Harvest is the tool I used the longest, until an acquisition changed how it's priced. Here's an honest, single-user comparison, not just the founder story.
Rated against the things a small consultancy with occasional subcontractors actually needs day to day. "Full" means a real, dedicated mechanic built for that purpose.
| Differentiator | Harvest | Bizily |
|---|---|---|
| Bill client / pay worker independently, worker price-blind | ||
| Client portal with a real, logged-in delegate account | ||
| Custom / non-USD currency, non-monetary compensation | ||
| Proactive budget alert | ||
| Flexible billing: fixed / retainer / rolling balance with overage | ||
| Worker payroll statements (draft → finalized → paid) |
Budget alerts are the one place Harvest matches Bizily outright: a real progress bar on the project's budget page plus configurable threshold emails. No exaggeration there.
Per-seat pricing looks fine until you actually count seats. Here's what a single consultant gets at each price point, both products, no team discount assumed.
Harvest Free
1 seat, 2 projects, capped at 4 custom reports.
Bizily Free
1 client, 2 projects, unlimited users on the business, and every feature Bizily has: client portal, bill/pay split, flexible billing structures, all included. The free plan is capacity-limited, never capability-limited.
Nothing new. Harvest's cheapest paid tier, Teams, starts at $9/seat/mo ($108/seat/yr), plus usage-based fees on top once you exceed included invoices, projects, clients, or tasks. There's no plan between Free and $9/seat.
$9/mo minimum for one seat on Teams (more than double Bizily's Unlimited price), and the usage-metering schedule on top of that isn't published anywhere on Harvest's pricing page, so the real number isn't knowable until it shows up on an invoice. Even at that price, Harvest still has no worker payroll object and no logged-in client account, just a link-based dashboard.
In-app Stripe/PayPal payment collection (Bizily registers that a payment happened, it doesn't collect it), SSO and timesheet approvals on Enterprise, and calendar-based tracking. On the other side of the ledger:
Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2025, and in 2026 its pricing shifted from a flat per-seat plan to per-seat-plus-usage-metering, confirmed directly on Harvest's own pricing page today. Two specific, checkable details matter more than any dollar figure: the post-trial checkout defaults to the Enterprise + Annual tier, so anyone who doesn't manually switch it lands on the $14/seat plan instead of the cheaper $9 Teams plan, and the per-unit usage rates for invoices, projects, and clients beyond the included allotment aren't published on the pricing page at all. You find out what you owe when it's charged.
It's a shame to see a company that built its name on small operators start pricing them out. And it's a wider pattern than just Harvest: Bending Spoons' other acquisitions (Evernote, WeTransfer, Splice, Meetup) have reportedly followed similar pricing shifts after the deal closes. I don't think that makes the Harvest team villains. It does mean the product a lot of small consultancies built their invoicing around is now priced by a company optimizing for something other than that customer.
Harvest's "client dashboard" is a link, not an account: no login, no persistent identity, though a client can have several named contacts each with their own invoice link. Bizily's client portal is a real login: any contact on the client record can be linked to it by email, each with their own access, and it's included free on every plan, not just paid tiers. If a client wants to check their own invoice status without emailing you, that only works one of these ways.
Harvest's own documentation is explicit: there's no payroll functionality, only a CSV export or a QuickBooks/Xero/Deel integration. Its cost-rate vs. billable-rate split is real and the price-blindness is genuine: Harvest's docs state members "can never see any fees, rates, or other monetary amounts." But it's profitability math, not a subcontractor pay object with a lifecycle. Bizily's payroll statements move through Draft → Finalized → Paid, independent of what the client gets billed.
Free for your first client, flat per-business pricing after that. No metering.
