Leaving Harvest
A Harvest alternative with no usage meter
Donedory tracks hours and exports them. There is no invoicing in it, so there is exactly one number in our pricing and it is seats — not clients, not projects, not invoices, not anything that grows as you get busier. Your hours live with us. Your billing stays in Xero, QuickBooks, or wherever it already is.
Harvest figures: one UK consultancy of about 15 staff, from the reporting summarised below. Not a like-for-like comparison — that Harvest bill includes invoicing and expenses, and ours does not.
Is Donedory a drop-in replacement for Harvest?
For some teams yes, for a lot of Harvest customers no. Here is the split, before you spend any more time on this page.
Yes, if
- You already invoice from your accounting system — Xero, QuickBooks, an ERP, your accountant, a spreadsheet.
- What you actually need out of Harvest is clean hours, by client and project, in a CSV.
- Someone on the team can run a CSV import, and would rather have an API than a support ticket.
- You are 5 to 40 people and want a bill you can work out a year in advance.
No, if
- You generate and send invoices from your time tracker. Donedory does not do this, and is not going to.
- You need billable and non-billable rates, or utilization percentages. We do not have them.
- You need expense tracking. Donedory does not include it.
If you are in the second column, Harvest is the better product for you and you should keep looking. We would rather say that here than take a payment and lose you in week one.
What is Donedory, exactly?
- What it does
- Time tracking for small teams: timer or manual entry, optional approvals, clients, projects, and filterable reports.
- What it costs
- Free for 3 users. $4.99/user/month after that, or $49/user/year. No usage component of any kind.
- What it does not do
- Invoicing, billable rates, utilization, or expenses.
- What you can take out
- CSV and PDF export on every plan, free tier included, over any date range. Plus a REST API, webhooks, and an MCP interface for compatible AI tools.
- Who runs it
- A consultancy team that bills its own client work through it every month.
What happened
What changed at Harvest in 2026?
Harvest moved from a flat per-user fee to a model that adds a usage-based component, and customers reaching their renewal have reported sharply higher quotes.
Harvest was acquired by the Italian software company Bending Spoons in 2025 and restructured its pricing the following year. The old model was a flat monthly fee per user. The new one keeps a per-seat charge and adds a usage component on top, which customers say can vary with activity inside the account. Harvest publishes its own current pricing; if you are on it, your renewal quote is the only figure that describes your account, and it is the one worth reading closely.
The effect was reported in August 2026. The head of Salentis, a UK consultancy that had used Harvest for more than a decade, said his average monthly bill went from about $130 to $2,110. A US customer reported an annual charge rising from $2,800 to $23,000. Salentis was subsequently offered a discounted $1,309 a month if paid up front for the year.
Renewal dates are staggered through the year, so annual customers are finding out one at a time, as their own renewal arrives. If yours has not come round yet, this is worth reading before it does.
Source: BBC News, 20 August 2026. Everything this page says about Harvest comes from that report or from Harvest’s published pricing.
Cost
What will this cost me?
Exactly what the table says, every month, until we change our published price — which we would announce, not meter.
We can’t show you what Harvest will charge you next year. Neither can Harvest, until the bill arrives. That’s the problem.
So there is no Harvest calculator on this page. We cannot model their pricing and we would get it wrong, and a wrong number here would be worth less than nothing. Instead: the one figure that has been reported and checked, and then ours, which is arithmetic.
One reported bill
| A 15-person firm | Per month |
|---|---|
| Harvest, before | $130/mo |
| Harvest, quoted | $2,110/mo |
| Donedory, same team | $59.88/mo |
Donedory, priced by arithmetic
| Team | Paid seats | Monthly | Paid annually | You save |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | 2 | $9.98/mo | $98/yr | $21.76/yr |
| 15 people | 12 | $59.88/mo | $588/yr | $130.56/yr |
| 30 people | 27 | $134.73/mo | $1,323/yr | $293.76/yr |
The first 3 seats are free at any team size, so a 15-person team pays for 12. Annual figures are the same headcount paid a year up front at $49/seat/year; the saving column is that against twelve monthly payments. No charge for adding a client, a project, an activity, a report, or an export. VAT where applicable.
Migration
How do I migrate from Harvest to Donedory?
Export CSVs from Harvest, upload them to our importer, check the mapping, then run both side by side for a week before you cancel anything.
- 1
Export from Harvest
Export a detailed time report as CSV for the period you want to keep. Split larger histories into files of up to 8 MB and 5,000 rows.
