Sublime is created by a small software shop and they need money to run the shop while Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. Microsoft can afford to give away free software for some goodwill from developers.
Its kinda a unfair comparison.
PS - I understand what you're saying, but I thought it was funny you claimed you don't have an account on a website that requires registration for commenting. Welcome to HN!
For me personally, that price is nothing. I would pay twice as much and each employer had to buy it if they wanted me happy in text editor regard.
It's roughly one week of food where I live; so not free, but something I would afford if it brought a net improvement to my work.
On a separate note, a friend described their backwards approach of validating licenses on every launch of their app, which creates a de facto 'telemetry' system since license hash is submitted to their servers and they obviously have access to other info such as IP.
So even though I quite like the software, I've discontinued use due to the high cost and also due to the inability to opt out of external communications that'd allow them to keep tabs on you and your usage. To be fair, I was not keen on Microsoft's telemetry in vscode but that can be disabled and even better, vscodium removes it completely.
I’ve given away 30+ SublimeText licenses in the last 5 years, mostly to students.
If you cannot afford paying $80 for a license, ping me via email and I’ll buy one for you.
My email is 0x636978746f7264732f61742f676d61696c I’m looking forward to talk with you.
If I buy a license, does that cover potentially upgrading to the next major version? If not, is there a roadmap for version 3?
Expensive is very much subjective