Harvest + Forecast Alternative: Agency Time Tracking and Capacity Planning in One Tool

The oddly specific problem

Bending Spoons bought Harvest, the bills exploded, and thousands of small agencies discovered their resource planner was a separate subscription with nothing left to plan against.

A UK consultancy with about fifteen staff watched its Harvest bill go from $130 a month to $2,110. That is not a typo, and it is not an isolated anecdote; it was reported by the BBC. A US customer on the same platform saw an annual charge climb from $2,800 to roughly $23,000. Bending Spoons acquired Harvest in 2025, and the 2026 pricing model now charges per seat plus usage fees tied to active projects, clients, tasks, and revenue invoiced through the platform. A pricing analyst quoted in the same piece put it plainly: there is no way for a customer to work out the bill before it arrives. Which is why "Harvest alternative" is suddenly one of the busiest searches in agency software.

So agencies started cancelling. And then discovered the second, weirder problem.

Harvest Forecast, the lightweight resource scheduling product, is a separate $5/person/month subscription that syncs to Harvest. Cancel the time tracker and you are left with a planning tool that has nothing to plan against. One agency owner posting in the Harvest community described leaving Harvest but still paying for Forecast, stranded between two products. Another was specific about what they wanted next: the same easy way of roughly planning resources, nothing fancy, straight to the point.

That is the whole request. Not a PSA platform. Not revenue recognition. A timesheet and a grid showing who is busy in three weeks.

Wait, is this actually a problem?

Yes, and the evidence is unusually good for a problem this niche.

The BBC coverage gives you named customers and verifiable numbers. G2 reviewers report increases in the 600% range driven by usage fees. A savings calculator built by a competitor works out that a five-seat team with twelve active projects goes from $60/month on legacy flat pricing to $180/month under the new model, before the Forecast add-on. Harvest has 70,000+ customers, and 6sense data puts the bulk of them in the 20-49 and 0-9 employee brackets. This is a small-agency disruption event at scale.

70,000+ Harvest customers, mostly teams under 50 people.

The capacity planning half of the pain predates all of it. A boutique consulting manager running ten consultants described managing capacity in Excel as time consuming and error prone, after spending a long time hunting for something better. A twenty-person agency said spreadsheet resourcing worked fine at five people and fell apart as they grew. Multiple vendors publish free agency resource planning spreadsheet templates, which is a reliable tell: spreadsheets are the incumbent, and vendors know it.

The structural grievance is real too. The Forecast sync annoyed people enough that a founder building a Harvest alternative confirmed users specifically asked him for a Forecast-style planning feature. Two products, one workflow, one sync to break.

Harvest + Forecast alternatives compared

All pricing as of research; most of these vendors change tiers frequently, so verify before you commit. The incumbent is listed first, then the combined time tracking + capacity planning options.

So why isn't this a slam dunk?

We looked at building something here. We stopped, and the reason is instructive.

The pitch writes itself: massive churn event, well-documented pain, a stranded-user problem with a specific shape, and a technically trivial build. Time-series data in Postgres, SQL aggregations for utilisation, a drag-and-drop timeline rendered client-side, PDF invoices, Stripe. Two competent people ship a credible v1 in six to eight weeks.

Then you count the competitors already sitting at the target price. Tempough at $11/seat does time tracking plus forecasting plus invoicing. Toggl 2.0 Starter at €9. Clockify Pro at €7.99. Resource Guru Blackbelt at $8. Float Pro at $12. Runn Standard at $11. Productive Essential at $10. That is seven live, charging, mostly funded products in the exact box labelled "white space." Float alone has $20M+ raised and 4,500+ customers.

Seven live, charging, mostly funded products already sit in the exact box labelled "white space."

The Tempough problem is the one that ends the conversation. Same price, same feature bundle, same positioning as the predictable Harvest replacement, same SEO strategy built around the price increase, and a head start on brand recognition among refugees. The only critique available is that they are new and small, which is not a competitive advantage for someone newer and smaller.

And there's no moat. One data point from the research is that a six-person dev agency facing a $59-to-$704 monthly renewal built their own replacement in two days with Claude Code. That gets cited as demand evidence. It is better read as a defensibility reading of approximately zero. Any of the incumbents can ship the missing invoicing module in a sprint. Meanwhile the price-sensitive buyer fleeing a bill shock is exactly the buyer who ends up on Kimai at €2.99 or Clockify's free tier, and the buyer who values combined planning enough to pay properly picks a brand they've heard of.

Without that list, it's a well-researched entry into a graveyard.

The one version that works is a founder who already has a few thousand agency owners on a list and can convert on launch day without touching SEO. Then the six-week build is a distribution-led play and the economics (95%+ infrastructure margins, ~$1,056 ACV on eight seats, 3%/month churn implying ~$2,900 LTV) hold up.

What we're watching

Three things would change our answer.

A longer tail than expected. Harvest is offering discounts during cancellation (one long-time user was offered 56% off Flex pricing on the way out), which means retention is active. If primary research showed a meaningful cohort of Harvest customers still undecided into 2027, the window reopens.

A concrete, public UX failure in Tempough. Not "they're small." A specific workflow that agency owners complain about in the open. That would be the wedge this idea currently lacks.

Movement in the adjacent problem. Nobody has really solved the migration itself. Agencies in the research were running two tools side by side and syncing deltas every morning during a switch. A clean migration and reconciliation layer on top of Float, Runn, or Tempough's API is a smaller business with much less competition, and it's the direction we'd look first.

We'll update this page as pricing shifts, which in this category it will.