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Suggestion: if a customer pays for an annual subscription of the software, grant them a perpetual license for the corresponding major milestone version of that product. For instance if I paid for an annual subscription of IntelliJ in 2015, grant me a free perpetual license for IntelliJ 14.

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This would be a great compromise, but I suspect that part of moving to the subscription model would be to do away with "one major version release per year" entirely and put out more frequent releases.

It's a tough position for Jetbrains. I've got a lot of sympathy, the annual release + purchase model is very limiting - but changing to a subscription model comes with its own problems that you can't just brush under the rug by offering a promotional price and talking about flexibility.

There is no promotional price, they're charging twice the price they charged in the past, ex. PhpStorm was $49 USD/upgrade, but now it is $99 USD/year.

It says right on the pricing page that it's still $49/year for people who currently have a license.

___for people who currently have a license___

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