How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

I don't know how people use their ides, but I have had no problems with eclipse and feel plenty productive with it. Writing java code in my case. It has autocomplete and that's pretty much what I need... Great support with workspaces and multiple modules (I have about 50-100 "projects" in one workspace, and you can use filtered views also if needed). An it has a faster more responsive UI and better fonts thanks to eclipse's SWT, java's UI-toolkit is sluggish and horrible fonts. Also idea seemed to be indexing a whole lot of stuff the whole time... Eclipse just finds the stuff you need with no fuss indexing (it does indexing of course but it's barely noticeable)

kuyfiuyg• 11 years ago

Is there any good Java IDE for emacs?

logicchains• 11 years ago

I'm not sure about IDEs, but if you install Evil mode you get a pretty awesome text editor.

bdarnell• 11 years ago

Last time I touched java (a year ago), malabar-mode (https://github.com/m0smith/malabar-mode) was the most feature-rich environment for doing java in emacs. However, it couldn't cope with the complex build system for the project I was working on, so I ended up using intellij instead (if malabar-mode had worked for this project I would have preferred to stay in emacs).

PyComfy• 11 years ago

You can integrate eclipse into emacs.

http://eclim.org/

http://www.skybert.net/emacs/java/

acomjean2• 11 years ago

Very cool.

emacs and a real a IDE, together at last.

gkya• 11 years ago

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/JavaDevelopmentEnvironment

Now, I've not really used Java, so I have no experience with this package.

gortok2• 11 years ago

It seems likely that JetBrains moved to this model because their current revenue model doesn't allow for enough runway to allow them to make updates as needed or grow the business. So from that perspective changing to a model where they continually get money helps them stay in business.

Where they 'went wrong', if you could call it that, is that they forced developers down this new path without allowing us to 'dip our toes in'. It would have been better to open this up as a separate way of paying for their products alongside the current model, and then in a year or two simply switching over.

teacup506• 11 years ago

Where JetBrains went wrong is in spreading themselves too thin on too many development fronts, letting products like IntelliJ languish with few significant features added and far too many bugs unfixed, and then deciding the solution to a lack of effort on these products was to switch to a subscription model so that all of their customers would pay for the updates whether or not they're worth paying for.

WorldMaker• 11 years ago

It seems to me that where JetBrains went wrong was building every language supported as a separate application. According to their announcement post the stated goal of was to deal with the customer ask to get easier discounts on multiple language products or to move from one language to another more easily. To JetBrains the solution was apparently to switch to SaaS, which kind of makes sense, but from my perspective maybe they should have just consolidated some of their product efforts?

leetrout• 11 years ago

This _feels_ pretty accurate. As a user of PyCharm, PHPStorm, and recently YouTrack, and in my experience, all the products either lack support for current trends (ES2015 for instance) or are riddled with bugs (YouTrack). YouTrack in general shocked me in the rough edges / lack of sane integration with SCM.

toyg16• 11 years ago

IMHO the "dipping toes" was the switch to the current model, which they did 4 or 5 years ago. It was a clear attempt at moving from shrinkwrap to SaaS. The constant stream of reminders in-product, on blogs, twitter etc was a strong hint that they'd really like you to pay something every few months. They were much more forceful than the average software vendor. This is why I wasn't really surprised by recent news.

As a hobbyist developer (I use PyCharm with a personal license, but I don't actually sell anything), I'm basically in the "screwed" camp. I thought it was about time for me to upgrade, but now I'll just keep using my current copy forever. I'm sad, because the tool is great; but stopping it from working when the license expires, rather than just disabling updates, is really a low blow. It signals that they don't think their upgrades are worth paying for (which in some cases is absolutely true, a lot of recently introduced PyCharm features are of no use to me whatsoever), and that they've stopped innovating and are now just rent-seeking.

LyndsySimon• 11 years ago

I've not needed any of the new PyCharm features in about two years - but I've still purchased the new versions. In fact, as I work for an open-source company, my PyCharm license at work is free. I buy the personal license for home even though I don't work on non-free software... because I want to support JetBrains.

jasonellis3• 11 years ago

You are absolutely right. As someone who uses PHP, Python, JavaScript and a little Ruby, I had purchased IntelliJ so I didn't have to renew multiple licenses each year. If they had just come out with their "All Products" subscription service at $149/year, I would have signed up for it immediately.

I don't like their proposal that I must forfeit my perpetual license to IntelliJ to take advantage of the lower price and that if my subscription lapses for any reason I'll be forced to pay an extra $100 a year!

jasode• 11 years ago

, and most customers upgraded every year.

Is this statement actually true? Is it educated guessing or has it been substantiated by JetBrains?

(Not trying to argue. Just want to know substantiated facts.)

gortok2• 11 years ago

There's no way for us to know unless Jetbrains shares their renewal percentage rate. In a similar business I was exposed to, 60% was considered pretty good. It wasn't exactly the same type of product, so I could be way off here.

navait2• 11 years ago

The article is full of unsubstantiated claims, though I agree with the author in principle.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

So once again the people getting the best deal will be the pirates :(

I suppose that we are at JetBrains market saturation levels - everybody is using their IDEs, so they just don't sell as many new licences to fuel growth.

konradb3• 11 years ago

I think their all-you-can-eat subscription deal is pretty good value. I use Intellij Ultimate but I have messed around with Appcode and Rubymine in the past and wanted to give CLion a go. I remember a while ago thinking 'surely they do some all you can eat package' and finding they didn't. This has answered it.

Realise that the same model doesn't work for everyone but the subscription deal for all-you-can-eat is damn good.

amyjess2• 11 years ago

everybody is using their IDEs

And I think that's a shame, because I prefer NetBeans over IntelliJ. I've used both, and IntelliJ's Maven integration is just terrible.

LoneWolf4• 11 years ago

Please elaborate, I havent used Netbeans for a while but it really sucked compared even to eclipse. Also never had any problems with maven integration on IntelliJ.

steve_taylor3• 11 years ago

I 100% agreed with you until I tried to run NetBeans on a MacBook Pro Retina (current model, fully specced out). It's so terribly slow at that high resolution.

navait2• 11 years ago

Pretty tough to pirate their products in the first place, and I imagine "phone home" type applications will only make it harder.

Especially when they already have a community edition in place, I think more people will use that.

67726e• 11 years ago

It's probably tough to pirate their products in the first place because there isn't much of an incentive to crack them. It's not like a Call of Duty release where kids with no money the world over want the product. This is a tool for professionals, the kind of people who can shell out a couple billable hours worth of cash or get a license from their employer.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

From what I have seen it is pretty trivial (at least if you were around in the 90s)

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

I have built their open source community edition, from source, and it is very serviceable. I prefer to pay for the ultimate edition but I could do my work with the open source version.

Yearly subscription pricing seems OK to me, with some allowance for giving companies adequate notice to re-subscribe.

steedsofwar• 11 years ago

This isn't new, well for intelliJ at least. I bought IJ 12x, and was a little saddened when they changed to the sub model. However it's still a great tool and i prefer it over the others, therefore still use it. It just means i'm forced to use the community edition, or EAP.

Loyalty is as good as the product; if another product comes along and makes my life easier i would switch.

microtonal5• 11 years ago

I always hoped that one of these let's force everyone into software subscriptions-actions would become such an embarrassment that companies will think twice about doing this.

Given how much I like IntelliJ (and liked JetBrains until they pulled this off), I'd be a bit sad if they would be that example.

I am still hoping for a quick follow-up announcement that they have listened to their customers and decided to keep the old licensing model as-is. If not, I cannot trust them anymore. How do I know that they won't change the rules of the game again with just two month's notice?

(Note: I am not principally against subscriptions, though I do think the model puts customers in a weaker position. Just offer people an alternative, or give them plenty of heads-up time.)

jerf• 11 years ago

I'd point out that "software subscriptions" and "software keeps working even if you don't pay" can both be in place.

For something like this, it's not a half-bad business relationship; the incentives are well aligned for everybody.

For something as fundamental as build software, I'd be nervous about committing to anything where whether I can use the software I already have in two years is in somebody else's hands. I really want to be able to squirrel away complete build environments and know I can build the thing I sold two years ago again if I have to release a "my business may die if I don't" update. Remember, in two years, the "somebody else" may not exist to give me permission. Then what?

The incentives here aren't so good if access to the software is actively being removed for non-payment... the vendor is extracting small values from their customers by forcing their customers to take hidden, but actually quite staggeringly enormous, business risks.

jbtule• 11 years ago

In the .net Environment Visual Studio and frameworks change fast enough that we are 1.5 year upgrading resharper ultimate already. I don't see this as a big issue. Pricing is appropriate and seems better for individual developers than it was prior.

jbob20002• 11 years ago

Meh, the only real issue there is the phoning home. The other issues he points out seem pretty contrived.

gorohoroh2• 11 years ago

JetBrains rep here.

"Phoning home" is actually not new. We've introduced JetBrains Account as a way of authorizing a product instance (as an alternative to license keys) for a couple of years now.

Current student licenses work exactly the same way, as well as a part of classroom and OS licenses AFAIK. A lot of current personal and some commercial licenses are managed through a JetBrains Account as well.

With the new scheme, JetBrains Account will simply gain more usage than now, hard-coded license keys will eventually go away, but a license server option for environments that have restricted Internet connection will be provided the same as it is now.

Now, there might be certain additional steps we might need to take to ensure license delivery in certain scenarios but we'll be handling this as we receive specific problem reports.

jbob20002• 11 years ago

Thanks for the reply! It's actually not an issue for me at all, my comment was more about the legitimacy of the OP's arguments.

ihsw• 11 years ago

Looks like Atom and related packages are about to get a lot more users.

oneJob• 11 years ago

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.

JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer decision. They make their business decision. This is the implicit but very real relationship any customer of theirs has chosen to be in.

I personally don't agree with their decision. But, I'm not running their business or working their jobs. Before going all "They're Google Reader'ing Us.", just ask yourself, do you use Gmail? Are you willing to continue their work on the Community Edition?

edit: to clarify my examples.

The services I referenced where chosen as examples of alternatives to options such as hosting one's own email or using existing perpetually or open-sourced licensed products (Gmail), a company that drastically revised it's product offering (NetFlix), and a company who's founder destroyed the business model of purchasing a c.d. for life by making mp3's user friendly and then went legit by moving to a SaaS model (Spotify).

As others have pointed out, one can still purchase a perpetual license through November, so JetBrains is not only not stealing back the product they sold you, they are also giving you time whether you'd like to make this transition with them. If not, simply do not purchase their product in the future. To expect JetBrains to do otherwise (maintain their business model) is to tell them how to make very basic decisions about how they run their business and live their lives. That, I think, is bad.

tl;dr: They didn't steal anything. Don't tell people how to live their lives.

microtonal5• 11 years ago

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum.

That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their products.

It's comparable to what Adobe pulled off: they knew that most people did not have a choice, so they could force it on them. Luckily, the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.

atonse3• 11 years ago

Not so sure about that. JetBrains has excellent products. So, sure, people can flock to other tools, but they aren't necessarily better tools.

I have gotten so used to using ReSharper, I'm probably 30% less productive without it.

sfteus• 11 years ago

On top of that, it's the difference between monthly costs for the company. Netflix, Spotify and Gmail all have monthly costs in terms of storage space, bandwidth usage, server maintenance, etc that users are directly affecting. You're paying for the content to always be available, to be available quickly and to not have limits on what you can and can't access.

Desktop software on the other hand has no direct monthly costs other than phoning home once a month. You could definitely argue that iterating development costs should be factored in here, I can't imagine that being a deciding factor in moving completely to this business model. I'm sure if they offered a low cost monthly subscription and a perpetual license option, they wouldn't have any issue offsetting development costs. At this point, they could even raise the price of perpetual license (hell, I seem to remember paying $200 for mine). I'd gladly pay an increased price with the knowledge that my software wouldn't stop working, especially given how many hours of productivity I gain by using their software.

at-fates-hands• 11 years ago

> the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.

Agreed.

I dropped most of Adobe's products after they went to a subscription based model. The only product I still use is Photoshop and I'm planning on dropping that later this year so I can move 100% to Linux.

For the record, over 95% of the front-end devs I know use Sublime Text for their IDE.

fastball5• 11 years ago

How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch.

teacup506• 11 years ago

This makes no sense whatsoever.

All of the things you listed are services that run on servers that cost money to run.

JetBrains' IDEs are downloadable software that we pay for and exists in perpetuity.

I also have no idea why you're referencing the community edition; the people complaining are customers that pay for JetBrains' non-OSS software.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

The more immediately obvious comparison is MSDN. Anyone who's using ReSharper, at least, is already almost certainly subscribing to MSDN.

macca321• 11 years ago

I'm not. Why would I subscribe to MSDN? I used to have a paid for VS Pro, now I use Community.

svisser• 11 years ago

I personally don't agree with their decision. But, I'm not running their business or working their jobs.

What if you discover many other customers also don't agree with this decision?

In that case it seems fair to write it down and provide feedback to the company making the decision.

mikeash10• 11 years ago

I pay for Spotify. I don't like JetBrains' decision.

Walk me through why this removes my right to complain. I don't get it.

I don't like JetBrains' decision because using their software represents a large investment in time and effort to learn it and get set up to use it. That investment could then be destroyed at any time if they go out of business, or if they decide in a few years that their prices need to be 500x higher. This is important to me because building software is how I eat.

Spotify is click and go. It's just music, and there are about a thousand other services where I can get music if Spotify goes kablooie. Worst case I have no more streaming music, and I can continue to eat even if that happens.

