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Comment by baconner | Hacker News Reader

Alive looks super cool, but the $99 price for individual devs feels pretty steep to me. It's basically just a different way to interact with the debugger during test right? So im not doing so much pause, edit, continue activity? Or am I am missing something?

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If it saves you even an hour of time over the course of months or years then why wouldn't it be worth it?

With that being said, if it's not yet "stable" then I agree, a hundred bucks is quite pricey for an unfinished dev tool.

Would I spend $100 to save myself an hour over a couple of months? Probably not, no. Not as an individual dev who could spend 100 bucks and get much more value for it. I could buy intellij for for the same price for instance.

Just a side note: very many Java developers mention IntelliJ.

IntelliJ is good but I prefer the free Netbeans even when I have access to the full IntelliJ paid by the company.

You can't spread the cost out of "years" because the individual license is only good for a year. I won't complain about the price because that is a value judgement that everyone will have to make on their own. However, it is always disappointing to see tools like this that an individual can't simply buy. Instead you have enter into a yearly licensing deal in which you have no idea what this software will cost in 12 months or even whether the company behind it will continue to be in business. These type of yearly licensing deals are the norm in enterprise environments, but they are harder to justify as an individual developer.

Agreed, Jetbrains is moving to this model and it is disgusting.

They backpedaled mostly and offer perpetual licenses.

I just wish they'd simply added subscription options in the first place vs going through all the hullabaloo. Perhaps it was a smokescreen, but that just feels very conspiratorial.

mostly but not completely. After your year you have to downgrade to the version as it was when you originally bought. Removing bug fixes and new features you have got used to over your year of use.

Mental.

That's what my 'mostly' meant. You can simply pay a 12 month fee and buy it 'in advance' and just use what you get, vs thinking about it as "I'm losing bug fixes". I'm still using PHPStorm 7.1 from a couple years ago, and it still works. Same concept would apply going forward, but... I still think they handled this wrong.

Last time I checked it out it seemed pretty easy to crack, if anyone is that desperate. Didn't do it though.

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