I ended up buying Binary Ninja for hobbyist projects instead. Worked great for doing a bit of Gameboy Advance rom hacking.
IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.
IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.
IDA has a problem where, for some shops, it really makes sense to just have one concurrent IDA user, because IDA is like 10-15% of the work hours --- but it's a critically important 10-15%. So they're super careful to charge for the ability to rotate a team of consultants through the same IDA license.
We had a client, a decade or so ago, that brought us in to do IDA-based vulnerability research work. We wrote some blog posts about the work, and it was so unusual for any of their clients to have that licensing arrangement that IDA (this is in the Pierre era, not the Hex-Rays era) publicly accused us of pirating our copy (which was annoying, because we couldn't out our client, but they absolutely did have the licensing worked out for this.)
It's all super off-putting. But IDA is in sort of a bind, because there just aren't that many users for their ultra-hyper-specialized product. You can have the very best decompiler in the world and you're still going to be a rounding error compared to companies like Figma, because (1) not that many people use disassemblers and (2) less and less software is written in C/C++ every year.
Edit: Ironically the NSA is the entity commoditizing their complement here, getting an in-house SRE tool and making it easier to hire students out of college with skills they want.
(1) could be changed by making a decent offer to hobbyists that they can't refuse, and making the buying experience for them hassle-free.
Yes, the license cost is likely marginal if you only disassemble Windows malware on Windows.
as an aside - When I was taught Ghidra the trainer said "in IDA you spend most of your time in the disassembly graph, in Ghidra I rarely leave the decompiler"