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Comment by thejosh | Hacker News Reader

Hang on, they have a single developer who is also the director? Yet they sell the IDE for a hefty sum with a healthy amount of "known" users https://sublime.wbond.net/stats - if they even have 10% of these are paying customers they should be able to afford more staff.

Sublime must be the most mismanaged profitable company.

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They don't enforce paying for the editor. Those users may or may not be actually paying. You're right that it does seem like they could afford more staff. But its also pretty clear the guy who created it wants to write code and not deal with the other parts of being a "company" (see lack of public responses/updates). He created it, so he can market it/develop it as he sees fit.

I admire what he's done, and respect his choice if he's really not expanding because he likes to code and doesn't want to deal with running a business. But I also now use Vim because I didn't trust Sublime's future.

I tried it and there was a pop up box every few minutes.

It is unusable without a license.

I use it full-time without a license and only get it twice or thrice a day at best (and the esc key is quickly hit); 'unusable' is a bit harsh.

Well I saw it pop up twice within a matter of minutes.

Popups cause a huge break in my concentration especially when I am coding so it is unusable to me.

Does having pop-up box once in a few days really makes it unusable without a license?

I think the pop up's counter is when you save, so if you have the habit of saving very often (as I do), it could be annoying.

But I still find it usable since it's not arbitrary pop up during typing or navigating.

I think that the number of paying customers will be in the 2-5% range. Sublime Text is fully featured for "free", it's a trendy editor, and has a large international following.

Plus this is the raw number: I know that I have a license, and I have it installed on a number of computers and VMs. I assume that I'm not alone in taking advantage of this.

So sure, if he has sold 50k licenses then that's $3.5m, and for that sum you expect active development (its like 580k/year), I doubt that he's pulling in millions a year..

I don't think it's anywhere near 10%. Even of those who pay, those numbers would be inaccurate. I have an ST2 license, but I've used it on many machines without putting in my license, and I've probably reinstalled it a dozen times on my main machine (I've had 3 machines since I've had the license, and each machine has been wiped 2-3 times each). So are they limiting "users" to registered accounts, or some other metric?

$70 is hefty?

Yes!

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