Life is expensive and getting more expensive every day. The median home price is twice as expensive as when sublime released for $70 in 2008. Everything from a car to a loaf of bread is more expensive and your developer needs pay for housing and loaves of bread too. As it stands the new permanent price of 99 is only 41% higher than in 2008.

Any chance you can get your employer (if you have one) to buy you a license? Some employers will help out their staff by buying licenses for IDEs, or textbooks or stuff like that.

Well, it is not far off a good game and some DLC.

I agree, I think it's hugely discriminatory against majority of world.

It's not really much though... Software engineers make that in an hour or two, that's reasonable price for 3 years of updates of the primary tool... And it's a business expense. And as the sibling comment says, a game costs about the same.

I agree with this very much. Both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge are quite cost prohibitive, particularly so for individual users. I've mentioned this here and elsewhere before and often others will attempt to deflect this with getting an employer to cover it or that it isn't much for a developer, but that only holds true for a smaller subset than they realize.

One can buy a copy of Windows 10, an entire operating system, for about the same price (or often considerably less!)