Most consultancies looking for a Harvest alternative in 2026 are not unhappy with the product. They are unhappy with the bill. Harvest's parent company was acquired by Bending Spoons, the deal closed on 31 July 2025, and the pricing changed during 2026 in a way that is structural rather than a percentage on top.
This page covers what changed, what it costs at different team sizes, and where TimeSubmit fits, including where it does not. If you want the mechanics in full, we have a longer piece on what actually changed in Harvest's 2026 pricing, and a roundup of eight alternatives if you are still drawing up a shortlist.
What actually changed in Harvest's pricing
The tiers on Harvest's pricing page are Free, Teams, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Read on 7 September 2026, Teams is $9 per seat per month billed annually or $11 monthly, Enterprise is $14 and $17.50, and the free tier covers one seat and two projects. Both paid prices are prefixed "starting from", which is the first clue.
The headline rates are not the change people are reacting to. What changed is that each plan is now billed in one of two modes, Flex and Unlimited. These are billing modes rather than tiers, which is the thing almost every article on this subject gets wrong, and they run in the direction people least expect: Unlimited is the fixed-price mode. The metering belongs to Flex.
Harvest's help centre describes Flex as a per-seat rate plus usage charges calculated from your prior billing period, metered on four things: active projects, active clients, active tasks and invoicing. "Active" means only items with time tracked against them during the period. Each plan includes an allowance, and usage above it is charged.
Harvest publishes no allowances and no overage rates. Not on the pricing page, not in the help centre, nowhere public. The help centre confirms allowances exist and gives no numbers, and says the rates are shown in Settings under Billing. So the only way to see what your usage costs is to already be a paying customer.
Sit with what that does to a purchase. You cannot model the bill before you sign up, you cannot compare Harvest with anything else on total cost, and you cannot check whether a renewal quote is arithmetically correct, because you have no rate card to check it against.
One correction to something we published on this page in August, and which is repeated widely elsewhere. Harvest's help centre says accounts upgraded from a trial before 7 November 2024 "may be on one of our Legacy plans". That is a statement about eligibility for a legacy plan, not a promise about price, and it is usually read as grandfathering. Harvest told the BBC the opposite: legacy customers faced the larger increases. If you have been a customer for years and took reassurance from that date, the reassurance points the wrong way. There is a second claim in circulation, that increases land at each account's own renewal anniversary rather than all at once. It is plausible and Harvest has published nothing that says it. What Harvest has confirmed is a notice period: 30 days, then a further 10 days before renewal.
How large the increases have been
The BBC reported on 20 August 2026 that Salentis, a UK consultancy, went from $130 to $2,110 a month. Its director Richard Haldenby, a customer of fifteen years, called it "a classic example of corporate greed over valuing customers". The same report carries a US customer whose annual charge went from $2,800 to $23,000.
Bloomberg covered the wider backlash across Bending Spoons' portfolio on 13 August, including a freelancer whose annual renewal went from $211.20 to $2,547.60. Subscription Insider reported on 22 August that a seven-user business moved from $69 to $821.50 a month. Silicon UK, on 31 August, described increases of "more than 15 times". The developer thread on Hacker News ran on 20 August and drew 112 points.
Taken together the documented cases run from roughly eight times the old bill to about seventeen. That is a wide band, and quoting the top of it as typical would be its own kind of dishonesty. Where you land depends on how much of your work is spread across many clients, projects and tasks rather than concentrated in a few.
Public reviews have the same shape. Harvest's Trustpilot profile showed a TrustScore of 1.6 out of 5 across 21 reviews when we read it on 7 September 2026. One review from 23 August 2026 puts the common complaint plainly:
"Like many others, I am complaining about the predatory pricing strategy adopted under the new Bending Spoons ownership. I am being asked to pay over 10x my existing price for the same product."
Almost nobody says the software got worse. They say the price stopped being predictable.
What the invoicing meter actually counts
The metered dimension that surprises consultancies most is invoicing, and it is worth being careful about what is known here, because a lot of confident writing on the subject is not.
Harvest's own wording is "invoicing" and "additional invoices", which reads as a count of invoices raised. The BBC reported the metering as running on revenue invoiced. Those are very different claims for a consultancy that raises a few large invoices rather than many small ones, and the ambiguity is not resolved by anything Harvest publishes. We are not going to pretend otherwise. If your billing is concentrated in a handful of high-value invoices, establishing which of the two it is should be the first question you put to Harvest support before renewing.
What is verifiable is the shape rather than the rate. A time-tracking tool whose cost moves with your own billing activity is a different kind of purchase from one that does not, and it is harder to forecast a year out.
How TimeSubmit's pricing compares
TimeSubmit charges for people. There is no charge for adding a client, opening a project, creating a task or raising an invoice.
It is not a flat per-seat rate either, and describing it as one would be inaccurate. Each tier is a base fee covering a number of members, then a fixed rate for each additional member.
| Team size | Practice | Core | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | $39 | $70 | $110 |
| 10 people | not available | $140 | $220 |
| 25 people | not available | $350 | $550 |
| 50 people | not available | $700 | $1,100 |
Practice is $39 a month covering up to five members, capped there, and limited to 1 client and 1 project. The first two months are at no cost and a card is required to begin. Core is $42 covering three members, then $14 for each additional, or $33 a month billed annually. Margin is $110 covering five, then $22 each, or $90 billed annually. Enterprise starts at $800 a month covering 25 members, with $32 for each beyond that, and is arranged through sales rather than checkout. All figures in USD, excluding VAT, read from our own pricing on 7 September 2026.
