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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

I've used Jetbrains products for a long time, both as a student, and later professionally.

Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get.

In my experience, VSCode is not competitive with Jetbrains products. Their products come with support and good documentation. The proposition is clear and you get exactly what you pay for.

So please JetBrains, do not jump on the freemium bandwagon. Just have us pay for a professional tool without constantly being pushed to some SaaS product offering.

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If yout think about it, Jetbrains is more a counter part to Visual Studio then VSCode.

Vscode was more a advanced text editor to compete with atom. But I don`t see it losing it`s grip of the market anytime soon. Theres lot of tools that use vscode as base, that will be difficult for them to convert, like platformio IDE for example.

To be fair the same could be said about Sublime Text, yet here we are.

If JetBrains releases a free tool that competes well with VSC on core features, I don’t see why the community wouldn’t adopt it.

VSC is far from perfection, it’s only a step up from ST in that it offers a few more tools by default.

Platformio does already have a quite good plugin for CLion.

Tools are also free for open-source development: https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/

And for educational use (teachers) as well.

So I don't see a reason to jump on the freemium bandwagon. They offer a lot for free already.

I wouldn’t call this “free for open-source development”. It’s free for open-source development as long as the developer receives no money. This would literally be stricter than Visual Studio Community except that last I checked the latter refused to work without an online account for more than a month.

Needless to say, JetBrains are free to license and price their stuff however they want. But omitting this particular caveat to “free for open source” when important community-led projects regularly struggle to support themselves leaves a bad taste in my mouth. (The same kind of condition was, for example, used to chase curl off the free tier of Travis CI[1].) To their partial credit, JetBrains themselves only make this omission in the first sentence on the linked page and add “non-commercial” in the second.

[1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/issues/7150

That is a good point. My perspective was too pessimitic as never having real money from OSS projects in general.

My company was a straight up full JetBrains shop. To the best of my knowledge we didn't have the need for any support from JetBrains at all. Do you mind sharing which aspect of support were you refering to?

> Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get.

well, they're in violation of the licence if thats true. The 150€/250€ licence is for private people, companies have to pay 500€/650€.

/edit: i guess non of the people that are responding to me can read. he specifically said that the company is paying for that and the price of non-intellij licences don't overlap with 200€ on any tier I can see.

That’s the first year pricing, it goes down significantly by the third year. A larger company could potentially negotiate a discount on top of that. Each of their applications can also be subscribed to individualy as well, some for around 200 euros.

As far as I know you are allowed to use the individual license commercially [0], it is just that you cannot reimburse it from a company. I wonder where the line is and if you are allowed to use the individual license as a freelancer.

[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/comparison.html#LicenseCompa...

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...

You can use it for commercial projects. The intent, though, is that only you can use that license of the product. So with my Jetbrains purchase I can work on personal projects at home, or (if corporate IT allows it, apparently they do here) install it on my office computer and work on corporate projects. But I cannot install it on a laptop at the office and walk away, letting others use that license.

>I wonder where the line is and if you are allowed to use the individual license as a freelancer.

You are.

> Purpose of use: General commercial

It just can't be reimbursed.

You're missing something: larger companies can negotiate significant discounts when they buy in bulk. This applies even more for a product with negligible marginal cost.

Unless they're only paying for a single product ( vs the all products pack? )

no, thats was why i wrote two numbers each; completely spelled out:

  private person: 150€ intellij only, 250 € all products
  corporation: 500 € intellij only, 650€ all products

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#commercial

They never said IntelliJ. Pycharm is $199 USD for the first year for a corporation.

They said Jetbrains, not IntelliJ.

There are other products that are $199 USD for the first year.

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