Ask HN: Best ways to monetize a developer audience?
How to make developers perceive value in a product?
...it just might alienate all your users in the process.
Talk to recruiters, ask them for good jobs that you yourself add to a curated job board that your dev audience has access to.
You can probably negotiate ~$300-500 per referral to the recruiter that works out.
For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier.
A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give me a clean nice text editing experience."
More, is this something that will help me enough that it's worth the time of integrating it into my work flow.
As mentioned in another comment, it also depends who's money it is as to how that value tradeoff looks. The company they work for or their own.