[mimixco]

Depends on what you call tooling. Aren't all the SaaS services needed for modern dev part of tooling? Most companies pay for that stuff. Could be Digital Ocean, GitHub, Auth0, Chargify... To me, those are all dev tools because they do stuff I don't have to do manually, just like an IDE is a dev tool that's more powerful than notepad. They're not standalone services because they don't do anything without me configuring them. And they're really only useful for devs, not anyone else.

Digital Ocean is, to me, a great dev toolbox and keeps me from wasting time setting up machines, IPs, etc. We gladly pay for it. Even tools like Notion are really dev tools just deployed as SaaS.

I think dev tooling has just moved into SaaS and probably gotten more profitable, if anything.