Ask HN: How free editors such as Atom, Brackets, VS Code are monetized?

Microsoft uses VS Code to create awareness of the MS brand and ultimately get people on to Azure.

VSCode is a Microsoft product: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode - their core developers work at Microsoft

Atom also is a Microsoft product: https://github.com/atom (Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018)

Brackets is an Adobe product (https://github.com/adobe/brackets) (and doesn’t appear _that_ alive to me)

Yup. The official docs contain a lot of references to Azure (cloud) as well, e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/python-on-azure

how big is the userbase of Atom? I remember there being a lot of hype when it came out but I never hear about it anymore

Microsoft bought github (creators of Atom). But Microsoft is putting its resources behind VSCode, so Atoms future support looks shaky.

How about pycharm?