This is definitely going in my toolchain of RE apps, alongside x64dbg.
Compare computing to other hobbies. Anything involving cars/boats/motorcycles: expensive. Woodworking, metalworking or anything else that requires a shop: way expensive. It's easy to spend thousands upon thousands on most hobbies every year. In contrast with computing you can do almost anything with very basic tools.
It's great when there are high quality free tools out there. But most of the time these free products get abandoned or are left unfinished. It's hard to get a community of volunteers to do the schleppy maintenance work for 20 years when the product is already feature-complete. And that's why we should be glad there are commercial alternatives, even if they're a bit pricey.
I guess there aren't student loans for IDA, but there definitely is employment. Once you become competent with IDA, you can apply for jobs like these at my workplace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 Being competent means you can navigate around in a binary without symbols, that you can mentally convert assembly to C, and generally that you can find things of interest in the binary and understand them.
Binary Ninja (binja) is $149 from Vector35. That might be optimal for you.
I realize someone's probably going to comment that I'm an idiot for living in the Bay Area, but consider this: after living expenses, I still make a fair bit more than I did in Detroit, and I much prefer living here. So it is what it is.
I think in a few years I should be more than capable of buying an IDA Pro license, but as it stands I am not taking on that debt for a hobby. As for whether or not I will get a job doing reverse engineering, I think it's unlikely any time soon, though certainly possible in the future.
That's a lot more context than I feel is necessary to explain why I can't casually drop $3k-5k on a hobby, but hopefully it makes more sense.
Looks like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/radareorg/cutter/master/do...
https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi/products
if i'm reading this right, it looks like $1879 for an individual license of IDA Pro, plus $2629 for each decompiler (a decompiler targets a single OS and architecture). the licenses are perpetual and come with a year of support.
so about $7k just to work with x64 and x86 .exe and .dll files. yikes. but if all you need is disassembly, i guess you're covered with $1879.
I will say that ~$2600 for a named license wouldn't be so bad, though it's certainly nothing I'll be able to casually drop anytime soon.
IDASTACL is $979, getting you a disassembler for 32-bit only. It is possible to add up to 3 decompilers (ppc, x86, arm) for $2629 each. Getting all of this would be $8866. You can't add the two decompilers for 64-bit architectures.
IDAPROCL is $1879, getting you a disassembler for everything. It is possible to add up to 5 decompilers (ppc, x86, arm, x86-64, arm64) for $2629 each. Getting all of this would be $15024.
For hobby use, Binary Ninja for $149 and Hopper Disassembler for $99 are more reasonable choices.
All of these have demo and/or freeware versions available, with IDA having both. Freeware versions are generally limited to x86 and ARM, without a decompiler. Demo versions are generally limited by being unable to save and by a forced quit after half an hour or so.