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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

60 bucks for an editor is quite expensive I think. There are nice alternative to such an editor.

I wonder what features makes sublime text so much valuable...

60 bucks is less than an hour's pay for many developers. We're talking about a tool that gets used for > 8hrs/day in many cases. Other industries would DREAM of having tools this cheap!

* edited to remove the word "most" which seems to be upsetting some people.

> 60 bucks is less than an hour's pay for many/most developers

WHAT? Where?

from the top of my head:

UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, all of Scandinavia

I don't make 60 bucks an hour (not even 45 euros)..

Much sad :(

Same here. I'm a web developer in the US and I make $17 an hour... and that's at a major, international corporation. I think you and I are being shorted.

That's insane. I made more than that as an intern in college writing code. We paid our current interns more than that the last time I checked. I don't know what your background is, but get your LinkedIn profile polished and you should be getting multiple recruiter emails a week inviting you to interview. That's where the market is right now.

For reference, that's considerably less than the inflation-adjusted starting pay (roughly $22 USD now) at my first software job in 1996 doing QA work.

Big time, but it also depends on the area of the country you live in. Pay in the midwest is a lot lower for example, but the cost of living is a lot lower as well, whereas in Silicon Valley, it is not unheard of for people to make close to $100/hour (although that is somewhat rarer).

Even in the midwest, though, $17/hour (about $35,000/yr) is WAY low. Most devs in the midwest START at about 50,000 - 60,000 for entry-level.

$100/hr comes out to about $200k/yr. Only the developers at the top echelon make that kind of money.

You may be confusing your salary with what your boss charges clients. Or, it may simply be that you are from somewhere where the economy is different.

I know the distinction between the two ;-)

While my boss charges something like EUR100 an hour, I make less than 25% of that (after taxes).

O.t.o.h.: The salary is quite competitive around here (41k EUR a year, 40hrs/wk, 25 days off)

From your profile it looks like you're in The Netherlands. 41k/year is acceptable but not considered competitive in my book.

Edit: Note that this 41k/year pretax salary in The Netherlands does not include the contributions your employer makes for you to your social security/pension/disability insurance, etc. That being said, even after all those it's not yet near 60 bucks an hour.

Exactly, I cost my employer approximately double of that. And you're right about it not being industry competitive; I should have been more specific about regionality (i.e. I choose to not work in Amsterdam where I can 'easily' make double but which will cost me around 2,5hrs of travel a day while I can walk to work in 5 minutes now).

Just a funny note, those values ($60 and 45 EUR) are almost exactly the same, to the .1. I don't know if you meant for that.

Yeah, it's the same...

https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

In NYC, senior devs can charge 2x that. I assume silicon valley is the same way.

Which is $240k a year which puts you in the top 4% of earners nationwide. Why on earth you would pay a programmer $240k a year when you can probably get the same thing outsourced for $40k/year.

Because you can't reliably get the same thing outsourced for $40k/year.

Outsourced projects have a strong tendency to either completely go down in flames, or end up being rewritten (if you're smart about it) or "fixed" (if you're stupid about it and want to spend ten times as much) by the guys making $240k.

Yes he might target developers who make an everyday use of it, I just use a C++ IDE. I still don't understand what are those features though. Isn't it just good for web/python development ?

No, I use it for C++ development as well as Python and Ruby and I think it's excellent. If I'm using something like Qt or Obj-C I use something with an IDE (mostly for the UI tools), but for everything else it's excellent.

I'll pay for value.

For instance, I've probably sunk $800 into my current editor over the years. It's been completely worth it, and I don't regret a single penny.

Another tool (for visual diffing) was about $300, 15 years or so ago. Totally worth it; it's paid for itself many times over.

In both cases the open source alternatives were awkward and borderline broken. Sure, I could have saved a few bucks by using them, or even spent some time improving them, but it's just not worth my time. I have other things to do.

Agreed that Sublime Text looks like abandonware now. It's a fine editor (not great), and the price seems okay, but I'm guessing there will be a mass exodus when ST 3.0 turns out to be not much better than previous versions.

What editor?

Epsilon (it's an Emacs clone). Was about $300 new, and upgrades over the years were about $100 each.

It hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it's a very capable editor, and many of the heavies I've worked with in the past decade or so have also been power-users of it.

Epsilon is arguably more abandonware-like than Sublime Text, but it's also a much more mature product (with way better documentation). I'd love to have some new features (multi-window editing would be great, and multi-selections, and support for collapsing regions of text), but on the whole I'm happy with it.

Probably a JetBrains editor. One commercial license for IntelliJ IDEA is one buck shy of $500. If you include the cost of upgrades over the years, it's not that surprising.

What makes sublime text so valuable is that it saves me at least 30 minutes a day compared to what I used to use, not to mention making web development a much nicer experience.

So it more than pays for itself every 2 days, and makes working more enjoyable. I'd happily pay more than $60 for it.

>> 60 bucks for an editor is quite expensive I think.

I remember in the 90's, the big editors Visual SlickEdit and BBEdit were like $200 each!

Have you downloaded the "forever-free" trial?

Yes, I use that, but I'd also love to buy just for the sake of it. But 60 is a lot. I guess he just targets developer who are constantly using an editor instead, increasing the price and making that bet. The pop up message must be quite unnerving for heavy users.

$60 for a tool that you'd probably use every day? Well worth it in my opinion.

When people complain about the cost of iPhone and Android apps ("What! This is going to cost me a buck?!") $60 to many people today must seem like an absolute fortune.

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