time).

They also redesigned (rewrote?) the entire application which requires additional clicks and screens to perform daily functions.

My dream would be for companies to keep their interface / UI the same and incorporate new features into that design.

In closing, it doesn't make sense to me that organizations like Bending Spoon would buy a much loved service and change anything. It's profitable, just go through the feature request list and incrementally improve it, don't change the whole application, billing structure, and UI. People used Harvest for all of the reasons you removed. Or, even better, follow the Basecamp model, it's worked very well for DHH.

In the end I opted to roll my own invoicing solution and keep Harvest for time tracking, since it saved me having to reimplement the Mac app and meant my costs actually dropped to $110 or so. I’m under no illusion that the vampires won’t close that loophole as well, but since I’ve had good success vibecoding some Swift apps in recent months I’ll be happy to take on the time tracking app next time too. It’ll be nice to stop sending them any money regardless.

Annoying, but worth the $10 / month for the basic plan not to have to migrate to another service so I decided to upgrade.

Helpfully there was a "Upgrade your account to send this invoice" button which I clicked. I'd filled out my credit card details and was about to hit submit when I realised the payment total was for more than $10 / month.

Turns out the upgrade flow subscribes you to the Super Mega Deluxe plan, even though the CTA implied it would just do the upgrade necessary to send invoices again.

A scummy dark pattern. I abandoned the upgrade and migrated to Zoho invoice instead.

I've used Waveapps since I shut my own service down. It's pretty complete as an invoicing and report generator, free if you're not taking payments through them, reasonably priced if you are. I don't accept credit cards anyway, since as the OP pointed out, why would I want to give away 3% of my annual income?

Even if I were to do time-and-materials hourly billing, which I studiously avoid, I can't think of a better base to use. In the cases where a customer's constraints would mandate I work with whatever software they are running, I can, in most cases, continue being org-first and integrate with their system (export/import / upload/download).

I just need a little Emacs-fu for generating invoices and then I could dump Harvest.

I can't share mine yet, but others have helpfully published theirs https://github.com/woofers/org-invoice-template

And TIL: someone appears to have vibe-coded a mode for invoicing: https://github.com/emacsmirror/org-invox If the code looks okay, I might give it a spin.

When I was self-employed in the UK, I used Freeagent which worked very well.

[1] https://news.lavx.hu/article/bending-spoons-raises-harvest-p...

Have you tried any of the agentic AIs?

Typically Bending Spoons buys a successful product with lots of user by a company that couldn't control the spending, took too much investment and sells so that investors can recoup some of the money.

Great product, badly managed business.

This might not apply to Harvest. The details of their business before acquisition or the sale price are not public but logic dictates that the business wasn't doing that well, and owners sold it to salvage as much as possible or it was doing well and owners sold to get a big, one-time paycheck and be free from day to day drudgery of running a company.

I always wonder: why couldn't the management of the company that sold to Bending Spoons do what Bending Spoons does.

It's not rocket science: reduce the cost and increase revenue (by increasing prices)?

But you can more easily do that with AI nowadays. The AI can even figure out what you're working on, and when.

What is the logic here? Do they really think people wouldn't notice or wouldn't get pissed? Or have they run the numbers and decided one "enterprise" customer is worth a 100 small businesses? This makes no sense even before AI, but now? If anything, SaaS providers should be providing much better service for a reasonable price to fight off homegrown AI solutions, no?

Shortly after the transition I went over the usage based limit, basically using too many labels on my tracked time (tasks) and got hit with an additional 2.5x of my normal monthly spend.

Transitioning away is going to cost more in the short term but the principle of the thing will be well worth it and I don't see the service getting any better.

My only real difficulty has been marketing/gaining traction as buying advertising for such a low-fee project has proved very difficult!

https://billable.to/