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Comment by nadams | Hacker News Reader

> Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices?

Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan)

(All renewal at current license price)

PHPStorm - $129

PyCharm - $99

ReSharper Ultimate - $600 (no renewal price)

If I were to purchase that with their old license it would cost me $828, with the new plan I only pay $240. And those are just the tools I have an immediate need for (I do Python, PHP, and C# on an almost daily basis).

$20/month for their full suite of tools? Count me in.

When I first found their tools - I was like "ehhh I don't know - I'll stick with Eclipse/Netbeans etc". Eventually I tried IntelliJ, PHPStorm and PyCharm and they have been the best IDEs I've ever used. Trust me I'll advocate open source when I can - but after all the issues I've had with Eclipse and Netbeans I almost just totally switched to vi.

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Yeah, Eclipse has the Linux GUI curse.

Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi.

The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.

I recently had to use Eclipse again, after 5+ years of Emacs mostly coding sessions, and boy it was tough. I kept thinking it's just one IDE, and others are better, thinking about IntelliJ. Heh.

ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough

> I kept thinking it's just one IDE, and others are better, thinking about IntelliJ. Heh.

I usually don't endorse a product or service (different tools for different tasks and different people etc) but at least try out IntelliJ. I'm pretty sure there is a reason why Google decided to dump Eclipse in favor of IntelliJ as their officially supported IDE.

You may be able to crank out code faster using vi and/or emacs - but an IDE will be more advanced to tell you mistakes that could mean a world of difference. You don't know how many times I've seen people make simple mistakes writing PHP with vi that could have easily been avoided using an IDE.

My English is often cryptic, it was flattering towards IntelliJ. Since long ago they wrote very useful code either infrastructure (their caching mechanism) or UX (thorough keyboard bindings).

What kind of errors did they fail to catch ? vi/emacs rely on external checkers, I don't know what IntelliJ uses, if they have an in-house fully fledged AST analyzer or if they reuse community made ones.

> ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough

As an Emacs fan, I feel obligated to, ahh, unpack this reference.

EMACS: Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. A Humorous Expansion of the name from when eight megabytes of RAM was more than you had, bucko.

These days, I'm sure that, if you really worked at it, you could get an Emacs process to take up as much RAM as the Chrome tab you just opened to look something up on Stack Exchange.

Some times emacs has perf issues, but Eclipse overhead is really too much for me to enjoy. And the UX is miserable, all this OOP, OSGi plugins and frameworks for this leaves me meh.

I am a complete newbie so my perspective is inherently flawed but I am wary of installing anything on a Debian machine that I can't just get using aptitude (sudo apt-get install foo).

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't it possible to create a Debian repository server at Jet Brains that I can add to my aptitude sources list and then install Intelli J and stuff from the conventional command line interface? Why does Jet Brains insist on doing things the Net beans way with opening a web browser and downloading a binary every time?

Fwiw it's worth learning how to use the excellent Debian Alternatives [1] system to install stuff not in the repo's. Download the precompiled binary, or download the source and compile it, put in $HOME, /opt, or wherever you want, then use update-alternatives to soft link it into the standard system directories (/usr, /usr/bin, /usr/local, etc). You can manage and toggle between multiple versions of the same software that way, including the repo version, and lots more benefits, see github readme below.

Intro: https://www.debian-administration.org/article/91/Using_the_D...

Example setup scripts: https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/h...

[1]:https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives

Not just that, but they've closed numerous bugs as "wont fix" & blamed them on the linux ecosystem. On Ubuntu, I've gone through some very annoying bugs like the IDE randomly freezing every 10-15m and needing to be restarted, even after removing openJDK & installing the official Java, and all the other annoying things they suggested.

I dislike them as a company because they claimed to support Linux, took my money, and then blamed my choice of OS when things broke. If they don't want to support linux, fine, but they shouldn't say that they do on the sales page, then act to the contrary.

Funny, because neither Pycharm or CLion have randomly frozen for me in Linux. Sounds like they support Linux in my case!

There's a big difference between "it works for most people on linux" and "we support our product on linux"

> I am wary of installing anything on a Debian machine that I can't just get using aptitude (sudo apt-get install foo).

I don't think that is really an issue (anymore?) - I've installed deb packages manually and compiled stuff from scratch. The only problem you could run into is if package A from the Debain repos requires Version X.1 - but you installed some random deb which installed Version X.2 - you might get into dependency issues. I've found backports to fill this gap.

In fact the Jetbrains stuff is self contained so you need to bring your own JRE and run it from the folder that you extracted it to.

It opens web browser in Debian?

On Fedora, it just downloads a patch, applies it and restarts.

The pet peeve of mine is, that it downloads a patch, restart, then it finds out it has updates for plugins too, downloads them and restarts again.

It would be much nicer if Jetbrains had a yum repository for both IDE and plugins and would download delta rpms. Just like Google Chrome does.

> It would be much nicer if Jetbrains had a yum repository for both IDE and plugins and would download delta rpms. Just like Google Chrome does.

Yes, it'd be nice if we had repositories for yum and apt-get.

Also, I understand that most of the time it just downloads a patch, and restarts but the first install is still a problem. It shouldn't be that way.

Eclipse is has the cross-platform GUI curse. :-)

In that example, you have someone working regularly enough in PHP, Python and .Net (Resharper) to appreciate the JetBrains tools. I'm sure it happens, but it doesn't seem to be the usual case to me.

edit But looking at the pricing page ( https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/ ), a pure C# dev could just get "ReSharper Ultimate" for £79 Per year, or "ReSharper" for £71 per year, which I think is not much different from the current price?