Set against the case above: seven seats on Core is $98 a month. That firm's Harvest renewal quote was $821.50.
What TimeSubmit does that Harvest does not
A documented approver role. Approvers have their own account, review and act on timesheets, and do not see billing rates or invoice totals. Approvals on Harvest start at Enterprise, at $14 a seat, and its pricing page describes them as "review and approve hours before they're billed" without naming a separate role. Worth stating carefully: we could not find any vendor in this market documenting that its approver is blocked from seeing rates, which is not the same as saying none of them do it. The claim is ours to evidence rather than theirs to deny.
Approvals on every plan, including the first two months. Admins assign one or more approvers per project, and a timesheet follows a submit, review, approve or reject flow with a reason required on rejection. Approvers count towards your plan as members, the same as anyone else. See approval workflows.
Invoices built from approved hours. Once a timesheet is approved it becomes a PDF invoice directly, or several approved timesheets combine into one. Templates carry your logo, payment terms, tax details and bank details, across seven currencies. See invoicing.
Structured timesheets rather than a running timer. Consultants log hours against projects with date, hours, billable status and description, across multiple projects in one submission.
Who should stay with Harvest
Several things Harvest does well have no equivalent here, and choosing on price alone would be a mistake if you need any of them. Harvest has also shipped a good deal during 2026: a new interface in May, a custom report builder without the old row limit, bulk actions, automatic timesheet locking, departments, custom cost rates by project, and a connector that lets Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT talk to your Harvest data.
- Accounting integrations. TimeSubmit does not sync with accounting software. It produces a PDF invoice, and the figures go into your accounting package separately. Harvest has integrated with the major packages for years.
- A running timer. If your team clocks in and out against a live timer, that is not TimeSubmit's model. Harvest's timer is mature and well liked.
- A broad integration ecosystem, and desktop and mobile apps. Harvest has had over a decade to build all of it.
- Expense tracking. Harvest has it on every tier including the free one. TimeSubmit does not. Only reimbursement payouts are still to come on Harvest's side.
There is one thing neither of us does, and it is worth naming because people shop on it. Neither product lets a client approve a timesheet through a portal without an account. Somebody on your client's side can be the approver in TimeSubmit, holding an account that counts towards your plan, and they will not see your rates. Harvest's client dashboard covers invoices and payments. If you need a genuine client approval portal, ask any vendor to demonstrate it rather than taking a feature list at face value, because we could not find one in this market that documents it.
If you track time loosely, invoice without a formal sign-off step, and rely on integrations to move data onward, Harvest remains a stronger fit even after the repricing, and a smaller general-purpose tracker may fit better still.
TimeSubmit suits consultancies that will not raise an invoice until someone has formally approved the hours behind it, and that want approval and invoicing in the same place as time tracking. That is a narrower product on purpose.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Harvest's price increase in 2026?
Harvest's parent company was acquired by Bending Spoons in a deal that closed on 31 July 2025, and the billing model changed during 2026. Alongside per-seat rates, the Flex billing mode meters active projects, clients, tasks and invoicing, calculated from the previous billing period. Because usage is billed a period in arrears, a new or newly converted account looks like a straightforward per-seat product until the first metered cycle reaches an invoice.
Were long-standing customers protected by the 7 November 2024 date?
No, and the widespread claim that they were is close to backwards. The date marks eligibility for a legacy plan, not protection from a rise, and Harvest told the BBC that customers on legacy plans faced the larger increases. If you have been on Harvest for years, you are in the group with the most to check rather than the least.
How much notice does Harvest give before a renewal increase?
Harvest told the BBC that customers receive 30 days' notice and then a further 10 days before renewal. Whether 30 days is enough to migrate a consultancy's time-tracking system is a fair question, and most people answering it find they are negotiating against a deadline.
Does TimeSubmit charge based on how much I invoice?
No. Pricing is based on the number of members in your organisation. Adding a client, opening a project or raising an invoice does not change the bill, and the amount you invoice your own clients is not metered.
Can approvers see our billing rates?
No. The approver role exists so hours can be signed off without visibility of rates or invoice totals. That is the reason the role exists rather than reusing an admin account.
What happens to our data if we leave?
Timesheet data exports as CSV and invoices download as PDFs. Take the invoice PDFs as documents rather than only as data, since a CSV row is not the file a client received, and write your rate card out by hand before you start, because that is the part never captured properly in any export.
Trying it
Practice starts with two months at no cost and a card is required to begin. If you are weighing a renewal quote, the useful comparison is not the headline seat rate but what the bill looks like a year out at your actual project, client and invoice volume. Count your active clients, projects and tasks from last month's timesheets before you read the quote, because those are the numbers it is built from.
See pricing in full, or how this works for management consultancies.
Harvest, Bending Spoons and Trustpilot figures verified against primary sources on 7 September 2026. Software pricing changes quickly; check the vendor before acting on any figure here.