- 2
Upload to the Donedory importer
In Settings → Import & export, choose Unified timelog and upload the CSV. Donedory recognizes Harvest's columns; confirm the mapping and date and number formats before continuing.
- 3
Review the mapping, then confirm
You see what will be created before anything is written: which clients, which projects, how many entries, and anything we could not place. Nothing imports until you say so.
- 4
Run both for a week
Keep logging in Harvest in parallel until you have seen one full reporting cycle come out of Donedory the way you expect. Then cancel. Do not cancel first.
The actual limits
- Imports: people, clients, projects, activities, and time entries from a unified timelog. The preview shows proposed changes before commit.
- Does not import: invoices, estimates, expenses, billable rates, approval history, or attachments. Approval history from Harvest is not included in this import.
- Use a detailed time export. Review ignored columns and validation errors before committing; invoices and expenses are outside the import’s supported data.
- Each file supports up to 8 MB and 5,000 source rows. Split larger histories into multiple imports and review each preview.
The trade
What do I lose, and what do I keep?
You lose invoicing, rates, approvals, and expenses. You keep your hours, your clients, your projects, and the ability to get all of it back out again.
What you lose
- Invoicing — no invoices, no payment links, no reminders. Your accounting system does this now.
- Billable versus non-billable rates. Every hour here is just an hour.
- Utilization and capacity reporting.
- Expense tracking and receipt capture.
- Harvest's integrations catalogue. Donedory provides a REST API, webhooks, and an MCP interface; compatibility varies by tool.
- Your Harvest invoice and expense history — export it yourself before you close the account. We cannot bring it over.
What you keep
- A choice of timer or manual time entry, with approvals that can be enabled or disabled.
- Your time entries, clients, and projects, imported from your own CSVs.
- Reports by client, project, person, and date range.
- CSV and PDF export on every plan, free tier included, any date range.
- Per-project roles, so employees see their own hours and managers review the projects they manage.
- A REST API and webhooks on every plan, including free.
- A per-seat price with no usage component attached to it.
- A signed DPA on request. The legal documents are already published.
If you read that whole table and still want to switch, you are the team this page is for.
For the person who has to do this
Does Donedory have a real API?
Yes — a REST API at /api/v1 and webhooks, on every plan including the free tier.
There is no developer tier, no sales call, and no “contact us for API access.” Create a key in Settings and start. Webhooks fire on eight event types — time_entry.created,time_entry.updated, time_entry.archived,client.updated, project.created,project.updated, account.created, andaccount.updated — and each webhook gets a signing secret so you can verify a payload actually came from us.
For most migrating teams this is the part that decides it. The export is a CSV, but the thing you build on afterwards is the API.
Questions
Common questions about leaving Harvest
Will you add invoicing later?
No, and the reason is the reason this page exists. A tool that issues your invoices necessarily holds the numbers that describe your business — what you billed, to whom, how often. Donedory holds none of that, because it has no invoices. So the only thing we can count when we price this product is seats, in this pricing and in any future one. Adding invoicing would hand us a whole set of numbers we are telling you we do not have. That is a structural commitment rather than a roadmap promise, which is why it is worth more than one.
What happens to my Harvest history?
Time entries, clients, and projects come across in the import, for whatever date range you export. Invoices, estimates, and expenses do not — there is no equivalent record in Donedory. Export those from Harvest and keep the files before you close the account. That history is yours, and you will want it at year end.
What if I have more than 3 people?
You pay for the seats past the third. A 15-person team pays for 12 seats — $59.88 a month, or $588 a year if you pay annually. The first 3 seats stay free at any team size, and there is no charge for adding a client, a project, a report, or an export.
Can I export everything if I leave?
Settings → Import & export provides separate CSV files for clients, activities, client activities, projects, people, project members, and time entries. Each export respects your access permissions. Reports also support CSV and Print / PDF. These are data and report exports, not a full archive of every workspace setting or approval record.
Who is behind this?
We’re a consultancy team. We built Donedory because we needed it, and we bill our own client work through it every month: hours out of Donedory, invoices out of our accounting system. That is the exact workflow this page is describing. If it stopped working, we would find out before you did.
Import your hours. Leave the invoicing where it is.
Free for the first 3 people, $4.99 per seat per month after that. Bring a year of Harvest CSVs and watch one reporting cycle come out the other side before you cancel anything.
No credit card. Export everything, any time, on any plan.