The Anatomy of a Software Rug Pull

#TL;DR

A software rug pull happens when the company that sold you a tool changes the deal after you are locked in. Harvest users woke up to roughly a 1500% price increase after Bending Spoons bought the company. It is not an accident and not one bad actor. It is the standard playbook of subscription software once growth stalls and an acquirer needs the revenue out. You can not predict which tool gets bought, but you can stop renting tools whose price and data are controlled by someone else.

#The email that started it

I got the same email you probably did. The subject line was innocent. The number underneath was not.

I had used Harvest for years without thinking about it. It was my billing memory, my Friday routine, the thing I opened when a client asked "what did we do in March?" The subscription was cheap enough to forget, around $130 a month for my setup, so I forgot it the way you forget a tool that works. Then the new pricing landed and it became a line item I had to think about. A number I had to sit down for.

I did what a lot of people did that week. I got angry. I read the Hacker News thread as it ran hot, 111 points, 110 comments, the same question in a dozen voices: what now?

Then I did the thing the angry commenters only threaten to do. I spent the week building the alternative instead of shopping for one. Not a blog post about leaving Harvest. A time tracker that structurally cannot do what Harvest just did. owntime is buy-once and local-first, and it exists because of that specific week.

But anger fades and the pattern does not. So let me walk through what actually happened, because the word "rug pull" gets thrown around and the mechanics matter more than the metaphor. And full disclosure up front: I am Amit, I make owntime, and I am going to point out where my own product falls short as we go.

#What a rug pull actually is

A rug pull is not a bug. It is a business decision made possible by an architecture.

Here is the shape of it:

1. A vendor sells you software on a recurring plan. You pay monthly or yearly.
2. Your data accumulates on their servers. Your team's history, your invoices, your tax trail, all of it.
3. The vendor is acquired, or its growth stalls, or its investors demand more.
4. The price changes. Or the terms change. Or the product gets folded into something else.
5. You can leave, but leaving costs you your history, your workflow, and your time. Most people stay and pay.

The key word in that sequence is architecture. Every step after the first depends on the vendor running the thing you rely on and holding the data you produced. The moment you agree to rent software and store your history on someone else's machine, you have handed them the leverage they will use later.

That is the part people miss. The rug pull did not start with the price email. It started the day the tool became a subscription with your data on their servers.

#The Harvest story, told straight

Harvest was a well-liked time tracking and invoicing tool. Small agencies and consultants used it for years. It had a decent free tier for solo use and a reasonable per-seat price for teams.

Then Bending Spoons bought it. Bending Spoons is a company known for acquiring apps and running them more aggressively. Within a short window, Harvest customers saw pricing that looked like a different product. The phrase doing the rounds was a price increase of around 1500%.

Let me be precise about the mechanics, because "1500%" sounds like a rounding error and it is not.

If a team was paying roughly $130 a month, a 1500% increase does not take them to $200 a month. It takes them to a number closer to $2,000 a month. Over a year, that is around $24,000 for a tool that, the month before, cost about $1,560 a year.

The math is the message. Nobody raises a price 15 times over because costs went up. That is a company re-pricing an asset it now owns, because it can.

#Why acquisitions trigger this

Acquirers do not buy companies out of kindness. They buy a customer base, a product, and a revenue stream, and they usually pay a multiple of that revenue. The only way the deal works is if the revenue grows after the purchase.

There are two ways to grow revenue in a subscription business:

1. Sell to more customers.
2. Charge existing customers more.

Option one is slow and expensive. Option two is fast. Every acquired subscription product faces the same pressure, and the ones that act on it are not the exceptions. They are the ones you hear about, because the quiet ones just raise prices 20% and hope nobody notices.

Harvest is not alone. The pattern shows up across software. Octopus Deploy, a deployment tool, was cited on Hacker News going from about $50 a month to $15,000 a year. Different niche, same shape. A commenter summed up the response in four words: "so we built a clone instead."

That comment is the whole story of why tools like mine exist.

#The three receipts

When I built owntime, I kept coming back to three receipts that explain the category:

Receipt 003 is not a promise. It is an architectural fact, and that is the entire difference.

#How to spot the next rug pull before it happens

You will not get a warning email. But you can read the tea leaves years in advance. Ask these questions about every tool you depend on:

1. Who owns the company, and why would they sell?

A bootstrapped tool with a founder who answers support emails is a different risk than a venture-backed tool that needs to show growth to its next round. Neither is safe forever. But the pressure to sell is higher when investors are waiting on an exit.

