Don't forget there are a couple hundred countries besides US. I make a relatively decent living by our standards, but nowhere near close to $100k/year. $150-250 per year is quite a bit of money for us.
It should be possible for a small devtools company to price differently based on locale, but I expect the support costs would then dominate any of the lower prices customers.
I think the core point missed in this thread is: developers write software for a living. They do not want to pay for something they would love someone to pay them to write.
You see this in other professions. A car mechanic doesn't want to take there car to someone else. A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors. A realitor will sell their own house. A grass cutter doesn't hire someone to cut his lawn. The person who makes lawnmowers doesn't buy one he makes one even if it takes longer.
I would love for someone to pay me to write an IDE. I've been in that situation a couple of times in the past (SQLWindows, Visual Basic) and it was a lot of fun.
However, my current job is developing a voice response system for restaurant drive-thrus. I don't have time to write my own IDE right now!
So I farm that out to JetBrains and get to use all of their awesome work for less than fifty cents a day.
If that's too much, their free versions are very good too.
I may also take exception to this:
> A doctor tries to avoid general checkups with other doctors.
Wouldn't the opposite be true? As far as I know, every psychiatrist has a psychiatrist, every counselor has a counselor (or should), and I would guess that every doctor has a doctor.
A doctor is more likely than the rest of us to have particular insight into their own health, but I don't think they try to do it all alone.
Of course I'm only speaking for myself. If anyone prefers to write all their own tools, more power to them!
> Then there is this saying that if a lawyer represents himself in a court, he has a fool for a customer
Also making the reverse assertion true too: that client has a fool for a lawyer :-)
Of course, many unsuspecting non-lawyer clients also have fools for lawyers; it's hard to tell whether or not your lawyer is any good (unless his name is Saul Goodman)
$250 (the initial all-you-can-gobble) is a day's wages or less for anybody making more than $62500 (post-tax) per annum, which at least in the US is not a lot at all.
That $250 isn't (generally) tax-deductible. At the moment, I'm making ~€80k as a SWE in Belgium (reasonably good pay but not the highest), and my net income is closer to €150/day. At the top of my career, I expect that I could increase that to at most €200/day because taxation is brutal.
This is not to say that I don't pay for tools; I subscribe to the full Jetbrains set among other things. It's just that that wasn't as simple of a decision as you present it.
Is it not in Belgium? In Germany you can count this as 'Werbungskosten' which you can deduct from your income. Anything you use for your job or for professional development counts as this type of expense. Don't other countries have similar concepts in their tax systems?
I guess you proved the original point of this thread.