I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie.
I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.
I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.
Jira is horrific.
How history repeats itself.
Most of that bloat you have to deal with? Blame your bosses, not Atlassian.
Every page load still took 30+ seconds.
From Jira’s owner POV, Jira is pretty great.
I suspect that there aren't enough people who would pay $99 for a IDE theme to support an ongoing company with employees. However, for a single designer, it's perfect. The fact that 99.9% of the population turns their nose up doesn't matter because 0.1% is still 600,000 people. $100k is just over 1000 sales, which seems eminently doable for nearly any project.
My take-away is that - if you're considering a solo side project that will only work if you charge a "high" price (which probably isn't as high as you think it is) or if you get a ton of sales - try charging the high price!
That's why I said scale of the project matters. Using a 1% (or 0.1%) metric to found a company is rubbish. Using it to guesstimate if a personal project might get some buyers seems much more reasonable. This probably isn't a $100k recurring revenue project, but it's reasonable to imagine that you could get up to $100k revenue selling a $99 product to programmers.
If you have a microtransaction for everything in your computer, they start to add up pretty fast. At some point you have to pick and choose, and nice UI themes start to seem less essential...
(Also, do note outside the first world $29 is not such a small amount of money. And $79 is unthinkable for a UI theme).
I do use the free stuff (GitHub, VS Code, etc).
And I also pay for NCrunch, Wallaby, RubyMine, Rider, GoLand, PyCharm, FastMail, PCloud, and more.
Most of the stuff I pay for has free equivalents (and yes, I know JetBrains have an all-products subscription rather than separate Ruby, .Net, Go, and Python, but I have reasons).
Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1]
But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a trade-off :)
[1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many empiric experiments, especially with business/social things like this HN submission.