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Comment by steven2012 | Hacker News Reader

steven2012

Frankly, I support this.

We need to pay more for software, not less. The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun. People only want to pay $0.99 for a program that took months of man-hours to write. $5.99? Fuck it, that's too expensive!

IntelliJ is magic to me. It's a wonderful piece of software, and I generally do not like Java. But it has transformed the entire experience.

Companies like JetBrains needs to be incentivized to write this kind of software, and innovate on it. They're not going to if they have leeches that use the free version in perpetuity. And if they change to a subscription model, then good for them.

If you use IntelliJ in a professional context, and you make a decent wage, a large part of it is because of IntelliJ, so you should pay up. $200/year is nothing compared to other things people spend money on like Starbucks, DirecTV, gas, etc.

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This. This whole thread is people saying how great IntelliJ is, but damn them for changing their prices. I can't believe how short sighted people can be when confronted with even the smallest change. Jetbrains needs to make money both to stay in business and to continue to innovate with their products, that is a fact. Prices on things go up over time, why should software be excempt? Would it be better if they put in ads and sold your personal data to pay for it? With constant uproar or using the consumer as the product you would think that folks would relish supporting a software company with their dollars instead.

Besides, this pales in comparison to a yearly MSDN license and that new fancy macbook every couple years, or even that morning starbucks fix.

Most wouldn't mind a price hike. But the outlook that in a few years the tool I rely on for my projects will not work anymore is unacceptable for most developers.

> the tool I rely on

Then don't stop paying for it.

Meanwhile, its not like they are holding your data hostage. Apart from your customized settings in their IDE you can always access your project files with another IDE or editor.

> Then don't stop paying for it.

If a tool is good, I will happily pay a large one-time fee for it.

Unless there is literally no other choice, I -personally- will not rely on a tool that may cost me an unbounded amount of money in the future. In a subscription model, four things are pretty much always true:

1) When you stop paying your recurring fee, you lose access to your tools.

2) The rate you pay is subject to change at any time.

3) If the company decides to stop offering a given tool, you lose access to it, regardless of how much you relied on it and how unsuitable any replacement tooling is.

4) If the company folds, you've a 50/50 chance of losing legal access to the tools that you "paid for" forever.

I understand that a constant, guaranteed revenue stream makes a company's financial planning easier. Unless I have a contract that makes rock-solid guarantees and imposes penalties that far more than cover my losses for breaking them, neither paying in advance for software upgrades, nor renting tools that will become a vital part of my projects makes any sense at all.

Is it written in stone, that Jetbrains and their tools will still exist in a few years? And that the then current version will be able to open my ancient project files?

Not really, but our benevolent God has ordained that, especially if it becomes abandonware, versions without license check will be available on plenty of internet sites.

> The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun.

This isn't Freemium. This is the equivalent of Buy-To-Play. You are paying for the product. Paying quote a lot, in fact.

And unlike an MMO, there's no servers to run, just possible bugfix updates.

If software developers expect to be paid well for their talents, the cost of software has to increase.

And it's not just bugfix updates, it's new features and innovations.

If they expect to paid well; they should make software worth buying and price it properly. In the subscription model, they're still (likely) under-pricing but now they don't have to keep with features and innovations -- because if they do nothing, and you don't pay, you lose access to everything you had before.

>they should make software worth buying and price it properly

They do make software worth buying, and I have already stated that I believe it is priced properly NOW.

Wrong. You don't lose access to your files, your code, your data. You only lose access to the IDE. If they stop innovating, the great thing about this model is that you can leave immediately to another competitor that likely is copying all their feature.

How is this a defense of this model from the customers perspective? In the old pricing model, if they stop innovating I can just stop paying for it and stay with the version I have. This is good for me. And I have actually done this -- I own PHPStorm and while I've bought a yearly upgrades in the past this last year I did not. I'm not doing as much PHP work and most of my PHP work is legacy. Thankfully I own PHPStorm instead of renting it for almost the same price.

With this new model, I wouldn't be happily moving to another competitor, I'd be forced into it immediately. I would paying nearly the same amount but instead I don't own anything.

But previous model catered for that: you buy a tool and x months of developers' work. If you want to buy more work (updates) you pay again. The incentives are nicely aligned here. With the rental model they aren't because you will have to pay for 20 years even if they stop developing the software. This trend is disturbing. It really is similar to not being able to buy an apartment, a car or a kitchen knife.

With all the goods I want to pay you for your service/time/offering and then maybe pay again if I like what you provide and want more of it. I don't want a financial relationship with you when just because I bought something you made I need to keep paying for it even though you don't need to work on it anymore.

What's next? Laptop as a service where you get upgrades every year but if you don't pay up they take it away from you?

You are confusing an subscription-based IDE with software-as-a-service.

Do you even use IntelliJ? You don't lose anything except access to the IDE. You can always switch to Eclipse if you don't want to pay. You lose NOTHING except the convenience and power of IntellJ, which is why you pay for them.

If the loss of access to IntelliJ is not a large one, then why would one ever pay to use it? :)

I, and many others in this thread, are happy to pay for a perpetual license to a particular version of software. We are also happy to pay for future versions of that software, if future versions are even vaguely worth paying for. We are not happy with making rented software that contains a built-in killswitch a critical part of how we get our work done. [0]

[0] kileywm found some JetBrains FAQ answers that indicate that if your license cannot be verified for 30 days, or your license payment is 30 days overdue, JetBrains's software will refuse to function: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171998

IDE's have their own learning curve. We invest time in learning IDE software in order to be more productive. When we lose access to IntelliJ the knowledge we gained is worth significantly less than it was and now we have to go and spend time learning another IDE. We are also now less productive so we spend more time working to make up the difference. Time is money.

Renting computers has always been pretty popular at the enterprise level. I believe there are a few steps trying to bring that model into the consumer market.

Imagine this scenario :

Big company sees Jetbrains income / username; buys Jetbrains. Decides to cut costs, lets a few devs go. Income doesn't change but profit rises. Let a few more devs go. Switch to minimum viable development model. Customers are locked in to access their work, don't really care about updates because they already like the product. Gradually customers drift away. Not enough revenue for minimum viable product, close it down. All customers can't access files "too bad".

You hit the nail on the head. Yes it is a price hike.. At the amount of money software developers make annually, $240 annually is peanuts. Especially since it will be pretax for the company (or the self employed individual). Jet brains offers free community editions and hasn't indicated that it will stop doing so. Use that if you cannot afford the $240. Or just get the one product you are interested in for half the price. Think of the productivity improvement you get and decide if it justifies the price.

I think this is a tremendous deal for polyglot or multi platform developers and a mild price hike for specialist programmers. If you think the new price isn't worth the software, don't get it. I think it is.. in fact I think the kitchen sink license is worth a lot more than the $240 they are charging frankly.

Programming gets easier and more accessible every year. Here's some other industries that wished their skills were worth more even as they became generic or commoditized:

- scribes

- blacksmiths

- http://www.sfgate.com/jobs/slideshow/14-jobs-that-don-t-exis...

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