"The Harvest Price Hike, Worked Out For Your Studio"

#The headline is not the number

You have probably seen the headline by now. Harvest raised prices after Bending Spoons acquired the company. The widely cited figure is around 1500%. That number is real, but it is not the number that matters to your studio. The number that matters is the one on next month's invoice, in dollars, for your specific team.

I want to help you work that out, because the headline percentage obscures more than it reveals. A 1500% increase sounds abstract until you multiply it by your seat count and your billing cycle. Then it becomes a number that either fits in your budget or does not.

#Work it out

Take your current Harvest monthly cost. If you are on a per-seat plan, it is seats times the per-seat rate. If you know your annual contract, divide by twelve. If you do not know the exact number, estimate from your last invoice.

Now apply the reported increase. The 1500% figure means the new price is roughly sixteen times the old one, not one and a half times. This is where the headline misleads. A 100% increase is double. A 1500% increase is sixteen times the original.

If you want the exact figure for your situation, the range being reported for some teams takes a monthly bill from around $130 to a number closer to $2,000. But your number depends on your plan and your team size, so do the math on your actual invoice, not on a Hacker News comment.

The number you get is your new monthly cost. Multiply it by twelve. That is what the hike costs you per year, every year, for as long as you stay. If you want the three-year number, multiply by three. That is the figure to compare against any alternative.

#The comparison that actually matters

Once you have your annual number, compare it against the cost of leaving. Not the cost of the new tool. The cost of switching: the hours to migrate your history, the hours to onboard your team, the risk of a billing error during the move.

For a six-person studio paying the reported new Harvest pricing, the annual cost is in the range of $20,000 to $24,000, depending on the exact per-seat rate. A buy-once tool at $99 per license (up to three people) is $198 for a six-person studio, once. Even if switching costs you two weeks of reduced productivity, the math is not close.

I am not going to pretend switching is free. It is not. There is migration friction, there is a learning curve, there is the week where people miss the old tool. I have done enough of these switches to know the first month is not seamless. But the question is not whether switching is free. The question is whether two weeks of friction is worth $20,000 a year. For most studios I talk to, the answer is obvious once they see the annual number in dollars.

#What to do with the number

If the annual cost fits in your budget and you trust Harvest's new owners, stay. I mean that. Not every price hike is a reason to leave. If the number is fine for what you get, and the product still does what you need, staying is a reasonable choice.

If the number does not fit, or if it fits but you do not trust the new owners not to do it again, you have the figure you need to justify the switch. Take it to the person who approves software budgets. Show them the annual cost of staying. Show them the one-time cost of leaving. Let the numbers make the argument.

And if you work out the number and decide to leave, owntime is one of the options on the table. It is not the only one. Toggl, Clockify, and a dozen other tools exist. The point of this post is not to sell you owntime. The point is to give you the actual dollar number, so whatever you decide, you decide on the math, not on the headline.

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