On 20 August 2026 a single line item on a UK consultancy’s invoice became a warning shot for every business that runs its operations on other people’s software. Richard Haldenby, who heads the UK consultancy Salentis — a firm of up to 15 staff with sister businesses in the United States and Australia — watched his average monthly bill for the time-tracking and invoicing app Harvest rocket from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110. That is an increase of roughly 1500% for the same software his team had used for years, arriving not through any change on his side but because the app’s new owner rewrote the pricing rules. Accepting it, he said, would double his firm’s entire annual IT spend. He called it “completely unaffordable” and “a classic example of corporate greed over valuing customers”, and he is now migrating to an alternative provider.
The specifics are striking, but the pattern is what should concern any UK SME reading this. Harvest was acquired in 2025 by the Italian technology company Bending Spoons, which the following year replaced Harvest’s simple flat per-user monthly fee with usage-based pricing tied to active projects, clients, tasks and invoiced revenue. Businesses paying annually are only discovering the change now, as their renewal falls due, and many cannot even calculate the new figure in advance. This is not a story about one app. It is about the structural exposure created when a core business function — billing, in this case — sits with a single third-party vendor whose commercial terms can change overnight, and about why vendor strategy, exit planning and data ownership belong on the desk of whoever owns IT decisions in your business. This article breaks down exactly what happened, why it is happening across the software industry, and what a UK SME should do before its own renewal lands.
What actually happened
Salentis had used Harvest, a well-established time-tracking and invoicing tool, as part of its everyday billing operations. Under the old model the cost was straightforward: a flat monthly fee per user, easy to budget and easy to predict. When Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in 2025 and moved it to usage-based pricing in 2026, that predictability vanished. The new bill is calculated from how much the business does inside the tool — the number of active projects, clients and tasks, and the volume of invoiced revenue flowing through it. For a growing consultancy, every one of those metrics tends to rise over time, which means the pricing scales with success rather than with any additional value delivered by the software.
The result for Salentis was a jump from $130 to $2,110 a month. When Haldenby pushed back, Harvest offered a discounted rate of $1,309 a month — still a tenfold increase on what he had been paying, and available only if he committed to paying the full year upfront. That is the detail that turns a pricing dispute into a strategy lesson: the ‘concession’ still represented a 10x rise, and it was conditioned on locking in an annual commitment before the customer could reasonably assess alternatives. Faced with a choice between an unaffordable bill and a large upfront payment for a service he no longer trusted to hold its price, Haldenby chose to leave.
He is not alone in his reading of it. Mark Peacock, who heads the UK SME pricing consultancy PriceMaker, said Harvest had “completely failed at the transparency test”, because customers cannot know what they will owe until the bill lands at the end of the month. Damian Foks of the pricing consultancy Valueships framed it as part of a broader pattern, describing the move as “a shift in the company’s strategy from growth to monetization” that typically follows a change of ownership. In other words, the software did not change — the business model behind it did, and the customers absorbed the difference.
If a core operational tool — the one that tracks your time, raises your invoices, holds your customer records or backs up your data — is supplied by a single vendor with no tested exit route, you are exposed to exactly this. A post-acquisition repricing can multiply a small, predictable line item into one of your largest IT costs at the moment of renewal, when your data is already inside the platform and switching feels hardest. The danger is not that the software fails; it is that the commercial terms change while your options are at their weakest. That is a governance problem, not a software problem, and it is solvable before the bill arrives rather than after.
How the Bending Spoons playbook developed
Where SaaS repricing exposure is greatest
Not every category of business software carries the same risk when a vendor decides to monetise more aggressively. Exposure is highest where two things combine: the tool is deeply embedded in a daily operational workflow, and moving away from it is slow, disruptive or data-heavy. The chart below is a Cloudswitched assessment of relative repricing exposure across common SaaS categories, on a scale where 100 represents the highest combination of switching difficulty and pricing power held by the vendor. It is an analytical ranking to guide where to look first, not a survey.
The tools at the top of that list share a common trait: they hold the data that runs your business and the workflows your staff use every day. Harvest sits squarely in the highest band because it touches both billing and the record of chargeable work — the closer a tool sits to how you get paid, the more pricing power its owner holds. This is the same dependency logic that runs through so much of modern business IT, from the third-party software supply chain we examined in the ChainDrop npm supply-chain worm to the concentration risk of a single hosted phone provider in the RingCentral VoIP breach. The vendor changes; the lesson about single points of dependence does not.
The number that should stop a boardroom
Haldenby’s most quotable line was that the new bill would double his firm’s entire annual IT spend. Sit with what that means. A single application — one tool among the dozens a modern consultancy uses — would come to cost as much as everything else in the IT budget combined. Put another way, after the hike that one app would account for roughly half of total IT spending. The donut below expresses that share, and it is the figure that ought to trigger a review in any business: no single non-strategic SaaS tool should be able to grow, unbudgeted and outside your control, into half of what you spend on technology.
