I don't get it. I make a lot less than your average SV software dev but even I understand that goog software that makes you productive is worth investing in.

Take Jetbrains' software: I happily pay for that every year and it's 100% worth it. I could stop paying and use the fallback licence the rest of my lifr but I use the newer features and support often enough that I want to invest.

I've never used the tool in question but from what I can see it does a whole of a lot more than Meld or even Jetbrains' merge tool. It supports diffing a wild range of file formats that makes it useful for programmers but also helps out when cloud sync runs into conflicts.

Good tools often cost money. A carpenter doesn't buy value brand hardware for their most important tools and while a developer has the advantage of access to open source, paying for good tools shouldn't be controversial.

A one-time purchase of $150 is less than what I pay for Netflix in a year. It's not a meaningless amount, it's a fair price for a piece of software. Were it subscription, you'd pay paying $5 per month for years to come, with the software broken the moment you stop paying. I'll take my purchased software that will just keep working, thank you very much.