So do explain, how does paying for the latter mean I can't complain about the former?

fastball5• 11 years ago

1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month.

2. Nothing in their old model prevented them from raising prices. Not sure how you think switching to a monthly subscription model changes that.

i.e. your entire premise, that this is an investment of time and money, really has nothing to do with JetBrains' switch to a subscription model. In fact, they would probably be more likely to go out of business if they stuck with the old model, so this protects your investment.

Complaining because you don't think you can afford it is an understandable position. Your points, however, are entirely irrelevant.

kryptiskt• 11 years ago

They should be happy that the customers are complaining, it gives them a chance to consider their concerns. I just usually walk away without warning if I'm unhappy with a product, customers like me force businesses to do a lot of detective work to find out the reasons for bad retention.

dsabanin• 11 years ago

All these threads complaining about JetBrains decision are actually debating what we as customers should do. I think you missed that point.

We give JetBrains a chance to change it's mind by this public outrage, and if they don't listen – many people will switch.

throwaway_xgqtr2• 11 years ago

Let me actually clarify what you are saying for you, as I see this sentiment quite often and it drives me nuts.

You are saying that as a paying customer, one is not allowed to question any product or service offering they pay for (or even will potentially pay for as a potential customer). One is not allowed to suggest improvements. One is not allowed to state that if the company would modify the offering in some way, then they would again become a paying customer. One's only choices are to pay for the product/service as is or walk away and keep quiet.

One is also not allowed to mention to friends/acquaintances/colleagues that they are dissatisfied with the overall value of a product or service, or indicate that they do not believe the overall value to be worth it. As before, one's only choices here are to give good recommendations of the product/service to others or to not say anything at all.

"Take what we offer or walk away quietly and never speak of this again, those are your only choices."

This is essentially what you are saying. Are you sure that is what you want to be saying?

PhrosTT• 11 years ago

For 600 people complaining: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3ji148/jetbrai...

bitserf• 11 years ago

The problem I have with subscription model for my tools is this: It removes the option for me to decide to not upgrade because the improvements are not worth the cost.

Note that I have been upgrading my license most every year, but chances are I'll just make do with what I have next time around.

If the current pricing model isn't viable for them, I'm sorry, but it is not my problem. It's already the most I pay for any tool I use, and I have found it worth it so far, but coercion into a subscription model just doesn't work for me.

Not a great move by JetBrains.

jasonlotito3• 11 years ago

The problem I have with subscription model for my tools is this: It removes the option for me to decide to not upgrade because the improvements are not worth the cost.

That's fair. But at the same time, that presents a problem they mentioned. In order to get those sales, they had to worry about big features that would get people to buy. Bug fixes and performance improvements are things people want, but it doesn't make people buy. So you are stuck: you want to make a solid product, but bug fixes don't make sales. So where do you put the effort?

If the current pricing model isn't viable for them, I'm sorry, but it is not my problem.

You say that, and I know what you mean, but it is your problem in the sense that any software you pay for, you've invested time and workflow into. Moving off IntelliJ products isn't easy unless you haven't been fully utilizing their tools (at least, I can't imagine easily moving off). I'm generally wary of paying for products that I'll rely on because of reasons like this.

For myself, I'm fine with the change because the value they provide is substantially higher than what they charge, and frankly, the subscription model (which again, amounts to the same price I'm paying yearly now) hopefully means less hassle when actually renewing my license.

mark-r2• 11 years ago

bug fixes don't make sales.

Has anybody ever tested that hypothesis?

matwood2• 11 years ago

It removes the option for me to decide to not upgrade because the improvements are not worth the cost.

The blog post stated this as a reason. They want to focus on quality instead of features to sell upgrade licenses. I was a bit put off that statement though since I expect bug fixes as part of my original purchase price.

lfowles3• 11 years ago

I was a bit put off that statement though since I expect bug fixes as part of my original purchase price.

You should expect that. But when it comes time to purchase the upgrade, would you do it ONLY for future bugfixes? Or for new features?

Most people would upgrade only if there were new features, because otherwise they'll just use their older version with whatever bugs it has that might not even effect them. JetBrains is a business after all...

joesmo4• 11 years ago

Yeah, that's bullshit. I'd gladly pay for a maintenance release with only bug fixes considering the quality of the latest versions has tanked. I've already done it for the last two version of PHPStorm (each which has been more buggy than the previous with no great new features).

cweagans5• 11 years ago

You do realize that they haven't really changed their pricing model, right? They just changed how it's presented. It's always been a subscription if you want new features in an IDE (which most people do). I pay like $100/year for PHPstorm upgrades, and it's well worth the cost given the benefits that one receives from using the software (mostly in terms of productivity).

Yes, renting software is a skeezy model. Yes, they should still allow people to purchase perpetual licenses (which, for the record, you can still do until November). Yes, this could have been communicated differently and with more notice.

No, it's not the end of the world. A company has to make money, and at the end of the day, I'd much rather give my money to Jetbrains than many other companies because I know they make excellent tools that facilitate my ability to produce excellent software.

teacup506• 11 years ago

Sorry, but they have changed their pricing model; the previous model provided a perpetual license with a year of updates, and the new model is simply rental, which access terminating once you stop paying.

I don't rent my tools.

cweagans5• 11 years ago

So don't. There are plenty of other tools out there that you can use. Did you previously pay the yearly fee to continue getting upgrades?

mikeash10• 11 years ago

Keeping prices the same while providing less for the money is still a change in the pricing model.

Before, the choice after a year was to pay for an upgrade or keep using the old version. Now the choice after a year is to pay for a renewal or find a new tool entirely.

cweagans5• 11 years ago

Did you previously pay the yearly fee to continue to get upgrades?

tobltobs7• 11 years ago

So leasing a car for 1000$ per year is the same as buying a car for $1000?

cweagans5• 11 years ago

Apples and oranges. Neither situation leads to constant improvements and upgrades to the thing you're paying for.

nutate• 11 years ago

Community Edition is still totally awesome for what it is right?

awjr3• 11 years ago

I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest this was driven by the CFO trying to provide better predictive earnings to their shareholders. It may also enable them to plan developer recruitment better but this feels very shareholder driven.

Personally, Webstorm is exceptional and worth every penny.

masklinn7• 11 years ago

Webstorm is exceptional and worth every penny.

Webstorm was heavily discounted compared to the other specialised IDEs (mostly because other specialised ones included Webstorm's features, at least before AppCode and CLion)

That has been rectified, Webstorm is now 99/year and completely worthless (since RubyMine, PHPStorm and PyCharm give you Webstorm + a "server" language for the same price)

awjr3• 11 years ago

"server" language? You may have heard that Javascript is doing rather well these days ;)

chiph3• 11 years ago

I think JetBrains miscalculated just how much people like the current licensing model.

I liked their first model - I paid for it and just used it. The current model, with the yearly upgrade premium, I tolerated. I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it.

This new model doesn't work for me at all. As someone who bought his own license, used it at work, and got 3 employers to switch to it -- this doesn't feel right. I am reminded of Altova. They turned their $120 XML editor into a $999 enterprise behemoth. I haven't recommended them in over 10 years.

anjanb2• 11 years ago

I agree with all your points. I have used jetbrains products for 15 years so I feel sad that this is how they are going to lose me and other customers. I was hoping they would come with an IDE for golang and I would buy that as well. Now, this is a big disappointment.

aantix2• 11 years ago

So your license price jumps from $89 to $120/yr and now you're no longer a customer? Do you not think their tools probably make up for that $120/yr in terms of your productivity?

If you struggle with Netbeans or Eclipse for an hour or two with something IntelliJ does easily, you've already paid for your license.

I don't understand arguing about peanuts; pay it the trivial increase and get on with the show of making real money. No wonder why so many startups fail.

corin_2• 11 years ago

* I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it.*

Surely under the current model you can just not pay for another year until they release an update you want access to?

dagw2• 11 years ago

Your 1 year upgrade starts from when your last license ran, not from when you paid for the upgrade. So if your license ran out in January and you bought a 1 year upgrade next June. That upgrade would only last until next January, not next June.

piqufoh• 11 years ago

.. but then you lose the 'renew' discount and have to cough up full price when the update eventually arrives.

calcifer• 11 years ago

No you can't. Under the new model if you stop paying, it stops working.

nadams5• 11 years ago

I've seen companies who forget to renew their licenses promptly or who have long and convoluted processes to approve the expenditure. I guess, under the new model, development grinds to a halt until the purchase goes through.

That sounds like a problem with the company practices and policies and not Jetbrains. I'm pretty sure that would affect other things in the company as well (such as stalling to pay an internet bill or something).

fridek• 11 years ago

It's hard to make an argument that loyal customers are lost. Don't they by definition renew the license every year anyway? If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire. This change affects only potential new customers who are not renewing every year for some reason.

microtonal5• 11 years ago

Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others).

If those developers go from 'IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock' to 'IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy', it may be bad for growth.

Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.

masklinn7• 11 years ago

If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire.

Converted and new ones do, so previously loyal customers who don't want to lose their perpetual license… can't upgrade their editor ever again.

izacus• 11 years ago

There's a significant attitude difference when you pay for upgrade every year because the product is improving or when you have to pay so the company doesn't pull the killswitch in your tooling.

edpichler• 11 years ago

At least it's no so expensive.

masklinn7• 11 years ago

* IDEA was 200 + 99/year, new license is 149/year (more expensive from year 3)

* PyCharm, RubyMine, PhpStorm, AppCode and CLion were 99 + 59/year, new license is 99/year (more expensive from year 2)

* WebStorm was 49 + 29/year, new license is 99/year (more expensive from year 1)

Things have gotten significantly more expensive across the board, and if you don't need the new version or can't pay for it… you lose your IDE.

The new licenses are absolutely terrible for holders of individual licenses.

ageektrapped• 11 years ago

I use a lot of Jetbrains' IDEs and have for years: ReSharpe, dotCover, etc., WebStorm, PHPStorm. I also have Rubymine but probably won't need it after the license expires. I use the first three often enough that I'd keep renewing the license to keep up with versions.

The use-it-all yearly price is cheaper, plus I can try their other IDEs. (Looking at you AppCode!)

Seems like a win to me. I heard about the change through the OP, which filled me with dread. Then I went to their website, which filled me with relief.

I've always found their IDEs worth the price.

yodasan• 11 years ago

The author claims that indie developers will be hit who let their licenses lapse due to limited income as well as forgetful corporations who forget to renew. I always found the reasons for these issues was because everyone's licenses expire at different times and it was hard to track (even with budgeting as an indie developer). If it is moved to a monthly service model, I think these issues would actually improve.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want.

For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they'll never need to bug their managers to buy the new version, or suffer on years-old versions because of corporate inertia. That's a big win.

teacup506• 11 years ago

As an owner of a company, business continuity-destroying dependencies on SaaS is the opposite of a big win.

thawkins2• 11 years ago

Nope, we just had to shut down our corporate evaluation of phpstorm because our org does not allow us to purchase locked in products with shut off mechanisms.

tobltobs7• 11 years ago

The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.

acdha• 11 years ago

Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.

toyg16• 11 years ago

That's not necessarily the case. Corporations also love pre-tax operating expenses much more than depreciating capital expenditure. A lot of "cloud business" is moved by this simple accounting reality, rather than any technical benefit: renting AWS time might cost more than buying a server, but because the server is depreciating cap-ex, for your CFO it's actually the cheaper option.

Miracles of finance, eh.

bunderbunder• 11 years ago

I think it depends on the company.

For a larger corporation where the act of managing pools of licenses is a significant expense and literally everything the business does is managed in terms of contracts that must be maintained via regular payments, this makes a whole lot of sense. Even if the licensing model costs a bit more on paper, it's probably still cheaper to them because of saving the cost of having someone spend time physically managing all those individual licenses every time someone switches projects or enters or leaves the company.

For a smaller company or indie shop I'm not sure it's the same story. The calculus above depends on economies of scale to work out.

GordonS• 11 years ago

For ReSharper users, some decent open source alternatives are Refactoring Essentials (previously called NR6Pack) and Code Cracker:

http://vsrefactoringessentials.com

https://github.com/code-cracker/code-cracker

alt_f42• 11 years ago

Yet another reason for me to stick with Eclipse.

When will people realise that true & complete OSS is the only answer.

CydeWeys• 11 years ago

I get burned by proprietary software way more often than I do by Free Software.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

When it stops being a massive PITA to use...

I HATE Eclipse, it's a massively bloated POS IMHO and I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. Eclipse is what drove me FAR away from IDE's until a friend recommended JetBrains to me and I found how awesome it was.

OSS fanatics drive me up a wall. I don't have unlimited amounts of time to customise something a ton just to make it useable. I'm not going to make my life harder on purpose so that I can sit on my high horse. I want to get things done not be constantly futzing around with display drivers, font rendering, icon sets, endless pages of customization, etc. Do you have full control in OSS? Yes, but the defaults normally suck.

I want something that takes me to 80-90% on day 1, I don't care if I can take it to 100% in OSS (it normally starts at 20% at best), it's simply not worth my time. Now given 2 products, one closed and one OSS that perform equally or close to equally well out of the box I will lean towards OSS but I'm not going to go out of my way to use it just so I can tout my neck-bearded-ness. Money = Time and I'm not interested in wasting the "non-renewable" one of the two.

Note: none of this applies to servers, linux is the only thing I'd ever consider using on a server. This is primarily aimed at OSS programs and OS's (Open Office or whatever they are calling it now, Eclipse, Linux on the desktop, etc)

alt_f42• 11 years ago

Doing professional Java dev with Eclipse since '10, never had any serious issues with Eclipse. IMHO, the biggest Eclipse-related issues I've had were with dodgy 3rd party plugins.

