It's not that much.
It's fine to use free versions instead, but maybe let's stop asking for freebies from folks who make their living that way, especially from Indy folks. (Badger your average megacorp for free stuff for all you want, they'll find ways to extract money somehow)
If I could get the entire font family for $30 or so I would consider it despite all the free alternatives, but $150 is just way too much if you are making a non-US salary.
The full collection is $100. At average European salaries, that's (at worst) half a day of work. Not unnoticeable, but if you care about your tools, not an amount that's entirely unreasonable. The coding family is, as you say, $30 - 90 minutes of work.
Beyond US, Europe, and other affluent countries, yes, it gets somewhat unaffordable. I don't have a good answer here. But I don't think asking indy folks to fix global inequality is the right answer, either. They need to live too.
Some choose to release their fonts for free (Monaspace, Comic Mono, Inconsolata...), but that's a choice they made for themselves. They ultimately decided it was affordable for them to do that. And that's great!
But I really have a problem with complaining about people who are trying to make a living, demanding they give away their work. One because it's somewhat entitled ("I deserve to get your work for free"), and two because it's a large part of what discourages indy work. Something our industry sorely needs.
> .OTF, .TTF, .WOFF, .WOFF2
Hopefully your OS of choice supports one of those.
Jokes aside, this is the only font I've ever paid for, and I use it for all my text editing across Linux/MacOS/Windows with no issues.
$16 to upgrade my life? well worth it. $16 to own something that I'd need to carry around for the rest of my life in a file, or track a download code for, and configure into every new system I boot up, and... nah, that's buying a responsibility
creatives out there: you are using and benefitting from the free open source internet where other creatives gave away their work product free. Stop trying to monetize your tiny contributions.
If you think they're not worth it then just click away.
And syncing a file isn't exactly hard in 2024.