The point is not that Harvest is uniquely expensive; plenty of software delivers genuine value at a fair price. The point is the loss of control. When a cost you cannot predict, on a tool you did not choose to have repriced, can swell to that proportion of your budget at the moment of renewal, the real problem is that nobody in the business was watching the exposure build. That is precisely the gap a strategic IT function is there to close — the difference between discovering a 1500% rise on an invoice and having planned an exit long before it could hurt.
An honest SaaS-resilience scorecard for UK SMEs
Most businesses only audit their software dependency after a shock like this one. The grid below is a self-assessment of the weaknesses we most often find when we review an SME’s SaaS estate. A ‘high’ badge marks an exposure that could turn a vendor’s decision into your emergency; ‘mid’ is a meaningful gap worth planning around; ‘low’ is a minor consideration.
What SaaS exposure looks like by business size
The scale of the risk changes with the size and complexity of the business, but no band is immune. The table below sets out the typical picture for UK businesses, the risk that tends to go unmanaged, and the sensible safeguard. The monthly spend figures are indicative planning ranges to show relative scale, not quotations; the real number depends on your stack, your sector and how much of your operation runs in the cloud.
| Business size | Typical monthly SaaS spend | Risk that goes unmanaged | Sensible safeguard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro (1–9 staff) | £150–£600 | One founder signs up for everything; no inventory or exit plan | A simple SaaS register with renewal dates and data-export checks |
| Small (10–49 staff) | £600–£3,000 | Core billing or CRM on a single vendor with auto-renewing terms | Documented exit plan and tested exports for every critical app |
| Medium (50–249 staff) | £3,000–£15,000 | Shadow IT and overlapping tools; no owner of vendor strategy | A Virtual CIO to govern spend, contracts and consolidation |
| Multi-site / group | £15,000+ | Inconsistent contracts across sites; repricing hits several at once | Central vendor management, negotiated terms and price-rise caps |
Reactive versus proactive: two ways to hold a SaaS estate
Reactive posture
What most SMEs do today
- Discovers a price rise only when the renewal invoice lands
- Has no single list of apps, costs or renewal dates
- Never tests whether its data can actually be exported
- Signs auto-renewing annual terms with no cap on increases
- Treats each tool as a departmental decision, not a strategic one
- Migrates in a panic, under time pressure, at the worst moment
Proactive posture
Where Cloudswitched takes you
- Maintains a live inventory of every app, its cost and renewal date
- Holds a tested exit plan and verified data export for each critical tool
- Reviews vendor ownership and pricing-model risk before it bites
- Negotiates terms, notice periods and caps on price increases
- Keeps an independent backup of business-critical data
- Plans any migration calmly, on your timetable rather than theirs
The gauge below reflects the typical starting position we see when we first review an SME’s SaaS estate against these criteria. A score in the mid-forties is common: the tools work day to day, but the governance around them — inventory, exit plans, data ownership and contract discipline — is thin enough that a single vendor’s decision could become the business’s problem overnight.
List every piece of software your business pays for, with its monthly or annual cost and its renewal date, in a single sheet. For each of the three or four most critical — the ones that hold your customers, your billing or your data — answer one question: if the price tripled at renewal, could we leave, and could we take our data with us? If the honest answer is ‘we don’t know’, you have found your exposure. Test an actual data export from each before you ever need it in anger.
The story at a glance
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Reported | 20 August 2026 |
| Affected business | Salentis, UK consultancy (up to 15 UK staff; sister firms in the US and Australia) |
| Spokesperson | Richard Haldenby, head of Salentis |
| Software | Harvest — time-tracking and invoicing app |
| Old cost | $130/month (£95.50), flat per-user fee |
| New cost | $2,110/month — roughly a 1500% increase |
| ‘Discount’ offered | $1,309/month (still 10x), only if paid a year upfront |
| New pricing model | Usage-based: active projects, clients, tasks and invoiced revenue |
| Owner | Bending Spoons (Italy), which acquired Harvest in 2025 and repriced in 2026 |
| Owner’s track record | 50+ tech firms acquired since 2013, including Evernote, Vimeo and WeTransfer |
| Budget impact | Accepting would double Salentis’s annual IT spend |
| Outcome | Haldenby is migrating to an alternative provider |
| Expert view | PriceMaker: “failed the transparency test”; Valueships: “growth to monetization” |
Read next
Vendor dependence is a theme that runs through much of the risk we cover. If this story has prompted a review of who your business relies on, our recent analysis joins the dots: the third-party software supply chain in the ChainDrop npm supply-chain worm, the concentration risk of a single hosted-comms provider in the RingCentral VoIP breach, and the exposure created when critical business software is compromised in the Cl0p PLM software breach. For the infrastructure side of the same dependency question, see how much rides on a single connection in Openreach’s 10Gbps XGS-PON rollout, and for the human-targeted angle, the rise of AI photo-geolocation scams aimed at business travellers.
Stop a vendor’s decision from becoming your emergency
A Cloudswitched Virtual CIO gives your business the strategic oversight to see this coming: a live inventory of every app and renewal, tested exit plans and data exports for the tools that matter, and negotiated terms that keep control of your costs where it belongs — with you. Strategic IT leadership, without the full-time salary.
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