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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

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dehrmann·

>> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.

Hijacking the quote...

I can't count the number of times I see well-paid developers using the Sublime Text trial.

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Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. They should make a special christmas offer %90 off and many (of those who will never pay otherwise) will pay.

Do that once, and nobody will pay the full price again. They'll just be waiting for the next discount.

But would that be worse than the same people just using the trial indefinitely?

The question is how many people pay the $99 now and how many pay the $10 then. If you can't convert 10x the people you have paying now, you will be losing money.

> Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much.

On the other hand I have 437 games in my Steam account and countless gadgets I don't use. I guess I can skip a couple of games and a gadget or two to pay for software I use.

That's somewhat true for me as well, but I generally pay under 5 EUR for a game. Deciding between 20 games and a text editor doesn't look so good. Though as long as Sublime Text's developer is happy with the market share and revenue it has, I wouldn't change the price.

I've paid $60 or so once, and then another $60 or so for the upgrade to version 4. I've used Sublime Text for almost 10 years, essentially every single day. A hundred bucks for a tool I use every day is not too expensive. And Sublime Text is extremely good at what it does.

They should also off a £8/mo plan to use a custom icon and let people realize how good they've got it for a one off £90.

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