I find that people who "HATE" Eclipse passionately often don't understand how to use it properly. E.g... why is it taking a long time to build? Well, you enabled "Build automatically" in the project settings of your 900KLOC project...

Anyway, I've had this debate many times, I have no interest in having it again. I am just happy Eclipse works well for my needs, so I have no reason to worry about IntelliJ, SaaS licensing or whatever.

I would just encourage people who are unhappy about the changes to give Eclipse another shot -- who knows, maybe you will like it the second time around.

konradb3• 11 years ago

I'm with you in terms of productivity/results etc. I remember when I started with a new team that were all Eclipse. I gave it my all. I really did. No doubt much of it came down to familiarity but there was something about it that I couldn't jive with. It seemed to introduce concepts/abstractions that didn't need to exist. It crashed a bunch. There were more steps involved with everything. I had pick up after it. It was slow. Then I said, you know what? I can't hack this, I'm going back to IDEA. Suddenly it felt like I was in a ferrari rather than a trabant. Fully accept that a lot of that was down to me not being a particularly fast learner, that I was used to IDEA in the first place etc.

I'm happy to pay Jetbrains three times the amount I pay to continue with it. This deal is great for me because I wanted to use PyCharm and CLion, and have historically used Rubymine, and the amount I have to pay to have everything isn't that far off what I pay already.

I consider it money well paid to be able to be more productive. Understand other people feel differently... it's nice to be idealogically consistent and beholden to no-one. That's worth a lot to many.

odonnellryan• 11 years ago

I'd be surprised if we don't get a good response from them out of this.

thisisandyok• 11 years ago

They've posted a response on their blog:

"We announced a new subscription licensing model and JetBrains Toolbox yesterday. We want you to rest assured that we are listening. Your comments, questions and concerns are not falling on deaf ears.

We will act on this feedback."

http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/04/we-are-listening/

LoneWolf4• 11 years ago

I really hope they do act, I love their products but this new subscription model annoys me.

gedy• 11 years ago

Thing is - their current model was sort of a dumb semi-forced yearly upgrade anyways. "Oh WebStorm 8 is out already, didn't we just buy 7?" etc.

mikeash10• 11 years ago

What bugs me about this is when I asked them about the change on Twitter and they kept trying to blow smoke up my butt about how it's better for everyone.

Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices?

Then they said it's better because you can jump in and out at will. Only need Product X for a month? Only pay for a month. Which is fine, except I've never heard of a developer who would do that.

This move wouldn't bug me so much if they were just honest about it. If you're doing it because you need the money or it makes your life easier or whatever, then fine. I don't like it even so, but I could deal with it. But when you try to convince me it's better for me, while treating me like a fool, I start to have a major problem with the whole thing.

stoshe• 11 years ago

A typical move to subscription based pricing LOWERS costs to the consumer, but the company gets the benefit of more predictable recurring revenues. That makes the pricing JetBrains puts out a little bit of a head-scratcher.

acveilleux• 11 years ago

Starting from zero, their pricing is lower over a set number of year. They got rid of the initial "hump" and in turn made the annual amount higher. I didn't look too closely but I guess the cost evens out over a 3-4 year subscription span. For a business this is actually going to simplify accounting I would think. It's no longer a cap-ex with a maintenance fee, it's just rental so all pre-tax.

My guess is that overall their spreadsheeting makes this even out based on how customers have been paying.

The fringe bits (loss of permanence, ability to install a home copy) will disproportionately hurt solo/small business folks and hobbyists. The very people that have been their champion getting their software into enterprise dev teams.

I don't understand why they don't go to the rental model with optional one-time permanent license add-on.

So like hypothetically 100$/year rental and a 100$ supplement for permanent license. Basically option into the current deal. They can even make the sum total greater then it used to be. Like 120$/year rental + 100$ permanent license supplement.

fastball5• 11 years ago

Contractors that work with different clients using different languages? You've never heard of someone that works with different languages at different times?

Huh.

estefan4• 11 years ago

Why not just use IDEA ultimate and install different plugins per language?

jasonlotito3• 11 years ago

Their first response was that it's cheaper than before.

It is cheaper if you are using a number of their products. It's the same price for the individual products I'm currently using. Net for me is that it's cheaper.

Which is fine, except I've never heard of a developer who would do that.

I don't code in Python or Ruby every day, but when I do, it's usually for a specific project, and having PyCharm or RubyMine at a low price point and in an environment that I'm familiar with is nice to have. I wouldn't want to buy the IDE outright, but the lower price point is more attractive.

nadams5• 11 years ago

Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices?

Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan)

(All renewal at current license price)

PHPStorm - $129

PyCharm - $99

ReSharper Ultimate - $600 (no renewal price)

If I were to purchase that with their old license it would cost me $828, with the new plan I only pay $240. And those are just the tools I have an immediate need for (I do Python, PHP, and C# on an almost daily basis).

$20/month for their full suite of tools? Count me in.

When I first found their tools - I was like "ehhh I don't know - I'll stick with Eclipse/Netbeans etc". Eventually I tried IntelliJ, PHPStorm and PyCharm and they have been the best IDEs I've ever used. Trust me I'll advocate open source when I can - but after all the issues I've had with Eclipse and Netbeans I almost just totally switched to vi.

mikeash10• 11 years ago

I'm glad it's better for you (really!).

But they shouldn't present it as better for everyone when it's clearly not.

Oletros2• 11 years ago

Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan)

If you need that.

The individual products are more expensive with the subscription plan if you buy a license starting 1/1/2016

SideburnsOfDoom• 11 years ago

In that example, you have someone working regularly enough in PHP, Python and .Net (Resharper) to appreciate the JetBrains tools. I'm sure it happens, but it doesn't seem to be the usual case to me.

edit But looking at the pricing page ( https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/ ), a pure C# dev could just get "ReSharper Ultimate" for £79 Per year, or "ReSharper" for £71 per year, which I think is not much different from the current price?

balabaster8• 11 years ago

Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...

barrkel• 11 years ago

I switched from RubyMine to emacs and got a significant productivity boost. YMMV, but I don't think I'll ever use an IDE for a dynamic language again.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

Yeah, Eclipse has the Linux GUI curse.

Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi.

The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.

solidpy• 11 years ago

With the previous model you could just stop paying them and keep using your current version of the software. With the new model stop paying them and you are locked out.

I want DRM-free IDEs!

orillian• 11 years ago

I agree, it is cheaper but there are some of us that simply have no way to force, convince or otherwise cajole our employers to adopt a service license model. I have designers on staff using old Adobe products due to this same problem. JetBrains isn't going to magically convince management to open their wallets for monthly fee's. If this goes through, I'm boned. Stuck trying to make shitty IDE's work like jetBrains products. Not a happy day.

mattkevan3• 11 years ago

The problem with SAAS pricing for previously bought software is that the conversation changes from 'Pay us for this great bit of software, then pay us again when we make it even better', to 'Pay up or all your years of work goes away'.

It's a fundamentally different relationship.

codersteve• 11 years ago

Agreed. The incentive to make it better becomes less because users are on the auto-pay plan. Whereas they have to prove themselves worthy of the upgrade otherwise.

specialist• 11 years ago

Everyone's just trying to get their nut.

I imagine they're stumbling thru this viable business model notion, just like everyone else.

Cut them some slack.

I frankly don't care about the price. Developers need to get paid. I hope they figure out something fair (reasonable) with modest profitability, so they can enjoy vacations and have hope of someday retiring.

If I ever stop renewing (or subscribing), I can just use the community version.

chrislgrigg• 11 years ago

For companies managing the licenses for their employees, this is a great change. It's especially true for those who have a few primary languages but occasionally get contracts or have projects in other languages. For those with staff sizes in flux -- employees coming and going, contractors in and out, interns on board for part of the year -- only being responsible for the number of seats actively in use is extremely helpful, too.

Managing licenses for teams is time-consuming and frustrating. When I worked in the MSP world, convincing our clients (for whom we were essentially the IT department) that they had to buy an extra seat or upgrade everyone license or reminding them that, "No, you upgraded Sally to v5 but the Intern's system has last year's v4 license, and you have to shell out $X00 right now or they can't work" was a _constant_ issue. Creative Cloud and Office 360 made everything better, I expect this to have the same effect for dev teams.

softawre• 11 years ago

You can do this already though. Right now, my team has a license server URI they type into their editor, and when we're using the software it grabs a license slot from the server. If that employee left the company they just wouldn't use the license anymore and there's no cleanup work.

navls• 11 years ago

vim remains free and free

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

I think Resharper is in trouble. This licensing change, the new "refactoring" features in Visual Studio 2015, and the lower barrier for new tools to be created due to Roslyn are all going to have an impact.

aikah2• 11 years ago

To be fair , it worked quite well for Adobe products ( most of them are now using a monthly subscription scheme ) despite all the dissatisfaction voiced by some customers at first. It is both good for Adobe and good for the competition. In fact allowed some challengers to be profitable when everybody pirated Photoshop before as 95% of people using it only took advantage of 1% of Photoshop features. It will be a good opportunity for alternative products such as Eclipse or Netbeans to evolve and get better.

malka2• 11 years ago

Adobe photoshop has pretty much a monopoly. IDEs do not.

estefan4• 11 years ago

It's been good news for Serif. I've bought a grand total of 4 non-games on my Mac, Serif's Affinity Photo & Designer being 2 of them so I didn't have to pay Adobe for things I'd only use intermittently (Intellij being a third).

glenndebacker• 11 years ago

The reason why it works well for Autodesk and Adobe is the fact that they have a defacto monopoly in their fields. My boss doesn't like the fact that they have a subscription scheme but we have one for Adobe Cloud because there isn't another way. That is not the case for an IDE. I really like PyCharm and PHPStorm but I can (and also would) drop them in a heartbeat.

You will always find some (edge) case who can profit from these kind of schemes - an amateur photographer for example with Adobe CC or somebody who uses all the jetbrain tools - but there are a lot of cases that are a different and really don't have any benefits of using SAAS.

In Flanders we have a saying that goes a bit like this: "all small things makes on big thing". The personal problem that I have is that if I would add all those "inexpensive" subscriptions of services it will add up very fast to a point that it is becoming really expensive. I don't buy all software in a single month or can even wait for upgrading if an older version is good enough for me, with SAASS that is not the case.

But I have the same opinion that this race to convert all commercial software to SAAS will be beneficial for OSS alternatives. Personally I would even go as far as donating (or crowdfund) (for the same amount that I would give to jetbrains) to an OSS project, if that means that I would get an alternative that I don't need to "rent".

kitsunesoba• 11 years ago

I don’t know how it is on other platforms, but Adobe’s move to a subscription model has brought a flurry of far cheaper plain-old-purchase alternatives to OS X. Off the top of my head:

PS Alternatives: Acorn ($25), Pixelmator ($30), Affinity Photo ($50)

Illustrator alternatives: Sketch ($99), Affinity Designer ($50), iDraw ($25), Canvas Draw ($99)

And you know what? All of these options are far lighter than the Adobe behemoths while providing all the most relevant functionality and looking and feeling like real Mac apps instead of half-assed ports, all while taking advantage of the best part of the OS. Here in SV people I know in design are switching away from Adobe in spades.

If companies like Adobe can’t exist without subscriptions, maybe it means that large software companies that produce gargantuan beasts of applications are going out of style. Small indie teams producing lean, maintainable, focused apps are the way forward.

27182818284• 11 years ago

Everyone I've talked to wanted a slight pricing model change with JetBrains, myself included, but nobody wanted a subscription service.

It is just that, often you find yourself wanting PHPStorm, and PyCharms, but that's it. A simple buy one-full-price-half-off-second scheme would have got people like me to say, "yeah sure, let's buy up PyCharms this weekend. Why not?"

timv• 11 years ago

And the thing is, they didn't even solve the issue people wanted.

Yes, you can buy everything for US$19.90 per month.

Or you can buy PHPStorm+PyCharm for ($7.90+$7.90) = $15.80

So, under the new model, it's still cheaper to just buy two full-price licenses. There's no discount for the 2nd product.

azurelogic• 11 years ago

Well, looks like I'll be doing some upgrade purchases very soon...

Rezo2• 11 years ago

I purchase a lot of commercial IntelliJ/WebStorm licenses for my company. Previously, the cost was $499/y for new employees, $299/y for existing employees. Now it looks like it will be a flat $319/y for everyone. Eh, I'm OK with that. Now there's also upfront volume discounts, whereas previously you had to talk to sales. In some ways it's simpler for me, and the pricing is in line with other per-dev SaaS costs we have. Consider what you pay for a software Engineer and the productivity gains, personally it's a no-brainer for me. It's the best Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript etc. IDE by far.

With this change, I hope JetBrains takes the opportunity to switch from the big-bang yearly releases to just a continuous stream of improvements. In some ways they've already been moving in the this direction, they've added some pretty great improvements to point releases this year (React/JSX, TypeScript etc. comes to mind). This will eliminate release timing anxiety on both sides (customers optimizing when the best time to buy is, and JetBrains deciding if releasing major new functionality now vs in the next big-bang release), and lets the company ship improvements as fast as possible.

phn• 11 years ago

The whole post feels like someone took away the "free lunch". C'mon, we can understand the need to find a business model that works, right? I am having a hard time believing that they're changing just for the heck of it.

Besides, They have a free version of IntelliJ, making the ultimate edition and other languages (for which there are probably more, and free, alternatives) support as "premium".

