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If you use Harvest, you have probably had a renewal email recently that didn’t look like last year’s. You are not alone. Since Harvest changed its pricing model in 2026, we have had a steady stream of Harvest customers on discovery calls asking the same two questions: why is my bill different? and what else is out there?
This post answers both. The first half is a plain explanation of how Harvest’s pricing now works, so you can read your own renewal notice. The second half is about what to look for in an alternative, and why a lot of the teams we have spoken to are landing on Avaza.
What changed in Harvest’s pricing
For most of its life Harvest charged a flat price per seat. You paid for the people on your team, tracked as much time as you liked, and sent as many invoices as you needed.
Harvest was acquired in 2025, and in 2026 the model changed. Harvest now has four tiers:
Plan | Monthly | Annual (20% off) | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 | $0 | 1 seat, 2 projects, time tracking, invoicing, expenses |
Teams | from $11 / seat | from $8.80 / seat | Unlimited seats, team reporting, accounting and payment integrations |
Enterprise | from $17.50 / seat | from $14 / seat | Adds custom reports, profitability reporting, timesheet approvals, activity log, SAML SSO |
Enterprise Plus | Custom | Custom | Custom integrations, dedicated success manager, assisted migration |
Prices from getharvest.com/pricing, checked Sep 2026. All prices in USD.
The seat prices are not the story. The word doing the work is “from”. Each paid plan now has two parts:
- A per-seat base rate, which is the number on the pricing page.
- Usage-based fees for invoices, projects, clients and tasks above an included allowance, calculated from your account’s activity in the previous billing period.
Harvest calls the usage-billed option Flex, and offers an Unlimited option with a fixed usage fee instead. Either way, the usage layer is where renewal bills have moved, and Harvest does not publish the per-unit rates. The only place to see what your account will actually cost is Settings › Billing inside Harvest.
That is why two agencies with the same headcount can now pay very different amounts, and why some teams have reported renewal bills several times higher than the previous year. The BBC covered one UK consultancy whose monthly bill went from $130 to $2,110 at renewal.
How to read your renewal notice
Before you decide anything, get three facts straight from your Harvest account:
- Which plan you are being renewed onto. Legacy plans have been retired, and post-trial checkout defaults to Enterprise. If you only need time tracking, invoicing and QuickBooks or Xero sync, Teams covers it.
- Your usage numbers. In Settings › Billing you can see active projects, clients, tasks and invoices for the last period, and simulate changes. Archiving inactive projects and clients before renewal can reduce the usage part of the bill.
- Your renewal date. Monthly accounts move to the new model straight away; annual accounts move at the next renewal. That date is your decision deadline.
If the number still doesn’t work for your business, you have time to move. Harvest keeps your data available until your subscription ends, so there is no need to cut over in a hurry.
What to look for in a Harvest alternative
The teams we talk to are not leaving Harvest because it stopped working. It is still a capable time-and-invoicing tool. They are leaving for two reasons, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one applies to you.
Reason one: price predictability. If your workflow is genuinely just timesheets and invoices, almost any flat-rate tool will do, and the main thing to check is that the pricing page tells you the whole cost.
Reason two: you have outgrown it. Harvest tracks time against projects, but a Harvest “task” is a time category, not a piece of work with an owner, a due date and a status. There is no Kanban board, no Gantt chart, no subtasks, no custom fields. Resource planning is a separate product. Retainers and recurring invoices exist, but supplier bills, quotes that turn into projects, and approval workflows for expenses do not. If you are running Harvest alongside a project management tool and a spreadsheet for capacity planning, you are in this group.
For the second group, the checklist looks like this:
- Every price published, including add-ons, with no usage fees
- Real task management with board and timeline views
- Resource scheduling included, not sold separately
- Timesheet and expense approvals on every plan
- Quotes, recurring invoices, retainers and supplier bills in the same system as time tracking
- QuickBooks Online, Xero, Stripe and PayPal integrations
- A way to import your Harvest history
How Avaza compares
Avaza is built for exactly the second group: agencies, consultancies and services teams that want time tracking, projects, invoicing and scheduling in one place.
Pricing. Avaza plans start at $11.95 per month. Additional Timesheet or Admin users are $7 each per month. Extra storage is $0.50 per GB. Every plan lists its included projects and invoices on the pricing page, and if you outgrow one you move to the next published tier. There are no usage fees, and nothing is calculated after the fact. Project collaborators are unlimited and free, so your clients and contractors never cost you a seat.
What Harvest gates to Enterprise, Avaza includes on every plan.
Timesheet approvals, expense approvals, cost rates, project profitability reporting and saved, scheduled reports are all standard, including on the Free plan.
What Harvest doesn’t do. Full task management with Kanban and Gantt views, subtasks, custom fields and saved views. Built-in resource scheduling with availability, leave and recurring bookings. Quotes that convert into projects or invoices. Automatic card charging on recurring invoices. Supplier bills. Team chat. An MCP server so your AI assistant can work with your Avaza data.
What Harvest does that Avaza also does. Timers and timesheets, expense tracking, invoicing with online payments, multi-currency, estimates, recurring invoices, retainers, QuickBooks Online and Xero sync, Zapier, an API, mobile apps and desktop apps for Windows and Mac.
For the row-by-row version, see our Avaza vs Harvest comparison.
Moving from Harvest to Avaza
Most teams complete the move in a week or less.
- Export from Harvest. Download your clients, projects, tasks, time, expenses and invoices as CSV files from Harvest’s Reports and Manage pages.
- Import into Avaza. Go to Settings › Import Data and upload each file. Customers, projects and timesheet categories that don’t exist yet are created automatically. Time you already billed in Harvest can be flagged as invoiced, so it is never billed twice. Team members are invited by email rather than imported. The import guide walks through each file.
- Reconnect and go live. Connect QuickBooks Online or Xero, link Stripe or PayPal, invite your team, and add clients as free project collaborators.
If you would rather have someone walk you through it, book a call and we will do it with you.