You’ve been using the same app for five years. It’s baked into your morning routine, your team’s workflow, your entire business. Then one day, the price jumps from $10 a month to $50. You’re furious. You tweet about it. You leave a one-star review. The company’s response? Silence, or a canned apology that says nothing.
But here’s the truth they won’t tell you: they planned this all along. The outrage isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
Meet Bending Spoons, the Italian tech holding company that’s quietly become the most feared acquirer in consumer software. Their playbook is simple: buy beloved apps with loyal user bases, jack up prices by 300% to 1000%, and watch the legacy customers scream. Then ignore them. Because the customers who scream the loudest are exactly the ones they want to lose.
You’ve probably noticed this pattern. Evernote’s prices tripled overnight. Filmic Pro switched from a one-time purchase to a $50/year subscription. Mosaic, a photo app, went from free to $30 a month. Each time, the same story: loyal users revolt, the company shrugs, and the stock price goes up.
Bending Spoons is applying a private equity roll-up strategy to consumer software. They’re not building products. They’re harvesting them. They buy apps with high switching costs—apps where your data, your templates, your habits are locked in. They know that leaving is painful. So they calculate exactly how much pain you’ll tolerate before you pay up.
Your loyalty is the trap. They’re betting that you’re too locked in to leave.
This isn’t greed. It’s cold, mathematical optimization. The price hikes act as a deliberate filtering mechanism. Low-paying, high-maintenance legacy users—the ones who complain the most, the ones who demand support—they’re a drag on margins. Better to shed them. Retain only the price-insensitive, highly dependent customers who will pay anything to keep their workflows running. The result? Fewer users, higher revenue per user, and a clean, profitable asset ready to be sold to the next buyer.
I saw this firsthand when a team I consult for got hit with a 5x price increase on their project management tool. They spent weeks trying to migrate. The export tool was broken. The data was proprietary. The competitor’s product was missing a critical feature. In the end, they paid. They felt like hostages. And they were.
You don’t own the tools you rely on. You’re renting digital land, and the landlord can change the rent whenever he wants.
This is the uncomfortable truth of the modern app economy. We’ve been sold a dream of convenience, of seamless integration, of tools that feel like extensions of our own minds. But we’ve also been sold a lie: that we have control. We don’t. Every app you depend on is a potential time bomb. Every acquisition is a potential price hike. Every ‘free’ tier is a trap that will one day close.
So what can you do? The honest answer is: not much, unless you’re willing to rebuild your entire workflow from scratch. That’s the real cost of the app economy. The switching costs are engineered to be insurmountable. The data is locked. The habits are baked in. The alternatives are incomplete.
But awareness is the first step. Stop treating software as a permanent asset. Treat it as a temporary lease. Build your workflows with escape hatches. Use open formats. Insist on data portability. And before you fall in love with the next shiny app, ask yourself: what happens when a Bending Spoons clone buys it?
The most expensive app is the one you can’t leave.
Bending Spoons doesn’t care about your complaints. They’re not in the business of making you happy. They’re in the business of making money from your dependency. And as long as you keep paying, they’ll keep raising the price. The only way to win is to never get trapped in the first place.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just free market capitalism? Companies can charge what they want.
A: Yes, legally they can. But the ethical issue is that Bending Spoons deliberately exploits user lock-in and data dependency to extract maximum revenue, often after acquiring apps that were built on trust. It's not illegal—but it's a predatory business model that treats users as assets to be milked, not customers to be served.
Q: How can I protect myself from this kind of price gouging?
A: Audit your critical apps. Identify which ones have high switching costs—proprietary data formats, no export tools, network effects. For each, create an exit plan: use open standards, back up data in portable formats, and test alternatives before you need them. Never build a core workflow on a tool that doesn't offer data portability or a clear pricing history.
Q: Is Bending Spoons actually doing something smart? Should other companies copy this?
A: From a pure ROI perspective, it's brilliant: they're maximizing short-term margins on decaying assets. But it's a death spiral for the software ecosystem. Users will eventually learn to distrust any app that could be acquired, leading to lower willingness to adopt new tools. In the long run, this strategy kills the goose that lays the golden eggs—user trust. Smart companies build loyalty, not dependency.