Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

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I just checked how much a license of Mathematica for Home & Hobby costs.

It's €447 one time purchase, or a €224/year subscription.

The one time purchase does not include updates, so if something breaks with next years macOS update I will probably have to pay for an upgrade again.

This license is pretty pricy for something I just buy for fun, but arguably worth it if you use it often. But I am not allowed to use it for any professional purposes at all. If I just wanted to use it to graph the sales numbers of my side projects (probably not the best tool for the job, but why learn another tool if you have one that does the job?), I would need a professional license which is 10x the price.

Being able to run it on the Raspberry Pi for free is nice, but I assume it is also limited to "personal use".

Mathematica is ridiculously expensive. It's expensive because it's professional software, and there are few alternatives. If you use it daily as part of your job, the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.

When I left university, I would have loved to keep using Mathematica, but it was just way too expensive to run it on my laptop, for an app that I would just use a few times per year. And logging into a Raspberry Pi just to use an even slower version of an app that isn't known for being particularly responsive in the first place just isn't something that I care about.

> Mathematica is ridiculously expensive

This is something I used to believe.

I am a hobbyist user. Mathematica was not required for my work or for any other interests outside personal curiosity and an ever growing love of math and science.

I’ve made it an indispensable part of my work. A small side-project in Mathematica blossomed into one of the key ways my clients analyze data now.

Mathematica costs less than a dollar a day. It’s always open among the apps on my desktop on both my work Mac and my kitchen Mac.

To stop using Mathematica, you’d have to pry it away from my cold, dead hands. It’s really that great.

"I’ve made it an indispensable part of my work"

And that's why Mathematica is indispensable to you—familiarity and use have made it indispensable.

The trouble is that it's a chicken and egg problem, with the program being so expensive many won't have access to it to try it—some of whom, if they'd had access, would have progressed to your situation.

A program like Mathematica only becomes indispensable to a person after he/she has had access to it for long enough to become familiar with its workings and for the person to actually benefit from the program's features—here that is to provide quick mathematical solutions to problems that would otherwise take a long time or require tedious workings out.

Thus, it's little wonder that so many are looking for cheaper alternatives—as they simply haven't developed the experience necessary to arrive at the same conclusion that you have.

It's unfortunate that's the situation exists and that there aren't more products capable of competing with Mathematica that have a similar UI experience and calculating granularities.

Are you using the hobby license for professional work? Or do they drop the price to less than a dollar a day if you ask nicely?

Licenses that you are allowed to use for commercial activities are a lot more than a dollar a day according to their website.

[insert anything] is ridiculously expensive. If you use it the price is absolutely worth it, but if you don't, it's just way overpriced.

Disagreed. Example: Numi.app and Soulver3.app = both are essentially just fancy calculators with built-in unit conversions and a few other convenient features. I use them maybe once a month, but €30 for a lifetime license with no subscription is more than ok for what they are.

I would perhaps say: if it offers you more value (not necessarily financial) than its cost, then it's worth it.

But this is a truism also.

You are misrepresenting my comment by removing essential qualifiers: It's worth it if you use it daily as part of your job.

There are plenty of jobs where Mathematica would be useful occasionally, but not every day. For these cases, the software is overpriced.

It can also be worth it when used outside of jobs and occasionally - in the same way that a bike or a blender or a day at a spa can be worth it. I wouldn’t say that a blender is “ridiculously expensive” because I don’t care much about smoothies.

If I wanted to buy a Mathematica license for my use case (hobby stuff, use it for my job maybe two times a year) it would cost me around 5000€. If that isn't ridiculously expensive, I don't know what else to call it.

I think I misunderstood your first comment - I thought you found the "home and hobby" license ridiculously expensive.

I'm not sure what that 5000€ refers to. The standard licence is 3880+VAT (I guess that's what you meant), the annual one half that price.

If you look at it as

  "hobby stuff" 500
  "use it for my job maybe two times a year" 4500 extra

maybe the "home and hobby" license makes more sense for your use case - use it "cheap" for hobby even though you cannot justify paying the full price for work. That's why that license was introduced in the first place!

One could also say that a 5000€ A0 printer is "ridiculously expensive" because you want to print only a couple of posters. While you would be better off going to a print shop it doesn't necessarily indicate any problem with the pricing of the machine.

Depending where you are and what you income is, €447 is a lot of money to spend on a hobby.

That costs more than a month's rent in some European cities https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/region_prices_by_city?...

Well, in that context one can also say that a €447 pair of shoes is ridiculously expensive, a €447 bike is ridiculously expensive, a €447 telephone is ridiculously expensive, etc.

> €447 pair of shoes is ridiculously expensive

Well, at this point it's not even ridiculously expensive; €100 would be ridiculously expensive already.

> a €447 bike is ridiculously expensive

Nah, a good bike can easily cost as much; it's an investment similar to buying car.

> a €447 telephone is ridiculously expensive

It is and it baffles me people are willing to spend even more.

A pair of shoes, a bike or a phone will be used a lot more, and with no license restrictions, than a hobbyist copy of Mathematica.

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