Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

My JetBrains all products pack is one of the few subscriptions that I enthusiastically pay every year. People talk about Copilot or Claude as a force multiplier, but I use both and would rather give them both up than switch full-time to VS Code or similar. Between their git integration, navigation tools, refactors, search, and so on, programming in a large codebase with a JetBrains IDE is just a completely different experience than trying to do it in a lower-power editor.

And, of course, the other reason why I'm so enthusiastic about their products is that they're one of the only companies that has been able to maintain a thoroughly symbiotic relationship with the developer community. They somehow have consistently maintained a healthy balance of giving things away without losing their business—their subscription model is humane (you get to use the last version you paid for indefinitely), they have an open source core, and they lean in more than most to giving their paid products away to students and others who can't pay.

> My JetBrains all products pack is one of the few subscriptions

I happily pay this every year myself, but I think it's important to note it's not really a subscription. You pay for software, and you keep that software forever. If you stop paying, you still get to keep what you paid for. What you pay for every year are the updates.

I know it's a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one to make. Again, I happily pay every where, and it acts very much like a subscription, but it's not like a Creative Suite subscription. If you stop paying, you an always just stay on the software you paid for.

iirc only if you have paid for a continuous year.

Jetbrains does do one thing slightly differently from most "subscription to own" things. You’re only entitled to the version that was current when you last paid your bill. Depending on your billing cycle, this could be the latest one you were using, or it could be up to 1 year old.

It’s a bit odd. I wish I was paying for 1 year of updates.

OMG, I stopped paying for DataGrip and Rider about six months ago and still have full access to them on my work PC for daily use. My personal Mac, though, immediately flagged the expired license once it was up. I actually thought it was some kind of bug on my work setup that let me keep using Rider, DataGrip, and IntelliJ, but I guess it’s just how it’s designed to work if you stay on the last paid version?

Same here. The JetBrains products are indispensable for me. They've converted me after being an Emacs user for 30 years.

Can you imagine if JetBrains worked their magic on Emacs?!

Years ago, there was a company that made a refactoring engine for C, I believe I paid >100$ for it in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was a standalone server that could communicate with Emacs (I wasn't an Emacs user). For a consulting engagement, I bought this tool and learned Emacs. I printed out a poster that I put on the wall that show the workflow for the most common tasks I needed to accomplish. I could not have completed it without it.

I discussed this with other programmers at the time, and they were somewhat incredulous that I bought software instead of spending 10x the time to complete the task. Knowing when to buy tools is a skill in and of itself.

> Can you imagine if JetBrains worked their magic on Emacs?!

No need for a mouse and on-the-fly macro recording and replaying? How many first-born do they want?

http://xrefactory.com/

now OSS https://github.com/thoni56/c-xrefactory

I'm all in with the JetBrains love, but for clarity, you can keep the first version you paid for indefinitely not the last. So if you decide to stop paying the subscription you have to go back to a year old version.

Right, the version that was active when you last paid the bill.

I've been paying for the subscription for years, so "first" isn't quite right either, because for me that would be some very old version.

Same here, I imagine also how had is for them to compete against free products paid by tech giants, they have no choice then be better and threat the users with respect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com