If their tools are that good, maybe they're worth the money and $119 per year sounds pretty much like peanuts for anyone that is trying to make money.

jrs2353• 11 years ago

This isn't even Software-as-a-Service. Most companies that offer SaaS are HOSTING the software and thus incurring ongoing monthly costs. The Service part is that the purchaser doesn't have to install the software on their own machines, pay for nor update servers, etc. Selling rights to use [but not own] software on a monthly basis should be called RtpS - Rent-to-pwned-Software (cause you're pwned, you'll never own it)

Rezo2• 11 years ago

JetBrains produces a continuous stream of improvements to all of their tools, previously they would have to artificially hold some of the bigger changes back to justify the next big yearly version number increase. With subscriptions, this is no longer necessary, everyone can have the latest and greatest right away.

And I do hope the next logical step is to offer an optional fully hosted service that has feature parity with something like WebStorm. There's cloud IDEs out there, but they're lacking when compared to JetBrain's tools.

jrs2353• 11 years ago

"previously they would have to artificially hold some of the bigger changes back to justify the next big yearly version number increase"

I get that. Perhaps they should or could have just sold the current latest version as is for a bit less and then whenever the next big release comes out offer a prorated upgrade amount to those that feel the new features are worth the additional upgrade amount. Their model, withholding features so they could package them into a huge update, was hurting themselves and their customers.

What's to say they don't start pulling IntelliJ with other/more products? That is, to stop or slow down development/improvements and now milk a cash cow?

Clarification: They could have sold a working perpetual license without the 1 year of upgrades. When they have an upgrade they have an prorated upgrade path/cost based on when you purchased your current license/product.

toyg16• 11 years ago

Yeah, but the "right" way to do it is to disable updates on license expiration, not just turn off a product you might have paid for since 2010.

Maybe the best thing to do would be an initial payment worth, say, 6 months, followed by monthly renewals; if the renewal does not go through, updates stop. This would be closer to the current model, but would still switch most revenue (renewals) to the SaaS model.

toyg16• 11 years ago

Some SaaS "hostings" are paper-thin, like Adobe or Steam. They are glorified FTP sites.

mattkevan3• 11 years ago

Ha, yes. As a daily user of Creative Suite, the 'cloud' benefits are fairly feeble.

The file hosting is handy, but we already use Dropbox and Google Drive. The other features seem like they could have been incorporated into the desktop apps but were pulled into the cloud to make it appear more worthwhile.

I can see how moving shrink-wrap software to a subscription can be good for the company – reliable income streams, no longer having to worry about headline features to get people to buy the next version – but (especially in Adobe's case) it's hard to see it as anything but a cynical attempt to milk customers for every last drop before the whole thing crumbles.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

I'm with you on Adobe, but Steam is a whole different thing, even leaving out its OS aspirations. Probably most importantly, it's free -- I think of it as an unusually heavy e-commerce site that needed me to install a bunch of stuff to get it to work. Kind of like if Netflix let me watch stuff offline, but only if I put their Chrome app on my computer: It's a client for accessing their platform.

ascagnel_• 11 years ago

Steam isn't really SaaS as much as a platform. It supports eCommerce, the logistics of delivering product on a massive scale (even if said product is bits instead of boxes), and some social networking on top of that.

xfalcox• 11 years ago

Steam cloud save (play on the living room, continue in the bedroom), friends (with game integration like invites), anti-cheat, automatic update, video driver updates, in home streaming, fps in game overlay. Definitely not a site.

invaliduser• 11 years ago

As someone managing a small software edition company and selling yearly subscription licenses, I can totally get their business decision. Otherwise, you get the "Microsoft Word 97" effect, when people still use the same old software for 15 years, never upgrade, and complain about your software.

Having a recurring revenue is the best way to be able to manage a company, because it gives you a better view for your next years' budgets, and you can more easily plan investment and hirings.

What is wrong, is probably how jetbrain seems to change their pricing and businell model far too often, lacking direction, and pretending it's for the customers (it's only very indirectly for the customers benefit). Besides, I wouldn't mind paying whatever they want if they would just improve their release quality so that I don't get afraid of breaking my project everytime I update.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Microsoft recently did the same thing, requiring you to sign in with a Microsoft Account to continually re-activate Visual Studio (90 days, I think). So now, even with an MSDN sub, after it expires, you don't get the software. Rather significant change. Though, with BizSpark and other programs it will probably only impact larger companies.

Plus when customers view changes like this as unfair or unethical, they suddenly find themselves caring a lot less about using a disassembler and changing some jumps.

gdulli3• 11 years ago

Personally, they had lost my goodwill already with their old upgrade policy. If you bought a license on 01/2014, it expired on 12/2014, and you didn't need the product again until 04/2015, the upgrade you purchase in April begins on 01/2015, retroactively beginning after the end of the previous license. So you don't get the full 12 months they charge you for. When I realized that it was the end of my support for them.

Latty6• 11 years ago

Why would it work another way? You are paying to extend your old license, of course it carries on from when it finished. If you want a year from the present moment, that's not an extension, it's a new purchase. Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.

gdulli3• 11 years ago

Why would it work another way?

Because I shouldn't have to retroactively pay for a period I didn't use a product and the natural thing for me to assume was my status as a previous customer/license holder was what enabled me to an upgrade with the advertised "year's" worth of upgrades? Because that's how upgrade licenses work for other software products? (Windows/Office, other stuff I've used.)

They can define a license however they want, it's just up to me whether I find it worthwhile, and I didn't.

But at least in those days I had the option of continuing to use the older version after it expired.

toyg16• 11 years ago

Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.

That's only a problem if your renewal price is different from a new license.

This is the Oracle model, by the way. Say you buy Oracle with its compulsory support package, then you stop paying (because you don't need or want support, you're not going to upgrade etc). If at any point in the future you decide you'd actually like to buy the new version, you'll have to pay retroactive fees for all the time you skipped renewing. It's... not really nice.

In this sense, a switch to clear per-month pricing is actually welcome; it's just the "disabling stuff you paid for" that grates.

zeveb3• 11 years ago

What I don't get is why a developer would ever use proprietary software in the first place. I code—it's what I do. I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing them where they aren't, but I want to be able to improve them for my use cases. Who else in the world is as capable at knowing what I need as…me?

If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the vendor for features and, as this shows, for pricing and pricing model changes.

progmal12• 11 years ago

You are right about being at the mercy, but I have not used free software as good as the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE for development.

dfox• 11 years ago

I've heard many people say exactly that (or even that VS is simply the best IDE). I somehow fail to see why would anyone say that.

The whole solution/project model seems to be optimized for something that does not make much sense to me.

The UI is mostly unusable on small screens.

Integrated editor feels somewhat weird to me (I'm probably too addicted to emacs' electric-indent, but even then).

Thus I may see some reason to use VS for .NET projects (VS being the "native" IDE), but I completely fail to see why one would use VS for C/C++ (which is even exaggerated by various quirks of MS's compiler, like not supporting C99 and different versions of stdlib that sometimes can be used at same time and sometimes can't).

andylei2• 11 years ago

sometimes the proprietary software is better at what it does, which outweighs other drawbacks

manigandham4• 11 years ago

Please... some of us need to get work done and are perfectly happy to pay someone else to give us good quality products.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's worth doing yourself.

jordigh4• 11 years ago

Why not pay them to do it for you and also keep the ability to do it yourself, should you ever need it?

integraton• 11 years ago

...some of us need to get work done...

There are whole ecosystems of developers and teams getting work done and building companies (including some of the biggest companies in the industry) without these applications, so they clearly aren't necessary to "get work done."

Latty6• 11 years ago

IntelliJ and PyCharm both have open source cores, and are leaps and bounds ahead of every other IDE out there. (I use eclipse a lot for work, and there is a reason I use IntelliJ at home).

acomjean2• 11 years ago

I use php storm because it works really well out of the box. > I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing

Thats what drew me to the JetBrains product line. The default functionality and polish feels good compared with eclipse which is what I usually use when I'm in java. I still jump into emacs for some file editing because it feels right. But eclipse still seem strangely odd to use (that could just be the whole java toolchain thing). I spend a certain amount of time on learning the tools and learning how to configure. The curve on emacs/eclipse configuration is steep. oddly I donated for me emacs / eclipse since I use them enough.

If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the vendor for features..

Something I kinda knew, even as a paying customer, but this change really brings it home. Especially since we now have to keep paying to keep using.

jroseattle• 11 years ago

In our business, we're building software -- not software tools. I give my engineers full reign to determine what tools they use. For our build vs. buy evaluation, we don't have a need to modify or extend tooling beyond their existing capabilities (I find the JetBrains plug-in model fairly decent.) We use a lot of JetBrains tools in our operation.

It all comes down to build/buy assessment, because build still costs money. JetBrains has a price point that puts a tight margin on that build decision.

jasonkester• 11 years ago

The reason is that we're capable of multiplication and comparison.

$240 per year / $200/hour = 1.2 hours that this thing needs to save me each year to be worth paying for. I don't think that I could rewrite ReSharper from scratch in that amount of time. I know from long use that it will save me that much time each year.

It's the simplest money I'll spend all year. It would be if my bill rate were a tenth of what it is.

hoopism2• 11 years ago

In the previous thread on the announcement I expressed some concerns (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165919). An employee responded:

"I see this is turning into a conspiracy theory ) Fortunately, there's a little thing called competition that prevents raising rates at will without facing the consequences, and JetBrains is no exception: we're no monopoly"

So the message first was "We did this for YOU!" and then quickly became "Hey! You can always go elsewhere..."

Doesn't sound like something they did for my benefit.

Latty6• 11 years ago

That's misinterpreting the response - he was saying that they were not going to jack up prices arbitrarily. 'You can always go elsewhere' vs 'We aren't aiming to screw you over - you can always go elsewhere.' - there is a big difference.

hoopism2• 11 years ago

Fair enough. Both of those interpretations are a very different message from "Look at the nice thing we did for you"... which was my point.

toyg16• 11 years ago

A lot of JetBrains employees speak English as a second language, and can come off a bit too harsh and direct at times, so you have to give them some leeway when trying to read between the lines.

Just... never trust a business that says "we're doing this for you, beloved customers". They are not. Even if they did it to make you happy, it would simply mean they profit from your happiness in some way. A business does things to make a profit and expand, nothing else. JetBrains are doing this because they feel they have to, likely because of cashflow constraints; everything else is just corporate doublespeak.

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

It looks like they're going to review the changes:

http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/04/we-are-listening

Personally I would find the pricing more reasonable if the "individual developer" licenses could be used by small businesses and freelancers.

trebor• 11 years ago

My first reaction to this is gritting my teeth. But I went and looked and did the math. And I noticed that current users with a perpetual license (the "old" licensing model) can upgrade to the new pricing for the old renewal cost. EG:

    PHPStorm renewal $49 (personal)
    PHPStorm SaaS $49/year (from existing license, doesn't change)
    PHPStorm SaaS $79/year (promo)
    PHPStorm SaaS $99/year (after Jan 31st 2016)

> Yearly plan special offer for customers who have purchased a perpetual license. Offer to be redeemed no later than Jan 1, 2017.

For the terms of that upgrade: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204249752-What...

1. The offer is available to customers with or without upgrade subscriptions regardless of the subscription status, provided a customer switches their existing licenses to the new model before January 1, 2017
2. The offer only applies to switching existing licenses to the new model. Purchases for additional users will fall under the standard pricing
3. Once the offer is used, the special price is available indefinitely until payments are canceled or paused.

Emphasis mine.

Looks like an irritating change, perhaps, but for existing customers you can lock your price in at its current renewal rate for the smaller products. The downside is that you will be renewing yearly, because if you pause the payment your rate might change.

cool-RR5• 11 years ago

I see a lot of whining in this thread. If you think that an increase of $100/year in the price of a tool that you use every day, for, say, at least 5 hours daily as part of your job as software developer as a meaningful price increase, than the cost of your IDE is not close to being your biggest problem.

Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.

malka2• 11 years ago

The price is not the problem. I simply do not want to rent the tools I use. I want to buy them.

cool-RR5• 11 years ago

It's absolutely about the price. If I told you you need to rent them, but the price for renting for the next 15 years is negligible, I don't think you'd have a problem with renting them. Now our only disagreement is on what constitutes "negligible".

addicted• 11 years ago

So if instead of $100/yr they had raised the price to $500 but you "own" the software, you would have been okay with that?

toyg16• 11 years ago

A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

A taxi driver will need their car fixed periodically at their dealership. If they don't pay up, no car.

cmdkeen• 11 years ago

Seriously, someone on HN equating SAAS to extortion...

Much like the OP talking of not being able to do development if your employer fails to approve the payment in time. Resharper is nice and all but you can actually write C# without it. (I know PyCharm etc might be harder but the article was about Resharper).

rockdiesel• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure cool-RR is referring to the fact that most taxi drivers lease their cabs from the cab company, not the pair of comfortable shoes they invest in.

balabaster8• 11 years ago

An increase of $120 is a 100% increase in what we were already paying. Perhaps $120 wasn't reasonable... and given the amount of functionality it adds to Visual Studio that it now seems like I can't live without, perhaps that's a fair assumption, but a 100% increase in cost with such little warning... that's not cool at all!

EthanHeilman2• 11 years ago

Its not the price, it is that if I write some software in an IDE, I want the capability to push a bug fix out two years later without having to "subscribe" again. This will just further contribute to bitrot.

taxi drivers invest more money than software developers

Citation needed.

software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.

You are assuming that everyone who develops software is employed as a software developer. There is fine work done by hobbyists and independents.

cool-RR5• 11 years ago

> taxi drivers invest more money than software developers
Citation needed.

