hice.ai vs Harvest: a time tracker with usage fees, or a PSA that includes the rest

Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons in mid-2025. In 2026 the pricing model was restructured from a flat per-seat rate into a plan fee plus usage-based billing, across three tiers: Free, Teams and Enterprise. Teams is published at $9 per seat per month billed annually, or $11 billed monthly; Enterprise at $14 annually, or $17.50 monthly. The free tier covers one seat and two projects.

The structural change matters more than the headline rate. The per-seat figure is now a base, and additional fees apply once an account goes beyond the invoices, projects, clients and tasks included in that base. In other words the bill is no longer a function of how many people you have — it is a function of how much work you do.

For a consulting firm that is an awkward shape. Headcount is a number you control and forecast. Invoices, projects and clients are the things you are trying to increase. A pricing model that scales with them turns a predictable line item into one that moves with your revenue, in the same direction, without giving you anything more in return.

Comparing hice.ai to Harvest on seat price alone is not a fair comparison in either direction, because they do different amounts of work. Harvest tracks time, expenses and invoicing. A consulting firm running on Harvest typically also pays for a CRM, an ATS or recruiting tool, something for resource planning, and a spreadsheet layer holding it together.

hice.ai is priced at €49.90 per MAIN user per month plus €2.90 per BASIC user, with no metering on invoices, projects, clients or tasks. MAIN users are the people who run the firm; BASIC users are consultants logging time and expenses. For a firm of 40 consultants with 5 managers that is €351 per month, flat, whatever volume of work runs through it.

The equivalent Harvest footprint at the Teams rate is 45 seats — the consultants log time too — which is $405 per month billed annually before any usage fees, and before the CRM and ATS you still need to buy elsewhere. The gap widens as your project and client count grows, because one side meters those and the other does not.

Two cases, and they are real. First, if your firm genuinely only needs time tracking and simple invoicing, Harvest does that with a polish that comes from a decade of focus. The time entry flow, the browser extensions, the integrations with the tools designers and developers already use — these are properly good, and a broader platform will not automatically beat them on that one task.

Second, if you are two to five people, the free tier and the low seat rate mean Harvest costs almost nothing, and usage fees only bite once you have volume. At that size a PSA is answering questions you do not yet have.

hice.ai earns the switch when the questions change: when you need to know an engagement's margin without an export, when a candidate has to become a consultant on a project without being retyped into a second system, when someone has to be staffed against real availability, and when the usage line on the Harvest invoice has started growing faster than the headcount line.