If they are taking a percentage of billings, that dwindling 10% will just be the smallest customers.
Re:RIP, Harvest
by adityaathalye on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:14AM
(#50424550)
No matter... even a 20% RoI handsomely beats the market. This is a pump-and-dump scheme, but easier because you can directly manipulate market value of the product. No need for market-manipulating pump. SaaS gross margins are enormous, and lock-in is real, which makes this tactic possible.
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).
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.