Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

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Reasonable question but I think people are just burnt out by the Silicon Valley pricing model that has proliferated everywhere.

* Most consumers now swallow a live service model and associated costs that they don’t want

* Most consumers now swallow the costs of west coast tech culture: cost of living, esoteric architectural choices, fad driven development, and hobby driven development

* Most owners of software businesses expect to get rich in a relatively short time frame

* Software is absurdly high margin if built effectively and distributed at (effectively) zero cost. Where do consumers ever see these savings when cost outpaces inflation?

* Record profits and layoffs being recorded by the broader industry

And specifically to the point of productivity tools inherently justifying nearly any price, this argument is fundamentally flawed because productivity is only measurable if it can be strictly defined and good luck with that one. Salespeople have made billions hawking that fallacy and people eat it up because American work culture fetishizes productivity.

This isn’t a critique of OP I really went down a rabbit hole exploring and appreciating this project and hope it succeeds.

The underlying business model of software is dystopian when compared to what it could be if everyone didn’t bind happiness to being cartoonishly wealthy in Menlo Park.

This in particular looks like a solo project that probably took around a year.

Say OP sells 1000 subscriptions. That's 20 thousand dollars a month. They sell 10k subs, 200k a month.

Or the project fails, and as a closed source tool I can't fork and fix issues. The only options are it becoming a multi million dollar company or abandonware.

I'd be open to it if it was 100$ with one year of free updates. But even then, I think Visual Studio( which is free for hobbyist) is the only closed source IDE I use. Everything else is open source and free.

Maybe I've been traumatized by Unity 3D, but I don't want to use a bunch of closed source tools. What if this becomes my primary dev tool, and OP decides to update the pricing.

If you're justification for a $20 subscription is that oh you're probably making six figures and this is making your job easier, then what's to stop you from pricing it at $50 a month. Why not a hundred .

Open AI has already started this bizarre slide into higher pricing tiers, I can use Deepseek or LLma3 for free, but if I'm using the most up-to-date chat GPT, I'll run into a rate limit and be told it's time to upgrade to a $200 a month service?!

I wonder if this concern could be partly alleviated through a price lock-in strategy. There could be a contract that says because the subscriber has paid for N months, that subscriber is eligible to keep paying the same price for 5-10 years, regardless of the price for other subscribers. This could incentivize people to start their subscription early.

That wouldn't stop the developer from abandoning the project though. I don't like using closed source tools when I can avoid it. Visual studio is a big exception because Microsoft will never abandon it in a million years, it's literally their flagship IDE.

The same argument can be made for the jet brains IDEs. But a closed source tool made by a solo developer just seems too risky for me, even if the OP was giving it away I'd be a little bit reluctant to use it.

Makes sense. Still, I've been burned a bit when Microsoft surprisingly abandoned a developer tool I purchased. Flagship or not, a lot can change in a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof...

Was this tool superseded by Visual Studio ?

From what I can tell they went from having a dozen small dev tools into consolidating everything in VS Studio.

This has also been somewhat mitigated by VS Code, not everyone needs a giant 30GB ide to edit text. I think Microsoft is one of the better companies when it comes to developers. You don't even need Windows to compile Windows software... Unlike Apple that locks everything behind over priced hardware.

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