> Richard Haldenby, head of UK consultancy firm Salentis, told the BBC his monthly bill had risen from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110.
If you estimate 25 employees total, that's $100/seat/mo. That's on the high end for enterprise SaaS but not really shocking enough to be a news scandal. The $130 they paid was laughably low. I also would migrate to a cheaper service ofc but Bending Spoons was aligning with the market pricing (at least the pre-2025 market) more than anything.
Buzzword nonsense. Wasn’t the $130 they were being charged before the market pricing?
You’re basically justifying that a 25-strong company can afford to pay more. Yes, that is true, but not all products have to extract as much profit as possible from their clients. Turn the problem around, how much does it cost Harvest to run their service for 25 additional users? It’s certainly not two grand a month.
Is the correct pricing that allows growth without alienating customers somewhere in-between? Probably.
Companies with 25 employees generally don't have money to pay a dozen SaaS vendors $2k each every month.
Maybe certain niche products that are critical to the business might be worth that much. But a time tracking & invoicing tool? Definitely not. Source: am actively moving away from Harvest due to this ridiculous price hike.
But obviously you need 16 seats to drop for every paying seat in order for that to earn less money
It also opens up a new market that takes them more seriously
I dabbled in dropshipping and would literally put the same ebay ad at a 1,000% market next to the (seemingly undervalued) supplier I would buy from
If you searched the item you would see both ads
and people bought from me
(you can’t do that at scale without getting flagged on that platform but a $8,000 pick me up was fine)
One of the frequent stories to hit the grapevine was someone putting up a common item at an insane price point in Jita or other popular trading system. And people would buy them (rarely, but consistently).
Something like a piece of an asteroid ore at 50 million ISK.
It's not exactly a crime, but for me it definitely sits in a moral grey area, somewhere between American Health care and selling bottled water in the desert for $1million/bottle.
Or it is not as bad as killing someone by depriving them of life saving water, but better than “American healthcare”?
The use of that scale, nor judging someone for their personal interests that do not impact anyone else as a moral issue is making sense to me.
Since Windows, despite its many faults, has a rock solid ABI (application binary interface), that piece of proprietary software from 2006 I use today still runs fine, as does that open source game from 2005 which I don’t need to figure out how to recompile.
So, yes, if these companies were able to buy the software instead of renting a SAAS (software as a service), they wouldn’t be subject to a huge bill to continue using what they have been using. And they would be able to still use that software for the foreseeable future.
They’d been paying $240/yr for freaking Evernote.
I’m astonished at how much abuse many people will tolerate as an alternative to changing their habits. Bending Spoons made the same discovery, but gleefully, and apparently it makes a profit for them.
I just don’t get it. I mean, I do, but I wish I didn’t. It’s depressing.
If Bending Spoons buys your vendor, then gtfo as quickly as possible. Don't wait, don't sit around like a sucker and hope you won't get screwed over, you will.
josefritzishere•22m ago
metalliqaz•20m ago
I remember fondly the time when computing was build on common interfaces and open formats. A abusive software supplier would be fired and replaced.
Now we have closed platforms and enshitification.
toomuchtodo•17m ago
Find use case, find stakeholders, wrangle stakeholders, build application with tokens, manage it in a non profit, coop, or similar model. License it in a way that prevents capture by commercial interests. Private equity (or rather, capital driven operating models in general) cannot enshittify what they cannot capture. If models continue to improve, this cycle can accelerate if generating "good code" continues to become more efficient and less resource intensive over time.
TLDR Building an anti-enshittification software factory.
A_D_E_P_T•13m ago
Some people won't like AI no matter what, but it's hard to argue with results that clearly benefit the public good and empower the little guy vs. public equity or the megacorp.
metalliqaz•3m ago
I believe this is a very flawed way of thinking that misunderstands why companies actually pay for software services. What you have described is essentially to hire an AI to provide the service. Our current LLM-based systems are not capable of this and probably won't be with the currently used technology. Software services is not the code. The code is frankly the least important part.
toomuchtodo•59s ago
I think you are mistaken. You still need to pay someone to host the service, but that someone can be a non profit or coop who operates the open source software for you.
NitpickLawyer•16m ago
Oracle has joined the chat :) (and them joining the chat is an additional clause to the initial contract, billed at 300% hourly rate, with a minimum block of 900 man-hours)
dewey•11m ago
paulcole•8m ago
Raise prices 1500% and you'll find out that you were way underpriced, you'll create an opportunity for a competitor, etc.
This isn't cancer medication we're talking about here, it's some dumb SAAS product.
havaloc•4m ago
I have a house and have been with every small/medium local landscape company in town, finally settled on a landscape company that was bought by private equity.
The pricing is about the same, but they actually do a good job, the employees are nice, and they answer the phone. You don't have to beg them to come do work and hunt them down, and they can usually come out pretty quick.
sph•56s ago