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Comment by silvestrov | Hacker News Reader

Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that. People only want to pay for new shiny features.

If IntelliJ doesn't get money because developers think "old version is good enough for me", then there is no money for bug fixing and for keeping the product alive. It would end up as abandonware like most apps on the iPhone App Store.

I'd guess the IDE have now reached this "fully featured" milestone where most developers don't care to upgrade. So IntelliJ has to switch to a subscription model to survive.

So we users have the choice between paying a subscription or having the IDE end up as unmaintained software due to lack of funds.

IntelliJ can't put out a new paid "version 15" which has bug-fixes only. People would be unhappy about that too.

I feel that the core IDE has degraded in quality over the past years because the releases were feature-driven, and I'd be happy to see IntelliJ refocus on quality instead of quantity.

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"Polishing and bug fixes cost money" and should be factored into cost of development and price of the product...

> I'd guess the IDE have now reached this "fully featured" milestone where most developers don't care to upgrade. So IntelliJ has to switch to a subscription model to survive.

Sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me and I doubt IntelliJ's sales are putting the company in any danger.

Even if they couldn't come up with new features, the programming languages and frameworks keep evolving and the tooling needs to catch up with that. But I can come up with a hundred things to improve from the top of my head, so I'm sure they can too.

Half the reason I haven't updated is that JetBrains hasn't been polishing. I'd pay for that, happily, but bugs sit unfixed for years while JetBrains rolls out entirely new (and similarly buggy) IDEs.

I wonder if that's part of the reason to move to subscription? To improve funding for that area?

If you operate on perpetual licenses you have to support that software and find a way to get people to purchase again - via new features etc etc

If you operate on subscription licenses you don't have to do anything at all. There's no need to improve the software in less tangible ways or provide new features since people will have pay for what they current have regardless.

This is a great model for Jetbrains but it's a poor model for consumers.

> Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that.

You pay for that when you buy the product - it comes with a year of updates.

I want more than a year because:

1) New OS releases might require fixes to IDEA's embedded JVM.

2) There's still a lot of bugs left after the first year.

The ONLY reason that I have bought the past 2 updates is to get bugs fixed, but so far it has been for the worse.

A company can't live forever on one-time payments. It needs a continuing income, otherwise the most sensible business decision is to close shop.

This was a solved problem: simply buy another Jetbrains 'upgrade' and you get fixes (or upgrades) for the following year. Subscriptions should be entirely optional.

> A company can't live forever on one-time payments.

Which is why they've been charging for updates outside the year. You yourself provided them two recurring payments with no need for a subscription model to prompt it.

"I feel that the core IDE has degraded in quality over the past years because the releases were feature-driven, and I'd be happy to see IntelliJ refocus on quality instead of quantity."

I couldn't agree more. The latest versions have a ton of bugs that were not present before. Some of the IDEs are totally unusable for certain tasks like debugging. I don't think they will focus on fixing bugs and they haven't introduced any great features, IMO, in years.

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