Pretty sure that for the price of a car, including maintenance, you could pay for a nice workstation and multiple monitors with lots of "expensive" software on a subscription model.

You are assuming that everyone who develops software is employed as a software developer. There is fine work done by hobbyists and independents.

If you're developing open-source software, you can probably get a free license for many IDEs. If you're both a hobbyist, don't want to release your software as open-source, and expect to be given top-rate tools for a cheap price...

dec0dedab0de• 11 years ago

I'll be renewing PyCharm this week, but will likely start brushing up on Eclipse/PyDev for next year. I find the idea of software disabling itself disgusting.

jasonellis3• 11 years ago

As someone who jumps between PHP, JavaScript, Python, and a tiny bit of Ruby, I have been using IntelliJ so that I don't have to buy and upgrade multiple IDEs each year. I really miss the simplified project management of the specialized IDEs. I would gladly pay $149/year for their "All Products" package (maybe even the $199).

Unfortunately, there are a few dealbreakers with their proposed model that will have me re-evaluating my development environment:

1) Losing the grandfathered pricing if my subscription lapses. I can swallow paying $149/year for the All Products and would do so, but I don't want to feel like a hostage where I'm stuck paying more if I take a month off of using the IDE.

2) $149/year is pretty reasonable, $199/year a little tougher to swallow, $249/year is a no-go.

3) As mentioned, I made a $200 investment in an IntelliJ license with the expectation that I would upgrade each year at $100. Now I'm forced to convert my existing perpetual license into a subscription where I'm held hostage to keep the lower price or I lose access to my product if I cancel the subscription after converting the license.

4) Losing access to the software if my subscription lapses. If the prices were more reasonable (like those of the grandfathered prices, but permanent without the hostage situation) then I could deal with the fact that I need to pay to play. But I feel like we're paying a premium price (albeit for good products). I like the idea others have floated of getting a perpetual license after having paid for a full year subscription.

rebootthesystem11• 11 years ago

We use PyCharm and love it. Could we do without it? Yes, of course. The tool makes a number of things more convenient but it isn't indispensable. That said, I'd hate to see it go.

One thing that has always bothered me about JetBrains is the "personality" of their support. It is isn't good. We haven't needed a lot of it, maybe 2 or 3 incidents since PyCharm came out (we adopted right away). Yet, there's a bothersome lag in support (I am not talking about international time zones) as well as a lack of quality. It's almost --but not quite-- condescending in feel.

I do understand there might be language and cultural differences at play here. I also have experience with German companies (not just software). Their approach to customer service can be very dry and very different from what you might experience in the US. I am guessing the Czech Republic might be similar.

I know these are generalizations that could be way off base. In the case of JetBrains, if the product was not good we would have stopped using them purely based on the substandard support.

As far as paying monthly. No. Thanks. I want my software to work and work reliably. If I chose not to upgrade for a year or two, these tools need to work. A monthly plan with 30 day call-the-mothership is a non-starter for me. I will not, ever, buy into something like that for my business. I want less overhead, not more. And I don't want a situation where if things are tight for a few months we lose half of our tools. Buying into something like that would be a really dumb decision on the part of a business owner or manager.

I look at something like MS Office. We purchased licenses back in 2007. We have not needed any of the new features. And so, our 15 or so licenses work just fine for what we need to do and we do not need to spend another dime to use the software. From a business perspective that is the right way to use tools and the right way to make purchases. You do not want to bleed money on a regular basis for software updates you don't need or updates that don't make enough of a material impact to justify their cost.

Anyhow, I hope JetBrains reconsiders. We have been looking at some of their other products but will not even consider them if they are converted to monthly subscription products. If they insist on taking this approach I suspect products like SublimeText will see a boost in adoption. Yes, not the same thing, but not the end of the world and it is a really, really good product with a very friendly license.

foobarbecue2• 11 years ago

They gave me a free version of WebStorm because I'm a hobbyist open source developer. I love it, but I'm obviously not going to pay $80 a year. Does anyone know if they're going to continue having some kind of free option for non-corporate use?

hhariri• 11 years ago

We've never had a free option for non-corporate users. We provide free licenses for Students, OSS projects and certain other groups. In addition, we give discounts of 50% for start-ups. All of that will continue.

foobarbecue2• 11 years ago

I'm a student with an OSS project, so that's good to hear. As long as you have this great policy about OSS, I can't complain!

kailuowang• 11 years ago

JetBrian used to have to improve the product significantly every major release so that people would pay for the new version. Just want to point out that by changing to the new subscription model, they no longer have that drive.

Of course there are still other reasons for innovating their product, it's just one less.

orangecat• 11 years ago

Right. In an alternate world where you had to pay Intel $20/month or they'd brick your CPU, I'd expect their rate of improvements to be much lower.

timrichard• 11 years ago

Hmm, time will tell. I've been using IDEA since 2008, but switched to WebStorm a couple of years ago because I wanted to get the new JS features and extensions sooner (and didn't need the Java Enterprise bits).

As someone who upgrades WebStorm within an hour of a new version being released, I'm hoping the new subscription model will mean they push out improvements whenever they're ready, rather than waiting for a major release to showcase.

Totally understand the angst on here about the IDE not working if you cancel your subscription, but I guess I'm already in that mindset from using services like Linode and BrowserStack.

As a serial upgrader, the WebStorm subscription price looks okay. Over the years, I've considered the IDE more of a co-worker than a tool (should credit Hector the Inspector as a great Wingman). If you're billing for your hours I still think the product is a no-brainer, but understand this would be a frustrating development for a more casual user.

davexunit• 11 years ago

At this I'd like to remind folks that Emacs has been around for over 3 decades and isn't going anywhere. Don't trust a single company with your most essential tools.

frik• 11 years ago

That's why I prefer open source tools.

JetBrains IDEA Community Edition IDE is open source, someone should fork it and add the various language plugins (many of them are open source too).

Permit• 11 years ago

I wonder if we're only getting to see one side of the issue here. How does enterprise react to changes like this?

Could JetBrains perhaps compromise: Offer the current licensing for individual/independent developers, but the subscription model for enterprise licenses? Businesses are more likely to consume multiple products than an indie developer.

What do you guys think?

silvestrov2• 11 years ago

Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that. People only want to pay for new shiny features.

If IntelliJ doesn't get money because developers think "old version is good enough for me", then there is no money for bug fixing and for keeping the product alive. It would end up as abandonware like most apps on the iPhone App Store.

I'd guess the IDE have now reached this "fully featured" milestone where most developers don't care to upgrade. So IntelliJ has to switch to a subscription model to survive.

So we users have the choice between paying a subscription or having the IDE end up as unmaintained software due to lack of funds.

IntelliJ can't put out a new paid "version 15" which has bug-fixes only. People would be unhappy about that too.

I feel that the core IDE has degraded in quality over the past years because the releases were feature-driven, and I'd be happy to see IntelliJ refocus on quality instead of quantity.

jrs2353• 11 years ago

"Polishing and bug fixes cost money" and should be factored into cost of development and price of the product...

joesmo4• 11 years ago

"I feel that the core IDE has degraded in quality over the past years because the releases were feature-driven, and I'd be happy to see IntelliJ refocus on quality instead of quantity."

I couldn't agree more. The latest versions have a ton of bugs that were not present before. Some of the IDEs are totally unusable for certain tasks like debugging. I don't think they will focus on fixing bugs and they haven't introduced any great features, IMO, in years.

ceejayoz2• 11 years ago

Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that.

You pay for that when you buy the product - it comes with a year of updates.

silvestrov2• 11 years ago

I want more than a year because:

1) New OS releases might require fixes to IDEA's embedded JVM.

2) There's still a lot of bugs left after the first year.

The ONLY reason that I have bought the past 2 updates is to get bugs fixed, but so far it has been for the worse.

A company can't live forever on one-time payments. It needs a continuing income, otherwise the most sensible business decision is to close shop.

teacup506• 11 years ago

Half the reason I haven't updated is that JetBrains hasn't been polishing. I'd pay for that, happily, but bugs sit unfixed for years while JetBrains rolls out entirely new (and similarly buggy) IDEs.

Navarr2• 11 years ago

I wonder if that's part of the reason to move to subscription? To improve funding for that area?

If you operate on perpetual licenses you have to support that software and find a way to get people to purchase again - via new features etc etc

vruiz• 11 years ago

I'd guess the IDE have now reached this "fully featured" milestone where most developers don't care to upgrade. So IntelliJ has to switch to a subscription model to survive.

Sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me and I doubt IntelliJ's sales are putting the company in any danger.

Even if they couldn't come up with new features, the programming languages and frameworks keep evolving and the tooling needs to catch up with that. But I can come up with a hundred things to improve from the top of my head, so I'm sure they can too.

justabystander• 11 years ago

Their "subscription" model was basically a year of small issue maintenance and 1-2 major versions. They spent more effort expanding into new markets than they did maintaining and improving existing tools. I don't really anticipate them spending any more time on tool improvement despite the cash grab.

I don't like companies that hold my development process hostage or treat me like a serf. I get that they want to stop maintaining old versions. But allowing people access to the full range of builds within their subscription (with maybe a slight exception of providing the next "stable" build after expiration) and some contract lingo should cover that.

Rental has its usage, but it's not for everyone.

lewisl9029• 11 years ago

That's really too bad.

I actually used and liked WebStorm at one point. I've since switched to Atom, but I still occasionally miss some of the more advanced refactoring and navigation features that indexing and static analysis made possible.

Every time JetBrains released a new version of WebStorm I usually try to take a thorough look through the release notes and sometimes become tempted to give it another try.

But this new subscription model has managed to completely kill any enthusiasm I had left for WebStorm and other JetBrains products.

As a side note, I really hope this doesn't mean Cursive is going to have to switch to the same subscription model.

steve_taylor3• 11 years ago

This was inevitable. Businesses want month-to-month licensing and now I expect JetBrains will see solid growth driven by their business customers. I would rather see a cashed-up JetBrains acquire - let's say - Xamarin than the opposite outcome, which would be an unmitigated disaster.

joesmo4• 11 years ago

Wow. This is terrible. I'm a user of a few of their products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, IDEA, and RubyMine), two of which I've paid for and gotten upgrades for in the past on a fairly regular basis. I've extolled Jetbrains and praised the to such great lengths you'd think I was an evangelist for them. But now, it seems like it's time yet again (something I though was over after discovering Jetbrains) to find a proper IDE.

Their products have been going down in quality. In the latest PHPStorm for example, I've had serious problems with the debugger not working and it rewriting my code to put many lines into one (fun!). Jetbrains hasn't released a new feature that I use on a constant basis for two major versions (multi-cursor is debatable, but certainly not a daily-basis feature). I seriously regret upgrading PHPStorm simply because I wasted $129 on a product that's worse than the previous version in every single way. I asked, but was not offered a refund. Not only that, but prices have already doubled in the last couple of years, with new versions being $200 instead of $100 as they used to be (and sometimes they'd have discounts like the End of The World Sale in 2012 when they were selling PyCharm for $25 and upgrades for $12).

Jetbrains, IMO, is close to failing to provide quality software and now we get this insanity. The only thing I can hope for is that someone takes this great platform and start writing plugins for these languages that are better than Jetbrains (was hard in the past but shouldn't be so now and in the future) or creates another IDE platform (Eclipse need not apply).

agentgt2• 11 years ago

Ironically I just switched back to Eclipse Mars from Intellij. Intellij is an awesome product and for certain development environments it hands down beats Eclipse... but if your just coding in a JVM language (Java, Scala..) Eclipse Mars is pretty decent. For me It really was never the features that made me want to use Intellij but the simple fact that shit never seems to get fixed in Eclipse version after version.

Eclipse Mars is better than previous versions but there are still ancient bugs:

Mac OSX scrolling: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471

Font Line Height (thank you Atom for supporting this) https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26765

I have like 10 more bugs that I wish I could pay to have fixed. Intellij had this problem too (but lesser) and I really wish a company had some sort of pricing option to have certain bugs/features fast tracked. Eclipse takes donations and Intellij purchaes but you can't specifically say hey I will give you $1000 if you just fix xyz bug/feature. I know there are services that do this on opensource projects... I just wish that companies did it as well.

Speaking of Atom I just created an Eclipse Color theme that looks like One Dark syntax https://gist.github.com/agentgt/fcaf75eb8acf92e08926 . Combined with the Dark widget theme (yes Mars seems to have made this better) it really looks pretty decent on Mac. Its nice because I use Atom for frontend work so I have consistency theme wise.

mdaniel• 11 years ago

I have like 10 more bugs that I wish I could pay to have fixed.

Are you aware of Bountysource? https://www.bountysource.com/ While I believe the audience size for it isn't super large, it's also conceivable that you could post a link to the Bountysource as a comment on the Bugzilla issue, at which point your incentive becomes more visible.

I don't know if you were just using a number as an example, but $1000 will likely get you some real traction on a bug - provided, of course, that the upstream project (Eclipse, in this case) will accept the work.

agentgt2• 11 years ago

I'll try bountysource for sure but others have tried (with I believe other bounty services and in some cases paypal) and for some reason have not gotten traction. In fact one of the bugs I linked to (mac scrolling bug) some one offered a bounty but the bounty links seems to have disappeared. I'm not sure if the Eclipse foundation has a policy against it. I would imagine they would prefer you donate instead.

It would be interesting if there were some sort of custom white label bounty services for organizations like Apache and Eclipse where contributions are complicated in terms of regulations, licensing, donating, consistency and general policy... Apache and Eclipse don't even store their code on github so I would imagine they might have issues with a bountservice.

alblue• 11 years ago

Note that Eclipse supports donations directly:

https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/users-can-now-fun...

