How We Calculated the 11-Week Payback Period
By the HarvestCost Team · February 22, 2026
Every SaaS company in the agricultural technology space claims a fast payback period. The most common number we see in pitch decks and homepages is "ROI within the first quarter," which is conveniently vague. We publish a specific number — 11 weeks — and we get asked, often, how we calculate it.
This post explains exactly that. What is included, what is excluded, and what assumptions sit underneath the headline figure.
The headline number
Across 47 HarvestCost clients in the 2024 cohort, the median time between contract signature and recovery of the annual subscription cost (via documented input savings) was 11.2 weeks. We round to 11 in our marketing because it reads cleanly, but we do not round in our internal reporting.
This is the median, not the mean. The mean is 14.6 weeks, dragged upward by three large operations whose savings were back-loaded into harvest. We use the median because it is the more honest summary of a typical client's experience.
What counts as "recovered"
For a saving to count toward the payback calculation, it has to meet three criteria.
First, it has to be measurable against a documented baseline. We capture each client's input spend per hectare for the 12 months preceding contract signature. Savings are calculated against that baseline, not against an industry average or a projected rate.
Second, it has to be directly attributable to a HarvestCost-surfaced action. If a client's input cost drops because of an unrelated commodity price movement, that is not a saving we count. Only savings that follow a documented variance alert, procurement audit, or FCR threshold trigger are included.
Third, it has to be realized within the first 12 months. We do not include projected forward savings in the payback calculation, even if those savings are the natural consequence of an action taken in month 3.
What is excluded
We deliberately exclude several categories of value that competitor calculations often include.
Reporting time savings are not counted. A client who saves 14 hours a week on manual reporting recovers a meaningful operational benefit, but converting hours saved into dollars requires assumptions about labor cost that we cannot defend rigorously across regions. We track reporting time savings separately and report them honestly, but they do not enter the payback math.
Risk-weighted savings are not counted. Avoiding a future cost spike is valuable, but it is also unprovable. We only count cost reductions that actually happened, not cost increases that did not.
Soft benefits are not counted. Better board reporting, better lender relationships, faster planning cycles — all real, all impossible to convert into a defensible dollar number.
This means our payback calculation is conservative. The actual operational return is meaningfully larger than the payback figure suggests. We prefer to be quoted accurately on a smaller number than aspirationally on a larger one.
The price assumption
The 11-week median assumes the Operations tier list price of $149/month per farm site, billed monthly. Clients on Field plan ($49/month) recover faster in absolute terms. Clients on Enterprise terms vary — those calculations are run individually.
If a client adds the HARVEST Audit ($599 one-time, applied as credit), the audit fee is included in the cost basis for the payback calculation. The audit typically accelerates the payback by 2 to 3 weeks because it surfaces immediately actionable variance.
The cohort
The 47-client 2024 cohort excludes:
- Clients who signed in Q4 2024 (insufficient data for 12-month measurement)
- Clients who churned within the first 90 days (insufficient data for any measurement)
- Pilot deployments not on commercial terms
We will publish the 2025 cohort numbers in Q1 2027 once a full year of data is available. We expect the median to remain in the 10–13 week range, but we do not promise it will.
Why we publish the methodology
The agricultural sector has a long history of unverifiable software claims. We are trying to set a slightly higher standard for ourselves and, by extension, for the category. If a number cannot survive its own footnotes, it should not be in the headline.
If you want to walk through the calculation against your own farm's numbers, the ROI calculator uses these same assumptions. If you want a personalized analysis with your actual data, the HARVEST Audit is built for that.