Harvest’s 2026 Price Increase: What Agencies Need to Know Before Their Next Renewal

Harvest has been a reliable tool for agencies since 2006. Track time, send an invoice, get paid. The workflow is simple and it works. So when renewal notices started arriving with numbers that bore no resemblance to the previous bill, a lot of teams were caught off guard.

In 2025, Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons and its pricing structure changed. The per-seat price on Harvest’s public pricing page is the base rate only. For some accounts, the actual bill looked nothing like it.

Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in 2025: here’s why that matters

Bending Spoons is an Italian software company that acquires established apps, restructures pricing, and runs them at scale. Their portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, Splice, and Meetup. In each case, users reported significant price increases after the acquisition.

Harvest is still a functional product with a long track record. If your workflow is simple and your bill held steady, there’s probably no reason to move. If the renewal notice caught you off guard, or you’re reviewing your tools proactively, the acquisition history here is relevant.

How Harvest pricing actually works: the part the pricing page buries

Harvest’s public pricing lists two paid plans:

• Teams: from $9 per seat per month, billed annually
• Enterprise: from $14 per seat per month, billed annually

Those numbers look manageable. The catch is a single line buried in each plan description:

“Your base rate includes core features. As your team grows, additional invoices, projects, clients, and tasks are billed based on what you use.”

For a small team with a handful of clients, this may not matter much. For an agency running 15 active projects across 8 clients and sending 20 invoices a month, it does. Users on public forums have shared renewal notices showing:

• A single-seat account previously at $12 per month billed at $1,900 after the restructuring, due to accumulated usage fees.
• A small team’s plan going from $130 per year to $168 per year plus an estimated $720 in usage fees.
• An account automatically moved to an enterprise tier priced at over $19,000 per year.

These are outliers, not averages. But the pricing mechanism that produced them applies to every account. A growing agency creates more projects, more clients, more invoices. Each one potentially adds to the bill.

What Harvest Enterprise covers at $14 per seat, and what it doesn’t

For teams that need time tracking and invoicing, Harvest is a mature and stable product. The client-to-payment workflow is well built, the integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and Stripe are reliable, and the interface is familiar to agencies that have been using it for years.

At the Enterprise tier ($14 per seat per month, billed annually, plus usage fees), the plan includes timesheet approvals, profitability reporting, an activity log, SAML-based SSO, custom reports and exports, and the ability to require notes on time entries.

None of Harvest’s plans include:

• Retainer tracking. There is no way to track pace against a monthly retainer, see how much of the budget has been consumed in real time, or manage rollover to the following month.
• Native project management. Harvest has no task lists, boards, or timelines. Teams using it for time tracking and invoicing still need a separate tool to manage the actual work.
• Full approvals workflow. Submit-for-approval, bulk approve/reject, and time entry states are absent from every Harvest plan.
• Client-facing access without a paid seat. Clients can’t access reports or project data without being added as a paid user.

What growing agencies actually need from time tracking in 2026

Agencies leaving Harvest tend to have one of two problems:

• The pricing problem. The workflow works fine, but the bill went up. The fix is flat-rate pricing: a number that doesn’t change based on how many projects you run or invoices you send.
• The feature problem. The price increase triggered a review, and that review exposed gaps the team had been working around.

The gap that comes up most often is retainer management. A monthly retainer means a fixed budget, a defined scope, and a need to know in real time how much of that budget has been consumed. Tracking that is different from logging hours on a time-and-materials project. Harvest wasn’t built for it. Agencies with retainer clients have been running that math in spreadsheets.

TrackingTime: what’s available today and what’s coming this summer

TrackingTime is the operational back office for agencies and professional services: one workspace where time tracking, retainers, time off with policies, approvals, payroll, expenses, and client reporting live together.

For teams leaving Harvest today, the Pro Plan ($5.75 per seat per month, billed annually) covers the core workflow and more:

• Time tracking with one-click timers, manual entry, calendar integrations, and AutoTrack
• Invoicing with billable rates, task rates, historical user costs, and profitability reporting
• Project management with task lists, boards, and timelines, so you don’t need a second tool
• PTO, holidays, and time cards
• Viewers: unlimited read-only access for clients and stakeholders, no paid seat required
• Shared Reports: filtered report views you can share by link, without giving anyone access to your workspace
• Unlimited projects, clients, and tasks with no usage fees

Coming Summer 2026: TrackingTime Pro Plus

Only here: Real retainers

Pro Plus is built for agencies running on monthly retainers. It adds pace tracking, a live view of how much of each retainer has been consumed, alongside burn alerts, rollover management, and rate tracking by person or task. Toggl, Harvest, Timely, and Clockify don’t offer this as a complete product.

Pro Plus also adds the full approvals workflow (submit, bulk approve/reject, time entry states), expense tracking against projects, unlimited Client Users so clients can log in and see their own project data, and tighter data controls once a billing period closes.

Pro Plus is priced at $9.50 per seat per month ($7.50 billed annually). No usage fees.

Side-by-side: Harvest vs TrackingTime

Moving from Harvest to TrackingTime

Switching tools is manageable when the data is clean. Here’s the process:

1. Export your Harvest data. From your Harvest account, export your time entries, projects, and clients as CSV files.
2. Set up your TrackingTime workspace. Create your account, import clients and projects, and configure billing rates to match your current setup.
3. Import your time history. TrackingTime supports CSV import for historical time data, so your records carry over.
4. Reconnect your accounting integrations. If you were using Harvest’s Stripe, QuickBooks, or Xero connections, TrackingTime connects to the same tools.
5. Run both for one billing cycle. Switching mid-month creates reconciliation risk. Running both tools until the end of your current billing period costs one overlap month and avoids gaps in your records.

If you’d rather not handle the migration yourself, we can walk you through it or do it with you.