I code php, java, python regularly. My team of two code php and java regularly and a little python. We have a small resource starved team. May not be normal but it is for us.

All of those languages are already covered by IntelliJ Ultimate. So your net cost in this new scheme is roughly the same as before, except if you don't renew your IDE stops working.

I'm glad it's better for you (really!).

But they shouldn't present it as better for everyone when it's clearly not.

He is specifically refuting your argument that the new model isn't cheaper than the old model.

And I'm accepting that but pointing out that it still applies to many.

Yes you are but you are providing no concrete examples of that. I'm interested to hear your examples?

I have a feeling that the people posting here on HN that are against the subscription may only be a small percentage of their user base.

Personally I don't upgrade - because I don't need to. But if given the subscription I probably would if the price was right. Take Office 365 - yeah you can pay $200+ for a full offline copy but you have to do that for every version (and the whole keeping track of your media). Or just pay $99/year and get a perpetual license + extras + online installer. I know there are a number of people who are like "open office does everything I need!" - and that's great but just wait until you need to work on a document with another person who is using office 20XX and open office doesn't support the subtle formatting in that version yet. I know of a large company that tried switching to open office - they couldn't do it because open office didn't format many documents correctly.

> Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan)

If you need that.

The individual products are more expensive with the subscription plan if you buy a license starting 1/1/2016

With the previous model you could just stop paying them and keep using your current version of the software. With the new model stop paying them and you are locked out.

I want DRM-free IDEs!

Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...

Here's the pricing policy:

https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/

The $20 is for all products, Resharper alone is $11.90 a month or $119 a year.

It used to be you would stop getting updates but could still use the product at its frozen (for you) point. For example, to re-examine an old project (even if you might not want to do any fresh builds on an outdated platform).

Can you still do that, or does the tool "die" for you altogether once you stop paying?

P.S. Assuming underlying OS compatibility, which would probably eventually break unless e.g. also frozen in a VM.

P.P.S. It was a couple of years ago, and during a promotion, but I got the "whole enchilada", plus a year of updates, for a bit under $100. It was a 50% off promotion, as I recall, so the non-sale price would have been under $200. [Or maybe it was just a bit over -- either way.]

I understand concerns about revenue stream; nonetheless, I have to agree with some others here in... more or less detesting such "subscription" pricing/licensing models.

Among other things, I have some old, old systems and programs that work just fine, as long as I keep them isolated e.g. from the big, bad Internet. I don't want stuff that dies unless I perpetually feed it, even just for historical purposes.

I've also been a Safari online book library subscriber, and I've started to regret not simply instead spending the money to buy ebook versions of the titles I'm most interested in.

In areas where I have a stronger personal interest in long-term and historical access, I am growing increasingly tired of and leery of the "subscription model."

After 30 days of a failed payment [1] or 30 days without contacting JetBrains servers [2] it will only allow you to open their software briefly before "the product will gently notify the user and will allow some time to connect to the Internet before asking to close the application".

[1] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204344871-Does...

[2] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204348441-What...

In other words the software requires perpetual rent to keep working [even as is]... that's not cool at all.

> does the tool "die" for you altogether once you stop paying?

It dies. Or at least, this is what they have announced, obviously we will only be able to test from December.

Have they? Where have they said that?

kileywm has this to say about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171998

So previously $119 would buy him infinite years.

And now $119 buys him a single year.

Sounds like a downgrade to me?

no $119 would buy him one year of updates, and he could choose not to update in the future if he didn't want to. If he chose to update on a regular basis, then he would still need to pay $119 every year

Also, under the new regime, the moment he stops paying, the IDE stops working. Previously, when you stop paying,you'd be left with a working-but-outdated version. This is definitely a downgrade

Do you have anything that says that's specifically what happens? Cause their FAQ says that when your subscription expires, you can continue using the last version that was released when your sub expired.

Where did you read that? The closest I could find was "Does the new model demand that I have Internet access?" [1] in which it states that it requires an internet connection every 30 days to authenticate and if it cannot then it will close the application. I'm guessing that also means if it does auth but sees an expired license, it would also close the application.

[1] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204344871-Does...

> Cause their FAQ says that when your subscription expires, you can continue using the last version that was released when your sub expired.

Would you mind mentioning the question in the FAQ which states this? Everything I've read so far (notable this question: https://i.imgur.com/u7Y7otq.png) suggests the software cannot be used when a subscription is not being actively paid for each month.

Cheers.

And he'd get to use the product indefinitely, without updates, for that initial $119.

Now, his software gets turned off.

and he could choose not to update in the future if he didn't want to

Yes, that's what I mean by downgrade. This choice was taken away from him.

I'd read it that I would lose my "update" model and I'd have to go back to paying the full outright price again if I decided to skip an update.

Resharper ultimate is $11.99 a month or $119 a year.

I switched from RubyMine to emacs and got a significant productivity boost. YMMV, but I don't think I'll ever use an IDE for a dynamic language again.

PHPstorm was excellent when I, a Ruby developer (among other languages), had to adopt a PHP codebase. RubyMine was less impressive, especially with all the enhancements available for Pry and IRB. RubyMine couldn't find method declarations or infer types the way PHPstorm could.

So, I stick with Vim for Ruby, but don't rule out IDEs entirely for other dynamic languages in a pinch.

I agree, it is cheaper but there are some of us that simply have no way to force, convince or otherwise cajole our employers to adopt a service license model. I have designers on staff using old Adobe products due to this same problem. JetBrains isn't going to magically convince management to open their wallets for monthly fee's. If this goes through, I'm boned. Stuck trying to make shitty IDE's work like jetBrains products. Not a happy day.

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