Be wary of random donation sites that are unconnected to the host organisation - the chance of any real money flowing back upstream on average is zero.

mindcrime3• 11 years ago

We use a subscription model at Fogbeam, but here's the twist: all our software is open source, and you're free to use it as you like, with or without a subscription.

So why buy a subscription at all?

Because you get the kinds of things big companies care about: certification, maintenance, support, indemnification, somebody to sue if things don't work, a vendor to shift blame onto if the shit hits the fan, a discount on professional services work, perpetual upgrades, priority access to influence the roadmap and direction of the product, etc. Subscriptions are also a win for customers in that (depending on the details) they may be able to pay for a subscription out of an operational budget, rather than needing to go to some committee and get approval for a large one-time capital expenditure. And with subscriptions you are paying a portion of the cost in future, inflated, dollars instead of today's dollars.

Of course, like any vendor who does OSS, we run the risk of having a lot of people using our software and never paying, but that's just something we accept.

But here's the thing... we don't sell development tools - IDEs and the like. Our stuff is backend/middle-ware that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and up (for companies with thousands of employees, anyway), which makes things like worrying about capital expenditures more of an issue. At the kind of price-points you are talking about for IDEs and what-not, I'm not sure the advantages of a subscription (from the customer POV) really carry much weight.

mreiland3• 11 years ago

I would like to see the software contract that includes indemnification for the software.

mindcrime3• 11 years ago

We don't have the final wording all worked out for all of that stuff. We've been pretty focused on product stuff for the past while, and only recently got to a point where we have a product actually available for sell, and we're still working on contracts / licenses and all that. But what I can tell you is that our approach will probably look a lot like what Red Hat does[1].

Basically, it's a guarantee that if you get sued for using our software (patent infringement, whatever) then we protect you from any fallout from that.

[1] http://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-assurance

jacquesm• 11 years ago

I would like to encourage everybody that does not like the new licensing scheme of JetBrains to band together and produce either an open source product that is as polished so it can be used for free or, alternatively to take this apparently huge business opportunity and run with it.

I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.

Looking at a moderately tooled up wood or metalworking shop you'd be looking at a very large multiple for the main tools + accessories without a hope to make the kind of money we can make in software.

sireat• 11 years ago

Many people are quite happy to pay for their tools, what they do not want is to be forced into a situation when it is pay for the tools this month or lose access to them.

Jetbrains could have avoided all this negative backslash by keeping the current licencing scheme in place and adding the subscription service as an option.

Again, think of it like buying a DVD over renting it on Netflix, most likely Netflix would be the cheaper option as with the exception of children's movies most movies/shows are not watched more than twice/thrice.

However we want to feel the ownership of something.

We do not want to be told that we must pay $5 for this exquisite hammer this month or be forced to go back to a 3 year old hammer.

falcolas4• 11 years ago

To continue the analogy, most woodworker's tools are 1) well over three years old, and 2) have consumable components which cost well over Jetbrain's highest subscription cost every year.

Not to mention, once purchased, a woodworker won't get upgrades to their tools, or have problems with them fixed as part of their ongoing cost.

Consider it a contribution to a team whose tools you obviously enjoy, to ensure both that updates keep coming and you're not stuck with a three year old tool because Jetbrains couldn't afford to stay in business.

monksy• 11 years ago

Jetbrains could have avoided all this negative backslash by keeping the current licencing scheme in place and adding the subscription service as an option.

Thats what Visual Paradigm did with their Visual UML product.

nitrogen3• 11 years ago

I think it's the idea that their favorite lathe maker no longer lets them buy a lathe., only rent. If you stop paying for your lathe, someone comes into your shop and disables it.

mdasen• 11 years ago

It would be possible for people to fork the community edition (https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community) and try and rebuild the most popular ultimate features.

JupiterMoon• 11 years ago

They would tend to own a lot of these tools. As in their spanner or their CNC mill does not phone home and then stop working if they fail to keep paying the monthly rent on it.

flurpitude• 11 years ago

I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.

You make an assumption that we developers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That may be true in some places and for some fortunate people but it's not true everywhere.

Besides, the main complaint I see here is that the subscription model makes all your code assets hostage to JetBrains' fortunes, since the moment they go out of existence all the software you depend on stops working. People are not balking at the thought of paying a few hundred dollars for a tool - they are, in fact, asking for the opportunity to do just that.

chrisbennet• 11 years ago

How would you feel if your favorite machine tool manufactures decided that they would no longer sell you machine tools - only rent them?

How about if cars could no longer be owned, just leased?

This is why people are upset, not because they begrudge tool vendors getting paid.

rgdzz3• 11 years ago

My main IDE right now is VS12 but once a week I use Webstorm for like 2 hours. Does anyone knows a good alternative to it? Preferably an IDE not a TextEditor.

nbevans2• 11 years ago

It's really odd how the C# community took ReSharper to heart so easily and somewhat irreversibly. The amount of C# developers out there now that will literally turn down a job offer if ReSharper is not used at that shop. It is also the #1 complaint of even higher-end C# devs as to why they would never move to F#... because there is not ReSharper for it. Duh. It's sad they can't see that ReSharper is merely a symptom of a poor language; to work around all its flaws.

xaqfox• 11 years ago

What flaws in the language does Resharper overcome? Does a language exist that causes you to never need to refactor code?

nbevans2• 11 years ago

Have you ever used ReSharper? It is far more than just a refactoring tool. It is basically a set of extensions for Visual Studio that somewhat entirely transforms the VS experience. It could be described as pseudo-productivity tool for Visual Studio more than merely a refactoring tool.

With that said, refactorings in C# code (like Java) are quite often incredibly repetitive which is why ReSharper exists: to ease that pain. Quite often it is alternating a property to a field, and vice versa. Or auto-implementing a new constructor parameter with a null checker, field or property setter, readonly detection etc. It's just boring repetitive rubbish that the language has delegated onto the programmer rather than simply improve the syntax. There is a common expression about C# (admittedly, often perpetuated by those whom have moved on from C#) which is "In C#, you have to do everything three times."

ReSharper has a type of code linting built into it which can be rolled out to the whole project team. This is cool and all. But it would have been better if the language ecosystem itself agreed upon a stylistic standard and provided a code linter for it. Then allowed that to be added in as a build step. C# shops are possibly too lazy for that though. It's all about the IDE baby!

And that ultimately is the USP of ReSharper. A product for lazy developers. It's no wonder they charge quite handsomely for it.

quaffapint• 11 years ago

Biggest problem I have is the need for a live Internet connection. We do all our work in an offline dev environment.

Now trying to get some licensing server installed in an Enterprise environment is a PITA.

balabaster8• 11 years ago

Moving to a subscription model for 1 thing is okay, perhaps 2, or even 3. But with every company gradually moving to subscription models, it is emptying out our wallets every month and removing more and more of our income to maintain the status quo.

From my own perspective, and I know this doesn't apply to all, but I cannot imagine I'm the only person with this viewpoint:

I'm sick of other developers saying things like: "You know what? For the amount developers earn, $X is a small price to pay." You're right, $X for a single piece of software is a small price. But when you add the cost of your MSDN license here, your JetBrains license there, your Xamarin university/license, O'Reilly Safari License, PluralSight license and countless other licenses and software purchases to do our jobs - all of which are gradually moving towards month-by-month subscription models with excessively large combined annual overheads, it cuts more and more into your budget... and not to forget that the income you make doesn't just pay for an ever revolving cycle of tools to maintain your competitiveness as these arguments seem to forget [unless you're still living in Mom's basement and all your income is expendable or can feed the endless software-as-a-service lifestyle]. It's also used to ensure that your kids get a good education so they can make their own valuable contributions to society; that you're able to live comfortably and not worry about where your next meal is coming from; that your family is safe and secure and well prepared for the unexpected; medical plans; retirement plans; mortgage; vehicle payments; the list goes on... all of which costs money - every month!

I'm growing tired of companies feeling like they can reach into my pocket month after month and take every spare penny for "services rendered." At what point will people turn around and say "Enough's enough! My money is mine!" I'm happy to buy products when they move me forward, but I hate paying monthly subscriptions on the off chance that you're going to continue provide updates that may or may not benefit me in the longer term.

As a company providing software, I'm not purchasing you as a service. I'm purchasing your product. When I work for a company that pays me every month, I'm selling myself to them as a service - to do their bidding and write the code they want. If I'm to pay for you as a service, then the money I'm paying you had better be providing what I need to do my job more effectively, just like if I pay a cleaner to come clean the house, I'm not paying for them to develop makeup products that benefit their other clients while I don't wear makeup. I want the option of buying the product that does help me do my job more effectively and then I'll hold on to the rest of my money and allocate it where that is the case.

codewithcheese• 11 years ago

It seems there is a simple solution. You pay the subscription monthly, until after 1 year you own the current version. If you stop the subscription at that point you don't get rolling updates or SLA support.

claar• 11 years ago

This is a psychological issue for me.

I gladly entered JetBrain's "cattle pen", and pay yearly for the privilege of being "trapped" there. Whether I might want to leave doesn't cross my mind, because I like it there.

Now they're adding security at the gate. I still don't want to leave, but now it's obvious that I'm trapped. It just feels different, and I don't like it.

yAak• 11 years ago

I think a lot of people are encountering this same issue -- myself included!

cromwellian• 11 years ago

JetBrains is in a tough market where they charge for what other competitors give away for free. They do so by making awesome products but doing that takes money and resources. If you want them to continue to invest in making the worlds best IDEs, you should be cheering this decision. They charge a pittance for such products.

Seriously, for the price of IntelliJ ultimate, most programmers will earn that in 2-3 hours of work. Your paying 2-3 hours of your time for a product that saves you hundreds of hours, and helps you earn a high white collar salary.

I just don't get people who whine about the pricing of their tools. Have you looked at the costs of video production, 3d and 2d art programs? Profession music creation software? Or any enterprise software for godsakes?

JetBrains has fought hard to survive and thrive in a cut throat market where most people use free tools and don't want to buy anything. They make a premium product and sell it for less than a cheap smartphone you upgrade every 2 years.

Maybe they can please people who want the false comfort of ownership by boosting the price of the non-rent edition.

chucky_z• 11 years ago

As an interesting perspective, I don't know a single person who pirates any JetBrains software. All the programmers I know use their software exclusively and pay for it.

I can name many people who pirate all sorts of video production, 3d, and 2d art programs.

As for myself, maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but I try to avoid paid software at all costs. I used Sublime Text briefly, but switched back to vim when I found a good combination of plugins (caveat: I do little programming).

konradb3• 11 years ago

Perhaps if they have a model where after you've had a solid 12 months of subscriptions behind you, you can stop and use the last good versions you had, that would fix the issues people are complaining about.

That would lose you the 'renewing' discount, but it wouldn't stop the concern about the IDE's not working.

pilif• 11 years ago

On the initial blog post there was a suggestion for a very good compromise which I would happily accept:

Add a minimum duration to the subscriptions. If you cancel the subscription after that minimum duration, you can keep using the products you have subscribed to, but you don't get any more updates (like it is now).

If you want to re-subscribe, you can, but the minimum duration starts to count from 0 again.

This would give me the safety net that if worse comes to worst, I'll still be able to use the IDE(s) in some fashion while it still guarantees Jetbrains the fixed income which gives them the freedom to finally work on bug fixes some more, instead of needing to add killer-features all the time.

rebootthesystem11• 11 years ago

They need to do a better job explaining the licenses.

https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/

I can't find anything that explains the difference between the individual vs. company/organization licenses.

Are these still single-developer licenses?

Why does a company have to pay twice as much as the individual license?

That's just silly. I'll have my devs buy their own licenses and reimburse them. People are not stupid, you know? Because these licenses expire on a monthly basis there really isn't a reason for a company to "own" the product.

With the prior licensing scheme it made sense because the product never expired. You could continue using it even if you didn't need the upgrades. You were, in fact, purchasing an asset. Not too different from buying a set of wrenches for your toolbox, they might not be the latest in a year, but they work just as well.

With this setup there is no reason whatsoever for a company to pay double monthly fees. That's just silly. I'd like to see someone justify a reason to charge a business twice as much. Please don't say "because you make a profit". This is like Ford charging you twice as much for an F150 because you buy it through your business.

Regarding the company/organization license: Does one license allow one developer to work with, say, IntelliJ while another uses PyCharm? I have not ask. Again, there's precious little on the website to explain the terms and conditions of each license.

sgdread3• 11 years ago

If you're reimbursing personal licenses, it's actually violation if EULA [1]

[1] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/200544871-5-Ca...

rebootthesystem11• 11 years ago

I am not. We already own permanent licenses for what we need and do not intend on moving to the monthly plan under current conditions.

I am simply pointing out people are not stupid. Doubling the monthly cost just because it is a business can't be justified and this is bound to lead to people gaming the system.

Again, pick a service, say, gardener, and have them charge you twice as much to mow exactly the same size lawn just because you are a business. What will happen is they'll be treated to a big "fuck you" and someone else will get the business.

Someone needs to tell me what they deliver to a business user that supports charging twice as much. There's certainly zero difference in the already questionable level of support, so, where is the justification?

To me that's bordering on being offensive.

hrabago• 11 years ago

I wonder how many developers will stop promoting their products to other developers based solely on the subscription model? I know I would.

