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Comment by beardog | Hacker News Reader

Now if only I could afford it :D

I understand you're joking, but this is important. It's $70. I know that's a lot to some people, but if you're selling your time as a developer it's probably quite a lot less than 1/2 a day at your usual rate. For a tool that will save you many days a year (and increase your bottomline as much), that's really cheap. If you were a designer and needed Adobe's tools you'd be paying much every month.

If you're using Sublime professionally you can afford it. You're choosing not to. That's fine because there are some great free alternatives to use instead, but you have no reason to complain.

While I agree with your general point, not everyone lives in places where 70 USD is 'only' half a day's salary.

I think some software products could sell more with regional pricing, if someone could crack reliable non-intrusive verification.

I think that is a bad idea in general to offer regional pricing. In fact by asking the same price you are fostering that people and business in poorer regions have more reasons to be brave and raise their rates accordingly, which helps with equality in the long term.

Actually all the companies that offer regional pricing do that with the hope that their overall revenue will be higher that if they don't. It is a short term decision that does not have anything to do with humanity.

That said, Sublime Text implements regional pricing with nagware. A larger percentage of devs in poorer countries will be in trial mode, happy that they do not have to pay or use a pirate version.

Do it with an honour system and leave it up to the customers. Should probably work given that you can keep using an unpaid version forever (at least in ST2 you can).

In theory, and by law, you're paying to use the editor.

But Sublime Text lets you "evaluate" it as long as you want, so by buying a license, you're not actually paying for the editor, you're paying for not having UNREGISTERED in the title and for not having window pop-up once in a while.

Even though that's probably wrong from ethical perspective, that's not worh 70 USD to many people, especially when they live in a place where average wage is under 5 USD/hour like Eastern Europe or Russia, not eve talking about India or someplace like that.

Atom is free, only slightly slower(on OS X at least) and has a more integrated ecosystem.

VIM is free and basically magic, Emacs etc.

We don't know that he's a professional developer. He could be a student (or in a million other situations). I know that when I was 12 years old trying to learn C on my own, spending $70 on an editor would have been unthinkable.

Absolutely, but the answer to that problem shouldn't really be to use it unlicensed, even if it's 'only' nagware rather than a trial. There are many free alternatives that do the same job very well.

exactly! I've bought SublimeText couple years ago, when the value after currency conversion was 4x higher than for someone who earns in dollars - still it was the best investments in dev tool ever!

I bought v3 a long ago, the price was ~30$, a good investment :-)

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