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Crow's Nest – a weekly planner and budget tracker for Harvest users

Crow's Nest – a weekly planner and budget tracker for Harvest users

by julianrubisch·Mar 6, 2026·2 points·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemShip It

Harvest planning layer that prevents overbooking, but solves a niche within a niche.

Strengths
  • Closes a real gap in Harvest's UX—real-time capacity warnings before commitments
  • Web-based PWA design integrates cleanly without requiring new tooling or account
  • Task carryover and copy-forward mechanism shows thoughtful iteration on weekly workflows
Weaknesses
  • Only works with Harvest accounts, severely limiting addressable market to existing subscribers
  • Two alpha users and early stage makes reliability and product-market fit genuinely unproven
Category
Target Audience

Freelance developers and consultants using Harvest for time tracking

Similar To

Toggl Plan · Float · Forecast

Post Description

I've been a freelance developer for years and always struggled with planning my weeks and tracking project budgets. I use Harvest for time tracking, but it doesn't give me a weekly view or budget visibility until it's too late.

So I built Crow's Nest – a work week planner and budget visibility layer that sits on top of Harvest. It pulls your time entries and shows you:

- Your week laid out by project and capacity (before Monday hits) - Real-time budget progress for each project - The gap between what you planned and what actually happened

It's not a Harvest replacement – just the planning layer that's missing. You need an active Harvest account to use it.

Why I'm sharing it on HN: I'd love technical feedback from fellow freelancers and builders. The product is early (two alpha users), and HN's constructive criticism has always been invaluable for my projects.

Technical details: Ruby on Rails with heavy usage of Web Awesome and Phlex

Biggest challenges:

1. Mapping Harvest's time entry data to a weekly planning model 2. Creating a simple UI that doesn't add cognitive load 3. Handling timezone differences for freelancers working with global clients

Try it: https://mycrowsnest.app

Would appreciate feedback on:

- Does this solve a real problem for freelancers who use Harvest? - What features would make it indispensable? - UX/UI improvements

I'm the developer, building this in the open. All feedback welcome.

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