Also, I never would have tried their products if they were already on a subscription model. That would have been a showstopper for me. I may continue to use them now, because I'm already hooked. However, they'll probably lose a lot of potential customers who'll never give them a try just because of their pricing model.

bb0wn• 11 years ago

And this is one of the many reasons why I've not used paid IDEs. I feel bad for everyone over a barrel with JetBrains because they've dedicated so much of their time developing in their lovely IDEs (many of my co-workers use their products.)

This is not to say that a SaaS model is necessarily bad... it's just that, as a user, one is now beholden to the whims of a company for what is perhaps the most critical part of their work flow.

jonhohle• 11 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Stallman - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

chinathrow• 11 years ago

If someone at JetBrains is reading this: Having 2 licenses paid and planned to renew when I decide what great.

This, not so much. Officially looking for alternatives.

brudgers• 11 years ago

The problem for any company providing a workflow solution is that if you solve the customer's problem by providing a stable workflow then there is no little for the customer to upgrade. Their workfolow is profitable, and the solution is analogous to a band-saw in a wood-shop: a fixture.

On the other hand, upgrading to a new version with new features is a risk. When none of the previous version's features changed, there's still the reconfiguration cost...and usually previous version features do change if for no other reason than UI. Even a compelling new feature entails the disruption of changing processes.

Ideally, the best long term strategy for a tools company is a subscription model that pushes no features and results in more or less the same profitability for their customers in the end: for example by exactly offsetting the gains from features with the cost of switching. The sweet spot is technical progress accompanied by business stasis. AutoDesk is the master at this...they started moving toward subscriptions almost twenty years ago. They got away from selling platforms and focused on features, and their customers are all locked into yearly cycles of disrupting their workflow and looking to features for redemption.

fenomas7• 11 years ago

I was with Adobe during their change (as a tech evangelist meeting a lot of users), and watched it play out from both directions. And setting aside questions of pricing, one thing people overlook is that a subscription plan is a much, much better way to make software than selling annual or biannual updates.

The problem is that for a mature product, yearly sales cycles create a toxic incentive to focus engineering time on flashy demo-friendly features, at the cost of spending cycles on performance, stability, workflow improvements that benefit power users but don't impress salespeople, and so on. It's a recipe for bloat - cutting out a flashy feature never helps sales, so they stick around even when they're not useful.

I don't know anything about JetBrains or their software, or whether the above is an issue for them, but FWIW I think most of the Adobe teams are making better tools since the change, and it's due to having the feature priorities in the right place.

bluecalm4• 11 years ago

What about pay for a product + 1 year of updates and then if you want it you can pay for another 1 year of updates? It seems it doesn't create the problem you mentioned because as people buy on different days there is no cut-off point you would be incentivized to wait with updates to.

Revisor• 11 years ago

Yearly sales cycles create a toxic incentive to focus engineering time on flashy demo-friendly features

I understand that argument, but what incentive does DRM with a killswitch create for the software company, if its customers must pay in order to keep the product running at all? Might it not create different perverse incentives, for example trying to close the ecosystem in order to make a switch a painful experience?

Or in other words: What incentive to improve the software (other than the threat from competitors) does subscription DRM provide, if you can just collect the rent, because the cost of switching is too high anyway and the customers are at your mercy?

fenomas7• 11 years ago

Very fair point, and believe me I heard it from a lot of users. My answer is (was), the pressure to improve has always been from competitors, and that doesn't change under a subscription model. I know people tend to see Photoshop as an endless monopoly, but actually tons of rivals pop up and get users in significant numbers (e.g. Sketch), and they do it by being lightweight and flexible. And if Photoshop just kept being huge and adding on ten more huge features per year it would inevitably become a relic, if not by losing old users then definitely by failing to attract new ones.

Not to dismiss your point though - it's absolutely possible that the company gets complacent and stops innovating and collects rent. I just don't think anything really stops people from ditching Adobe if that happens. In this sense I think people overestimate the tools' intrinsic value and underestimate the value of the updates each year. That is, I like Photoshop better than its competitors today, and I felt the same way three years ago, but between a three year-old version of PS and its competitors today I'd switch in a second, and I think many others would too. In other words, the only reason PS maintains its monopoly-like dominance is that it's kept innovating, and if one side of that equation changes the other will too.

With that said, playing devil's advocate against myself, one big argument against what I'm saying here is lock-in from file formats like PSD - if people subscribe and make PSD files, the risk of losing work if they switched tools removes some of the pressure on Adobe to innovate. At the time of the CC switch Adobe said they would come out with some way to make sure people don't get locked out of their files, but I don't know if anything happened with that or not. A lot of tools support PSD these days so maybe it's not a hot issue but I think it's worth keeping in mind.

Sorry to go to such length but I hope that answers your question.

HelloNurse• 11 years ago

The social cost of subscription-based offers can be enough to make users forfeit good products.

If a developer convinces a manager to buy a perpetual license of IntelliJ, mission accomplished: the developer will be able to use IntelliJ forever. Persuading the manager to spend more on IntelliJ by making a convincing case that an upgrade is worth the money is an optional campaign, reserved for a favorable moment (e.g. when being able to use a new feature would be very valuable) in a vague future.

If a developer convinces a manager to buy a yearly subscription to IntelliJ, the developer should expect to start using Eclipse after one year due to a cost reduction effort. Persuading the manager to spend more on IntelliJ is difficult (no expected updates), urgent (the software stops working rather than sliding into obsolescence) and a recurring unpleasantness.

Moreover, JetBrains makes the sort of luxury products that are bought when money is abundant and regretted (but still used and enjoyed) in times of poverty; forcing customers who cannot pay right now to eliminate JetBrains products from their daily workflow instead of keeping them as happy users and waiting for when they'll want to spend again is a gratuitous demolition of goodwill.

sokoloff• 11 years ago

I'm sure there are development shops that are that tight with a buck, but I've never worked at one. In my experience, once a recurring cost is baked into the run rate, it's easier to get it approved for the following year than it is to get an unforecast license purchase made during the year.

If you're working for a shop where a $200 annual expense for a dev tool is a deal-breaker, I shudder to think of how the rest of your work life is (free drinks, food, merit raises, etc).

(I acknowledge ahead of time that my comments are based on US employment.)

ovulator• 11 years ago

I've used Eclipse for development at my current place of employment for years. I recently tried the JetBrains product and loved it, so I started pitching to my bosses that this will improve productivity blah blah blah. I can still do my job without it, and pitched it 2 months ago and have still not gotten approval (but haven't got said no to either) and it's a good year money wise, so the upfront cost is nothing to us. Now I would have to do this annually, even during down years? It's easier just to stick with Eclipse.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

If your company is that tight when it comes to developer tools, maybe you should consider alternate employment.

steven20124• 11 years ago

Frankly, I support this.

We need to pay more for software, not less. The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun. People only want to pay $0.99 for a program that took months of man-hours to write. $5.99? Fuck it, that's too expensive!

IntelliJ is magic to me. It's a wonderful piece of software, and I generally do not like Java. But it has transformed the entire experience.

Companies like JetBrains needs to be incentivized to write this kind of software, and innovate on it. They're not going to if they have leeches that use the free version in perpetuity. And if they change to a subscription model, then good for them.

If you use IntelliJ in a professional context, and you make a decent wage, a large part of it is because of IntelliJ, so you should pay up. $200/year is nothing compared to other things people spend money on like Starbucks, DirecTV, gas, etc.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun.

This isn't Freemium. This is the equivalent of Buy-To-Play. You are paying for the product. Paying quote a lot, in fact.

And unlike an MMO, there's no servers to run, just possible bugfix updates.

steven20124• 11 years ago

If software developers expect to be paid well for their talents, the cost of software has to increase.

And it's not just bugfix updates, it's new features and innovations.

qyv• 11 years ago

This. This whole thread is people saying how great IntelliJ is, but damn them for changing their prices. I can't believe how short sighted people can be when confronted with even the smallest change. Jetbrains needs to make money both to stay in business and to continue to innovate with their products, that is a fact. Prices on things go up over time, why should software be excempt? Would it be better if they put in ads and sold your personal data to pay for it? With constant uproar or using the consumer as the product you would think that folks would relish supporting a software company with their dollars instead.

Besides, this pales in comparison to a yearly MSDN license and that new fancy macbook every couple years, or even that morning starbucks fix.

tobltobs7• 11 years ago

Most wouldn't mind a price hike. But the outlook that in a few years the tool I rely on for my projects will not work anymore is unacceptable for most developers.

mgolawala• 11 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. Yes it is a price hike.. At the amount of money software developers make annually, $240 annually is peanuts. Especially since it will be pretax for the company (or the self employed individual). Jet brains offers free community editions and hasn't indicated that it will stop doing so. Use that if you cannot afford the $240. Or just get the one product you are interested in for half the price. Think of the productivity improvement you get and decide if it justifies the price.

I think this is a tremendous deal for polyglot or multi platform developers and a mild price hike for specialist programmers. If you think the new price isn't worth the software, don't get it. I think it is.. in fact I think the kitchen sink license is worth a lot more than the $240 they are charging frankly.

benologist• 11 years ago

Programming gets easier and more accessible every year. Here's some other industries that wished their skills were worth more even as they became generic or commoditized:

- scribes

- blacksmiths

- http://www.sfgate.com/jobs/slideshow/14-jobs-that-don-t-exis...

wellpast• 11 years ago

JetBrains makes an astoundingly great product in IntelliJ -- so many features and integrations that just simply work. It is so rare to find a product this sophisticated yet elegant and reliable. I want more companies and products to figure out how to deliver software like this, with the same quality and power as IntelliJ. Then maybe I'll start complaining about pricing models, etc.

killface2• 11 years ago

Yeah, if you didn't see this coming, you haven't been keeping up. Their yearly upgrades? It's no coincidence that intellij 14 came out in 2014, 13 in 2013...

If you have kept up versions as I have, it's practically no different. If this means we get features sooner rather than waiting for a whole major version upgrade, I'm happy.

Yes, Adobe had a big clusterfuck when they did it, but you know who hasn't had as big of one? Microsoft Office. I subscribe to their office 365. 10 bucks a month for 5 computers, the whole office suite. I'll happily pay that.

And besides, there's always the community edition if for some reason your 120k/yr job doesn't let you afford 100 bucks per year...

People just have a meltdown anytime anything changes... chill the fuck out for a few minutes and let's see what happens.

gfodor• 11 years ago

There sure is a lot of complaining in this thread. But guess what: JetBrains makes the best tools in town, and the new pricing model is totally reasonable (and even beneficial for many folks.)

So, most people writing long screeds are just going to pony up and forget about it in a few months.

tobltobs7• 11 years ago

Basic risk management will forbid to just pony up.

ljw1001• 11 years ago

No company that believes in what they're doing announces a major change on a Friday, before a major US holiday. That's what you do when you want the reaction to die quickly.

andrewstuart2• 11 years ago

What an incredible whinge and whine.

Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool?

Often while I'm using PyCharm I'm awed by how powerful it is and amazed that JetBrains has the resources, time, brainpower and money to write it. And that's not worth a few bucks? Sheesh.

Seriously, it's a trivial amount of money and if you or your company can't afford it then you like this should go and use free alternatives.

Loving the tool enough to use it but hating on a company enough to declare it's lost all its customer loyalty makes my blood boil.

Also, how does this guy elevate himself to the all-knowing position to declare from his personal opinion how much customer loyalty JetBrains has actually lost?

I want the companies who make great software to make money and keep doing it.

This guy should just go use a different product that he doesn't have to pay for. It's not necessary to trash JetBrains on your way out the door.

infecto• 11 years ago

I do not like the idea of paying a monthly fee BUT I do buy the license annually so its not a huge difference to me. If this keeps JetBrains in business its fine with me. This is such an insignificant cost for a tool that I use all day, every day.

tomc1985• 11 years ago

I do too, but many of us hate the subscription model. To go from having a certain level of autonomy to feeling like little more than a peasant in JetBrain's little software fiefdom...

That is the problem with these models. Perpetual licensing grants the user independence... subscription licensing holds your tools hostage unless you pay up. $25 for adobe here, $20 for jetbrains there, pretty soon $20 for windows, $20 for office, $20 here $20 there $20 everywhere... it adds up. Maybe all of these companies will stay in business... if the software was sufficiently popular. If not, then POOF

It didn't used to be that way. It doesn't have to be this way. Some of us prefer to pay once.

That said, JetBrain's previous model was pretty shitty too... if you wanted to sit out a couple months and wait for the next version before renewing your license, those fuckers would backdate your purchase so it began on the last day of your previous license. Jerks...

balabaster8• 11 years ago

Moving to a subscription model for 1 thing is okay, perhaps 2, or even 3. But with every company gradually moving to subscription models, it is emptying out our wallets every month and removing more and more of our income to maintain the status quo.

From my own perspective, and I know this doesn't apply to all, but I cannot imagine I'm the only person with this viewpoint, I'm sick of other developers saying things like: "You know what? For the amount developers earn, $X is a small price to pay." You're right, $X for a single piece of software is a small price. But when you add the cost of your MSDN license here, your JetBrains license there, your Xamarin university/license, O'Reilly Safari License, PluralSight license, Apple Developer License, the Mac required to compile/publish for iOS and countless other licenses, software and hardware purchases to do our jobs - all of which are gradually moving towards month-by-month subscription models with excessively large combined annual overheads, it cuts more and more into your budget... and not to forget that the income you make doesn't just pay for an ever revolving cycle of tools to maintain your competitiveness as these arguments seem to forget [unless you're still living in Mom's basement and all your income is expendable or can feed the endless software-as-a-service lifestyle]. It's also used to ensure that your kids get a good education so they can make their own valuable contributions to society; that you're able to live comfortably and not worry about where your next meal is coming from; that your family is safe and secure and well prepared for the unexpected; medical plans; retirement plans; mortgage; vehicle payments; the list goes on... all of which costs money - every month!

