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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

I think JetBrains is doing it quite well. They have different subscriptions, but also an affordable All-Products-Pack. And they have discounts for individual developers over companies.

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Jetbrains succeeds because of their products, not their advertising. Mostly, I suppose. It was the mayan end of the world sale in 2012 that lowered the price point enough for me to make my first purchase from them.

They're probably the only tool that I pay money for, and I'm generally happy to do so, because I get a ton of value from it.

My only complaint is in a polyglot environment it can be painful to have multiple jetbrains ides running in the same project root.

A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

This is a forgotten time, and an important loss.

It would really be lovely if the Jetbrains all-in license gave you each product as its own standalone and as an IntelliJ plug-in.

Aren’t the specific ides just plugins loaded into rebranded IntelliJ?

To some extent probably, but I guess not completely. That’s why you don’t have everything everywhere.

This is same for me. It was great value in 2012 and product was good enough to keep using. I subscribed to Resharper before that but now use the other products like datalink. The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.

> The fact that a personal license can be used at work also helped my adoption of the tools.

Same here, and because of that I sub to the All Products bundle, while if I had to convince my employer it would be for PyCharm only. The Personal All Products license is $50 more per year than a Corporate Single Language license.

Gaining a perpetual license after 1 year of subscription also makes the subscription an easier pill for me to swallow.

> A number of years ago they shipped all of the different products as plugins to intellij. unfortunately at some point that stopped. I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

Did they stop? I still use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate for most languages (Go, Java, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript). I had to use Rider for C#, AppCode for Swift, and CLion for C/C++, but those are the only special cases afaik, or are those languages the ones you use & have problems with?

The plugin updates are sometimes a bit behind the dedicated IDEs in terms of feature releases which is annoying but I think you can often download an EAP build to get around that.

I've been under the impression that there are significant capability differences between any of the plugins and the corresponding product

I mainly use goland & clion, and clion definitely doens't have an equivalent plugin. It's been a long time since I've tried to use intellij though, so perhaps my impressions are antiquated.

You're right that you'd have to use clion for C/C++. I'm not sure why they don't have plugins for that.

As far as Go, I've had a great experience with the Go plugin for IntelliJ. You do need the ultimate license for that though, iirc.

Only very few companies can build a working business model without a good product.

The upside of different IDEs is they can change the keymaps and various options to cater for language specific preferences.

My issue is the things they just don't do, Jupyter Notebooks, more than anything else.

> I wish they resolve it, because it's slowly driving me to vscode.

The good news is that their new Fleet product has it all in one again.

The bad news is that it’s not anywhere near production ready (not at a point where it can compete with any of their othet products anyway).

A d they are giving away licences in meetups, conferences, discounts on podcasts. They offer licences for opensource, for academics... If I didn't have free access as an academic I probably would not be using it with a license today.

This is, I think, most appealing. I do need to know a product exists but the most important thing is when I land on the product page am I going to find a free product that turns into a $10k/yr product? Is there going to be a price range that’s suitable for my use case? Having a good range of offerings and skus makes a huge difference on whether I actually pull the trigger or not.

For me the winner with Jetbrains is that I can see clear prices, the product is defined and I can cancel easily.

With other enterprise products it takes forever to get pricing, scope of what you buy and how to cancel.

A while ago we had to price Windows for 5000 custom devices and it was infuriating to go through a convoluted process with lots of different people, meetings and whatever.

I once tried to buy 2 Windows embedded licenses for a prototype. All the official resellers in my country couldn’t even connect me with a person who could give me a quote, without first getting a certification, finishing courses, signing contracts, etc.

We rewrote our application on Linux then, it was much easier than dealing with MS licensing BS.

I'm always amazed when I see the various embedded contexts I find windows out in the wild. Usually when they are glitching out and displaying a start menu or something.

I guess they are operating at a scale where the licensing hell isn't a major roadblock? I don't get it.

Is it an embedded version though? If you see the start menu, probably not. Because you can easily disable it on windows embedded. And configure a lot of other things, that prevent it from glitching out.

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