[loves_mangoes]

Taking away the option of perpetual licenses is an interesting business decision. Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription (which is a great incentive to keep people renewing!)

Historically, IDA Pro's sales and licensing has always been a bit of a headache for customers. I could understand that the OPEX model makes it easier for some companies to keep renewing.

That just goes to show that I'm not their target market. Even if IDA had a pay-what-you-want option, the 10-20 I'd be willing to pay per month while using a leaked version is clearly completely negligible compared to what they normally charge.

And I'm happy to just use Ghidra instead of bothering with an IDA leak, so I suspect this announcement might simplify things for their existing corp users, but it'll probably not do a great job of expanding the home userbase.

[dcminter]

JetBrains had a mis-step on the way to that model (but had the sense to listen to their customers): https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t...

[thaumasiotes]

> Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription

That happened after they announced the switch to a subscription model to overwhelmingly negative feedback.

[ygjb]

You do realize that is a win from a customer service and reputation perspective? Jetbrains listened to their customers, and amended their model. That is the kind of responsiveness I would appreciate in a vendor, especially if it's a vendor that produces tools that I enjoy using or help me make money.

Anyone who has worked on customer facing projects or tools know there is always overwhelmingly negative feedback to billing increases. What is less common is vendors being responsive to that in a way that is actually beneficial to customers. That is doubly the case when you are dealing with high quality, specialty tools that have free or open source competitors that are good enough to get by, but not great (Adobe suite vs various free and open tools, for example).

[skoskie]

Jetbrains is also just $5/mo for the one app I use, and I get a lot of functionality for that.