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Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick aroun
by cs702 2mo ago
Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.
The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
- Scoundreller 2mo agoI had a vendor acquired by one of these types of outfits. I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
- mavelikara 2mo ago> this is where software goes to die The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
- pigeons 2mo agoThat avoided the Apache Foundation.
- ulfw 2mo agoThat's a short term business model if I have ever seen one. "customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
- cs702 2mo agoThink of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments. Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition. Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.
- dehrmann 2mo ago> a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.
- cs702 2mo agoYes, agree.
- Exoristos 2mo agoAdd to this that they make it really, really hard to unsubscribe. I think there's been some legal crackdowns, but for a time, they could make it literally impossible.
- The_Blade 2mo agocorrect, they have made it impossible, charged my 2002-era PayPal account when i said, "i want to leave, don't"
- rpdillon 2mo agoThis article is like an advertisement. Here's how they spin it: > Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.” Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.
- Bratmon 2mo agoYou're thinking too narrowly. Buying a cow is a short term investment because cows don't live very long. And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.
- dehrmann 2mo agoConsolidating stagnant or dying SaaS offerings makes sense, but it'd be nice if there were a version of this that's a better steward of the companies.
- bdamm 2mo agoIf that was good business then presumably the brand could have done it at some point during their long slow decline?
- cs702 2mo agoArguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown. I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
- w4der 2mo agoI'd argue it's worse for consumers, by keeping them alive it staves off competition, and leeches cash by increasing subscription prices or locking once free feature behind paywalls.
- taurath 2mo agoThere’s no choice here, and often the companies are profitable, but if there is any stickiness to the product the customer gets the privilege of having a company they built trust with turn around and betray them with massively increased fees.
- dvh 2mo agoSo like Delphi?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- The_Blade 2mo agoyes, they are trying to gouge me on Evernote that no longer works, that i tried to unsubscribe from here is a solid article from this week's Economist (that mentions another real jewel of a company): https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-spoons-thrive-as-a-listed-company https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
- SyneRyder 2mo agoSimilar story here. They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year. So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.
- burningChrome 2mo agoWas also on Harvest when news broke they had bought them here on HN. A lot of the same comments. I thought, "Well, maybe this is hyperbole, let's wait it out." About a month after they were acquired, same thing. Price of my plan went up almost by double. So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
- molf 2mo agoDouble? Rookie numbers. We went from $1k to $21k per year. A few emails later and we have a hefty discount, but we will still move away.
- PacificSpecific 2mo agoI've moved to Joplin and am pretty happy with it. Was easy to self host on my WebDAV. I believe it imports Evernote data too.
- CharlesW 2mo agoTip: It's straightforward to migrate from Evernote to Apple Notes. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-apple-notes/ https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/migrate-from-evernote-to-ap...
- apparent 2mo ago> cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible. Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
- quickthrowman 2mo agoThat’s what “cut costs” means for SaaS, firing people.
- apparent 2mo agoYes, it is part of cutting costs, but there are other ways to cut costs ("synergies" from merging back office functions) that don't necessarily affect the product.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time" Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.
- apparent 2mo agoI agree that a company in growth mode needs more employees than one in maintenance mode. But wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar? Usually not. It's emotionally difficult. And knowing what you need and don't need to cut (versus transition or aggregate with your conglomerate's administrative layer) is its own expertise. If you had that, you wouldn't need Bending Spoons or whomever.
- rpdillon 2mo agoAnd the article tries to spin this positively: > After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount. > While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard. That last line has me wondering who wrote this.
- IncreasePosts 2mo agoRenowned author C. H. Atgpt
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI don’t feel like the article was sortballing the company. They brought up things like the WeTransfer founder criticizing Bending Spoons’ decisions. As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait. In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable. For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
- rpdillon 2mo agoPeople are framing this like they're creating sustainable businesses, but if you look into the details, what they're consistently doing is stagnating on any kind of feature development, making the apps and sites more difficult to use and have more nags, and they're increasing prices, sometimes by 10x or 100x. When I look for a company that I think I would admire, I'm looking for customers that are satisfied and recommend the product to their friends. Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810
- danabrams 2mo agoThere are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.
- alexpotato 2mo ago> There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing). Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
- NuclearPM 2mo ago“ There's nothing wrong with that” Debatable
- The-Bus 2mo agoThere's skill in being able to manage a declining or non-growth business in a way that still pleases your consumer base (and therefore reduces your attrition rate). Not everyone does it well.
- NuclearPM 2mo agoWhat you said is not synonymous with “maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.”.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo agoThere's nothing wrong with it per se. Plenty of great products were ruined because management refused to accept that it wasn't in a growth market anymore and should be run for minimising customer losses, not gaining substantial new ones. That, in turn, means laying off a lot of the design, engineering and sales talent that was necessary for the previous configuration. You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.
- john-h-k 2mo ago> The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible. If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?
- pyrale 2mo agobecause there's no joy in managing a declining company, especially when you made it grow in the past, and probably get enough money from the deal that you don't need to care anymore.
- john-h-k 2mo agoSo then we prefer the scenario where the employees are just forced to manage a declining company? Or we prefer it folding?
- stock_toaster 2mo agoSo like Broadcom?
- pigeons 2mo agoSo like Computer Associates?