I'm growing tired of companies feeling like they can reach into my pocket month after month and take every spare penny for "services rendered." At what point will people turn around and say "Enough's enough! My money is mine!" I'm happy to buy products when they move me forward, but I hate paying monthly subscriptions on the off chance that you're going to provide an update that may [but probably won't] benefit me in the longer term.

As a company providing software, I'm not purchasing you as a service. I'm purchasing your product. When I work for a company that pays me every month, I'm selling myself to them as a service - to do their bidding and write the code they want. If I'm to pay for you as a service, then the money I'm paying you had better be providing what I need to do my job more effectively, just like if I pay a cleaner to come clean the house, I'm not paying for them to develop makeup products that benefit their other clients while I don't wear makeup. I want the option of buying the product that does help me do my job more effectively and then I'll hold on to the rest of my money and allocate it where that is the case.

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

If you don't like it, take your ball and go home.

nilliams2• 11 years ago

So would you rather pay a one-off fee for a JetBrains product and have no maintenance and support for it?

And by that I mean not even access to their public forums and for their devs to stop posting on Stack Overflow. Because that's the reality for most one-off purchase products. You'll get minimal over-the-phone customer support if you're lucky.

Not sure why you see it as a product that doesn't fit a subscription model. These devs have to constantly put in a ton of work to support this kind of product.

And like other comments have pointed out, if you don't see the value, there ARE free alternatives. It's your call. Ultimately if JetBrains have in fact got this offering wrong then customers will say no and JetBrains will lose out.

andrewstuart2• 11 years ago

The business plan that you or your company wrote probably includes "Pricing plan: subscription, revenue bazillions!"

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

I'm with you. It especially bugs the hell out of me to see this attitude coming from other software developers. I've never complained about having to pay for someone else's software, because I really hope other people will see fit to not complain and buy mine. This is our livelihood here. We can't all be independently wealthy open-source developers.

simoncion8• 11 years ago

Read the cogent comments more closely. Folks aren't concerned about the cost of the software. They're concerned about the built-in killswitch. Most folks in the thread will pay 2->4x more than they are paying now for a perpetual license to a particular version of the software. They're also more than happy to pay that same amount for future versions of the software, but on a schedule that they dictate.

If you're considering making a tool a critical part of how you do business, you need to be able to rely on it forever.

If you rent that tool -and don't have a rock-solid contract with stiff penalties- the lessor may chose to suddenly discontinue, or dramatically raise the price of that tool. Or their company may suddenly go under, taking access to all of your rented software with it. In any of those situations, you'll be left scrambling to find a replacement for something that once was a critical part of your business.

throwaway_xgqtr2• 11 years ago

Few, if any, people are complaining about paying money for the tool. I don't know where comments like this are coming from.

What I, and most, are complaining about is the fact that they are turning their offerings into "rental only" software (a disturbing trend in the industry).

I have no problems paying JetBrains, and I do, every year, even for duplicate product offerings whose functionality is included in the main IntelliJ product because I love them so much.

I have a problem with rental only software that will stop working the second I stop paying you. I will no longer be a JetBrains customer if they do not bring back a perpetual license offering, and I have told them so.

See my other comment [1] for why customers are allowed to complain.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170759

wonkaWonka• 11 years ago

This isn't about paying money (we'll pay the money), this is about whether the software will just curl up and suddenly die on you, while you're on the hook to meet a deadline where minutes count.

nilliams2• 11 years ago

I really doubt that JetBrains will allow your IDE to just stop working without any advance warning.

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

What an incredible whinge and whine.

What a bullshit way to start your own complaint. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people complaining about this.

Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool?

It's not about the money, it's about the principle. Poor people rent things. That's how they stay poor. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and couldn't go buy some eggs from the supermarket until you joined their club for 100$ a month? You'd go to another supermarket. What if you couldn't buy a car, only lease one?

Loving the tool enough to use it but hating on a company enough to declare it's lost all its customer loyalty makes my blood boil.

Have you ever heard the saying "You have to love someone before you hate them?" Does that saying also make your blood boil?

Also, how does this guy elevate himself to the all-knowing position to declare from his personal opinion how much customer loyalty JetBrains has actually lost?

Because he's talking about himself and his own loyalty to the company?

I want the companies who make great software to make money and keep doing it.

OK. But if people disagree with the pricing model and it drives away customers, that's not going to work either and no amount of your own whining is going to stop that.

This guy should just go use a different product that he doesn't have to pay for.

Yeah it's a good solution. I think that's what he said he'd do in the last paragraph. Many of the comments here and on his blog echoed the same thing saying that they'd use Eclipse or NetBeans instead.

prodmerc• 11 years ago

It's not about the money, it's about the principle. Poor people rent things. That's how they stay poor. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and couldn't go buy some eggs from the supermarket until you joined their club for 100$ a month? You'd go to another supermarket. What if you couldn't buy a car, only lease one?

Wow, you've just explained so well why I feel uneasy about all this switching to subscription payments for locally install-able software.

I mean, there isn't that much change, and it's even cheaper upfront, but... there's something about it. Not being able to own the stuff you're using every day (and depend on) is that it. It just kinda feels that you're owned instead.

whaaaaaaat• 11 years ago

How would you feel if you woke up one morning and couldn't go buy some eggs from the supermarket until you joined their club for 100$ a month?

Sounds like the local co-op; turns out they sell better products and generally provide a better shopping experience...

But if people disagree with the pricing model and it drives away customers

If you change a pricing model (and it's not cheaper) you'll get a ton of complaints no matter what you do. Their model will work fine.

ybrs• 11 years ago

I think if you cant pay for 20$ s a month for your fav tool that you use to earn money, maybe switching jobs might be a better option

eweise• 11 years ago

Bummer. Been using Intellij for almost a decade. Will give Eclipse another try.

crimsonalucard• 11 years ago

I know exactly why this is happening. It's the same for adobe: cracks and hacks.

The keygen for jetbrains currently unlocks ultimate mode on all products for 100 years. It's not hard for your average script kiddie to find.

jim_greco• 11 years ago

Jetbrains charges way too little for such a ridiculously good product.

trevorg75• 11 years ago

Here's the rub (and the danger of SAAS). This falls into some heavy psychology so: tl;dr you're a human being, you're going to choose what you think is a deal but you aren't going to jump through the hoops to get it, you're going to be screwed.

Here's the science: So taking a simple example. Joe is a damned fine php/javascript developer. He is in a decent demand as a private contractor. Joe LOVES Jetbrains' tools. He uses youtrack to keep his work in line, he uses PHPStorm as his php ide and WebStorm for his javascript and has TeamCity handling CI.

He gets the news that this is coming in and sees the fanfare and the pricetag and is like "wow! way to go jetbrains! $19.90 a month for ALL of your tools or $199 a year?! I mean that's only slightly more than what I'm paying now for my renewals at the yearly rate and I'd get all of their tools...." but Joe doesn't have time to look into it Joe is a busy contractor, work is coming in fast and furious now and besides, his current license doesn't expire until March. Nothing to see here.

Well winter comes and work slows down as it does during the holidays, except this year it doesn't pick up in the spring. It's dead slow. It's the end of February and Joe's considering getting well...a "Joe Job" when the phone rings and it's a client with a fat contract to put him back on track. But the project needs PHP version 5.whatever-the-hell-the-new-hotness-is and PHPStorm only supports up to 5.old-and-busted. Time to download the updates! Oh crap, his license is expired. Wait didn't he see something a while back about nw licensing options. He certainly doesn't have the $178 dollars it's gonna cost him to upgrade PHPStorm and WebStorm right now and he REALLY needs it to do this project that's going to get him back on track. So he checks the pricing. Hrmmm $24.90.....wasn't it $19.90 when I looked before. Oh, it was a promotional. Damn. Joe doesn't have $24.90 either, maybe he can just buy the updates for the products he uses. Oh look it's only $9.90 for phpstorm and $9.90 for webstorm for the month...oh wow but together it's MORE than he used to pay for his renewals! What's going on JetBrains?! He used to only pay $178 a year to renew both products but now it's $198. Well that's a no go. So Joe decides to do the month to month thing and when the check clears from this job he'll just update to the full year! So 20 bucks and a couple downloads later Joe is in business. Wow this new version is great! The Jetbrains devs still have their stuff together even if their business people don't. He knocks the project out of the park. Well a month passes and Joe sees another ding on his credit card for jetbrains....oh yeah he should switch that subscription. He'll get to it later. Well a year goes buy. Another winter and another slow spring and another big project to bail Joe out. Only this time Joe doesn't have the 20 bucks to renew that month. Well no big deal Joe can just fire it up and use the old version he doesn't need the latest and greatest. Except, Joe can't. The subscription has expired and so has the tool. And so like a shallow friend when the money ran out so did Jetbrains and left Joe without the tools he needs. All told over the year, Joe spent $237 dollars on a product he used to spend only $178 and had nothing to show for it.

I realize there are some things Joe could have done better, bad business practice etc. but this could very well happen and does all to often. Sure there are alternatives but the goal of a good business isn't supposed to be to force you into the arms of an alternative...you might get comfortable there.

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

To analogize this, imagine the perfectly cromulent subscription model of printed magazine delivery. You pay $X, and they mail you a new wad of glossy paper every month. If you don't pay $X, you just don't get new magazines. You can still read all the old ones. Remember National Geographic? Remember how your grandfather kept huge stacks of them that were all only an awkward elbow away of toppling onto the floor? Presuming you could locate it in the stacks, you could re-read the article about Elbonian mud-rakers as often as you pleased.

If you subscribed to JetBrains's magazine, you pay $X, and every month they give you a new magazine, and take back the previous month's issue. If you stop paying, they would come to your house, confiscate your latest issue, and then search the premises to make sure you weren't keeping any older issues, or any photographs or copies of them. If you want to read something, it'll just have to be something else, like RMS's free gnewsletter.

What JetBrains is doing is not switching to a subscription model. They are switching to a DRM-enforced rental model.

Subscriptions are ideal from products that are consumable or otherwise ephemeral. Television shows or newspapers or foods or coupons or pharmaceutical drugs work for that. Things that are used once and discarded are perfect for subscriptions.

Rental is good for things that have a low marginal benefit in comparison to their upfront costs, such that it takes a long time to recover that initial investment. You rent a hotel room for a night or two. You rent a car when you fly to another city. You rent a pneumatic excavator when you only have one hole to dig. You rent things that you do not intend to use enough to justify paying their purchase price.

With respect to a tool of the trade--something you buy to help you make more money--you emphatically want to own that, rather than just rent it. That's a great argument for using open-source IDEs. Even the previous model was just a perpetual license with a limited-time upgrade option. The person who wants you to forever rent the tools of your own trade is not doing so with your own best interests in mind.

adaml_623• 11 years ago

So if JetBrains goes bankrupt and the license servers go down then we all have a month to sort out a new IDE

xirdstl• 11 years ago

I really love JetBrains software and use IntelliJ daily, and this initially had me really annoyed.

However, after looking at the detail, I'm intrigued. I have a personal IntelliJ license that's a couple versions old, and an even older AppCode license. For $149/year I can get the latest of all of the products. Do I need them all? Maybe not, but I want them!

I for one will strongly consider that subscription, even if I wish I still had the option to buy a perpetual license.

cam-• 11 years ago

Intellij is one of the few IDEs that it is worth paying for.

studentrob• 11 years ago

I'd love to see a sentiment breakdown of % of usernames in this thread who agree vs. disagree on this basic issue. Does a tool exposing this exist?

JeremyMorgan• 11 years ago

Meh, $19 a month for all their products sounds like a steal to me. I currently use many of their products and upgrade every year so this actually saves me money.

hbt• 11 years ago

Intellij has no choice but to do this. Otherwise they lose revenue.

They have mature software products and people are not going to renew the license every year for a minor update. Most of their products are so mature that you can buy them once and never look back.

So how do they make up for this one time sale? Switch to a subscription model and convince users it's in their best interest.

Frankly, I don't care about paying money every month; IntelliJ is worth the price. However, I never update software unless there is a major bug or major features. Updating software is always a gamble and if you customize it, it often requires additional work (deprecated plugins, invalid keymap, new bugs etc.)

I hope they get this right and find the right business model to stay afloat without ruining the relationship they have with their customers.

bluebeard13• 11 years ago

Yeah, really bad....b4, we had a choice of when we would upgrade, if it's worth it, was there enough innvovation, etc. now, 'you' are forced to keep paying for upgrades, even if you don't need them right away, or want to just skip one. Sucks really bad...As a longtime user 10+years, I'm out...ransom does not play well with me.

rpwverheij• 11 years ago

I'm an indy developer who travels & works at various places in the world. I'm often working a place deep in the jungle, where there is some electricity but no internet. Not being able to work if I don't connect to the internet within 30 days will indeed decrease my happiness with JetBrains big time :(

profinger• 11 years ago

I hate this model in general just because I can't just pay a larger amount once and have it forever.

Aside from that, this reinforces my coding minimalism. I don't have a need for all of these weird extra things that just make "life easier" about 5% of the time while screwing with normal typing 95% of the time (in my case at least). I am perfectly happy with standard visual studio and notepad for anything that isn't .net.

gjvc• 11 years ago

It is astounding to watch a company shoot itself in the head so publicly.

nadgob• 11 years ago

I'm one of those who really loves IntelliJ and helped introduce it in our company. What happens now? One pays more and owns nothing.

payingCustomers--

How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

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