2. Is your data on their servers?

This is the big one. If your history lives in their database, you are not a customer. You are a hostage with a login. The cost of leaving is the cost of losing or migrating years of records.

3. What is the actual price trend?

A tool that raises prices a little every year is managing churn. A tool that raises prices a lot once is usually re-pricing before a sale, or paying for one that already happened. The second is the one that ends in a rug pull.

4. Can you leave in an afternoon?

Export your data today. If the tool makes export easy and lossless, you have freedom. If export is buried, partial, or formatted to be painful, that is a feature on their side and a trap on yours.

5. Does the business model depend on you staying?

Free tiers, teaser pricing, and "lifetime" deals all share a risk: the company needs revenue later and the only lever is you. If the product has no way to make money except charging you more over time, the rug pull is not a question of if. It is a question of when the board notices.

#What ownership actually looks like

The opposite of a rug pull is not a cheaper subscription. It is owning the tool.

I want to show you what that looked like the night I decided to build owntime. I turned off my wifi, on purpose, as a test. If the app I was imagining needed a server, it would fail the test, and I would know the whole idea was a subscription in a trench coat. So I sat there with no connection and asked: can the timer tick? Can the entries save? Can the invoice generate? The answers were yes, yes, and yes, because there was never a server in the loop to begin with.

That offline test is the whole product. It is why owntime can say things the subscription tools cannot say without crossing their fingers. There is no account, no cloud, no telemetry, and no monthly invoice with a number that can change. The license activates once, online, and never checks in again. If I disappear tomorrow, your copy keeps working, and I am not asking you to trust me on that. I am asking you to turn off your wifi and see for yourself.

Owning software means:

• One payment. You pay once and the transaction is over. There is no second invoice to surprise you.
• Your data is a file you hold. It lives on your disk, in a format you can read with other tools. Not in a database only they can open.
• The app works without their servers. If the company vanishes tomorrow, your copy keeps running. Offline. Forever.
• Updates are yours. You are not renting access to a version they control. You own the version you bought.

That last point is where most "buy once" tools cheat. They sell you a license but keep the app phoning home, or tie features to their cloud, or make you repurchase the "real" version later.

#The honesty constraint

I am not going to pretend owntime is for everyone. If you need a team of fifteen people live-editing the same timesheet from phones, owntime is not your tool. If you need Harvest's forecasting and scheduling, you should keep looking. Those are real products with real uses.

The trade is specific: solo consultants and small agencies that bill by the hour, sit at a desk, and just watched their tracker get repriced. For that group, owning the file beats renting the login.

And I will say the uncomfortable part plainly. Buying software can still end badly. A company can stop updating a buy-once product. It can go out of business. The difference is what you lose. With a subscription, you lose the tool and the history and the money you paid into it. With owned software, the worst case is the tool stops improving and your file keeps working. The worst case of buying is better than the best case of renting, and the asymmetry is not close.

#FAQ

Is Harvest really raising prices 1500%?

The widely cited figure is around 1500%, reported across Hacker News and customer accounts after Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in 2026. Exact percentages vary by plan and team size, but the reported change took many teams from roughly $130 a month to a number several times larger.

What is a software rug pull?

A software rug pull is when a vendor changes the terms after you are locked in, usually by raising prices or degrading the product after an acquisition. It is made possible by subscription architecture: your data on their servers and your workflow dependent on their continued operation.

Is owntime really buy once?

Yes. owntime is a one-time purchase, currently $99 during early bird and $149 after. There is no subscription, no account, and no telemetry. The app verifies a license key offline and your timesheet lives in one local SQLite file you keep.

What happens to my data if owntime disappears?

Your timesheet is a SQLite file on your own disk. If owntime ever stops existing, the app keeps running because it never depends on our servers, and you can open the file with any SQLite tool. Nothing is held hostage.

How is this different from a cheap subscription?

A cheap subscription can become an expensive one. The price is set by whoever owns the company at any given time. A one-time purchase ends the transaction. The only party who can change the deal after you buy is you.

#The bottom line

The Harvest story is not really about Harvest. It is about the shape of the software industry, where renting replaced owning and nobody noticed until the rent went up.

You cannot stop every company you rely on from being acquired. You can stop renting the tools that matter. For your time, your billing, and your history, the fix is simple: own the file.

Your time tracker can not raise your price 15 times if you own it.

Buy owntime once, $99 early bird · Try the 14-day free trial first · See owntime vs Harvest, side by side