JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.
Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
I'd pay for it if I did enough programming in my day-to-day life that it would justify the cost. But I only occasionally get into the swing of doing a project, and even then I've never made money off of any of them.
I still have my university email (graduated in 2020) so I've been renewing my student license that gets me a free license for the occasional times I use them.
I kinda wish they'd just go for the Winrar or Docker business model, where it's free for individuals but businesses have to pay up.
Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
Yeah, I jumped in when they first did subs back in 2015 (IIRC). Nowadays, the charge seems pretty trivial for what you get, though I think they may have just raised it on me a little to closer to $175.
I also jumped into a personal O'Reilly Safari subscription way back when the price wasn't as high as it is now, and I've kept that grandfathered subscription up as well.
I think between the two, it ends up being a bit less than $500 a year. That's not very much at all against a tech salary, and the O'Reilly sub actually has been quietly useful for work projects now and again too.
My basic take is 1) A builder should have their own set of tools whether they hew wood or numbers (and not everything fits neatly into Visual Studio Code, though I probably use that as much or more than Jetbrains); and 2) if I ever do manage to squeeze out a profitable side project in CA, I want my argument that I'm not using my employer's resources in any way shape or form to be very very solid.
In CA, who owns the resources is the difference in who owns that product. For the same reason, I always buy my own cell phone and pay my own cell phone plan, even if a corporate phone is otherwise forced on me, and always own my own laptop as well for any personal development that comes up.
It's a touch on the paranoid side, I guess, but I just feel better knowing I can be as independent as I want to be with my tech stack. With my own tech library to lean on, a nearly universal set of build tools licensed specifically to me, and my own devices for communication and development, I feel very comfortable that there's no implied shared resource argument that can be made.
