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Comment by qyv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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