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Comment by plasma | Hacker News Reader

> But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of > company leadership and ask for money to spend on something > that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with > the realities of running a business. The request would be > roundly shouted down.

I agree, at minimum, the its free but seeking sponsorship model is making it hard.

Looking at their Sponsorship options on GitHub [1] I see there's a useful perk at the $2,000/month price point, a Support Tier.

It would be interesting to investigate offering "Paid support" for $50-100/month (something easier to put on a development team's corporate credit card), that gives you "priority" in response to GitHub Issues.

Something tangible that the company gets back.

[1] https://github.com/sponsors/babel?o=esb

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Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer.

$500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.

> JetBrains asks for $500 per year

For IntelliJ; their other tools are $200 a year. And I suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending than a random JS fullstack devsecops person.

> suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending

Engineers get discretionary spending? I haven't ever had a dollar discretionary. My last job paid for an ergo mouse for me (Logitech Vertical) at hire time and I was so ecstatic at the park and got myself a jumbo mousepad to go with it.

Is there a norm I'm not aware of?

> Is there a norm I'm not aware of?

Maybe?

Everywhere I've worked in the US, I always had some level of discretionary spend--even as a lowly summer intern at a behemoth like IBM. It could be software; it could be books; it could be training; it could be computer hardware; it could be lab equipment; it could be groceries or office supplies.

As an intern, I bought some of the first O'Reilly books (mostly about X11) at the Cucumber Book Shop in Bethesda, Maryland courtesy of IBM. As someone way more senior, I once put a T3 line card (about $15K at the time) on my credit card in order to break a budgetary logjam between two feuding departments (and made BOTH of them angry at me--it was beautiful).

Obviously, the more junior I was--the less the value of that spend was. And it went up as I became more senior. And I always had to provide receipts and maybe a bit of justification.

But I've always had some level of discretionary cash spending at even the crappiest companies I've worked for.

Same, though I've heard of expensing software or business books, and of course conferences.

yeah at my company. they just submit a small ticket

Sorry, I never even noticed their "teams" things. And it looks like the full pack is now $650.

Holy shit, I must be grandfathered in, I’m still paying US$150 per year for the all products pack.

Just paid three days ago too.

It's €650 for the all-products pack for an organisation, or €250 for an individual, dropping to €199 in the second year, and €150 in the third+ year, which probably explains it.

149€, third year onwards, individual use

But the individual license can be used at work, it just can’t be transferred to another person since it’s licensed to you.

It’s a smart model I have to say. I continue to use JetBrains no matter where I work and I take the cost of the sub as a business expense on my taxes and get a deduction, so it in the long run costs even less

And you can't be reimbursed for it in any way.

You can get free licences for Open Source projects from Jetbrains. Babel would likely be eligible.

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