[voidfunc]

When developers who usually make 6 figures of money complain about $90/yr IDE price I just cannot help laugh. Actually it's even better... the price elevators down from $90 -> year2 90 - 20% -> year3 90 - 40%.

Over three years that's like $150-$200 total and it will save you so many headaches. But that's a steep price? Are you kidding? Why do developers hate tools that cost money when they save them time and allow them to do more?

[kstenerud]

Sorry, no. I have JetBrains and have since stopped using it for go development. It's too slow, too buggy, and lacks the ecosystem that VS code has. I still use it for Java because the rest are even worse

A language that depends too much on IDE integration for usability is a real problem, because now you have tool fragmentation as everyone goes different routes with varying levels of success to fix the deficiencies in your language. In the end you end up rolling your own tools as I have done, which is the absolute WORST of all worlds.

Go was supposed to be simple, but all it succeeded in doing is shifting the complexity elsewhere and calling mission accomplished. When you're designing a language, it's VERY important to understand the difference between the emergent complexity of the domain, and the inherent complexity of your design. The latter can be fixed, the former can only be managed - in ways that are already well researched (or just swept under the rug, as go has done).

Too much magic and too much "clever" re-purposing of existing paradigms (file names, capitalization, implicit contracts, etc) makes for an infuriatingly bad design.

[szundi]

While I am getting your points, but IDE support is an incentive to use a language in my eyes.

[kstenerud]

I'm not complaining about IDE support. IDE support is great!

IDE dependence is not.

[srer]

Pretty simple for me:

I like working with Free and Open software much more than proprietary software. I think it's important for society, and I have more fun that way too!

Also the payoff for me has been very good, I can learn emacs once and enjoy using it for the rest of my life for all significant written language tasks on a computer.

Perhaps I could be a little more efficient if I were using a jetbrains IDE, but then I wouldn't like what I was doing as much. Enjoying what I do, even if it may look slightly contrived to others, is important in me achieving results at work.

[marwis]

Most of JetBrains platform is open source (Apache license). Only the language plugin is proprietary.

It's not perfect but better than your typical closed source software.

[foepys]

This argument is not convincing to me, especially considering JetBrains publishes their IDE base as open source.

Everytime I have to use VSC to develop typescript and angular, I am having problems with finding definitions (works 30% of the time), code search (it takes longer due to the constricted interface), git operations (want to do more than a simple pull and push? good luck), and much more. WebStorm on the other hand has a lot less bugs, a more flexible interface, and more features. I am glad that people make an effort to make an IDE instead of an editor with IDE-style features and I'll gladly pay a very small amount of my salary to them.

Every workshop has higher costs than a software developer. Imagine a car mechanic propping up a car with 2 by 4 because they use what's available for free. No, they buy their $30,000 lift because they need it to get their work done quicker.

[lelanthran]

> Every workshop has higher costs than a software developer. Imagine a car mechanic propping up a car with 2 by 4 because they use what's available for free. No, they buy their $30,000 lift because they need it to get their work done quicker.

This is a far from convincing argument. Jetbrains IDEs are not the equivalent of a professional lift and the competing (often free) products are not the equivalent of a 2x4.

Is Jetbrains good? Well, I've used it for Java and was pretty impressed.

Is it $199/year[1] better than the free stuff? Well many people don't think so. It's fine if you only every use a single stack, but most of us use multiple languages and multiple stacks, now you're looking at $649/year (see link below) for all tools. Considering that my current personal development computer cost less than that years ago, is it now wonder that the price is considered too much?

I think the problem is that developers are looking at the Jetbrains products and comparing it to the value they get from other development purchases.

Compare:

A single $1k computer will last for many years, do every single development task needed to make money, be used for entertainment, and write all the actual software that will be sold. When it is too slow for dev (in a decade from now), it'll be repurposed for something else.

A single annual payment of $649 to JB results in a tiny increase in dev speed, which will disappear at the end of the year anyway. It won't make the code more robust, it won't help solve business problems any faster, it will only make code navigation faster.

For a dev, look what $1000 buys, and then look at JB for $650, and it doesn't look like all that good value for money anymore.

[1] the cost for Goland at https://www.jetbrains.com/go/buy/#commercial

[hurflmurfl]

Just wanted to note that if you're talking about "personal development computer" and "developers loooking ... and comparing", then it's more like an "individual" license as opposed to the commercial one, which is meant to be evaluated by companies.

The individual-license pack for all of their IDEs would set you back $250 as opposed to $650 commercial license.

I used to use "IDEA Ultimate", which is 30% cheaper than the All-Pack and supports installation of most of the other language plugins, allowing me to use a single IDE for everything. Nowadays I'm using separate IDEs as that seems to work faster.

I personally find the price worth it, as even a simple "expand selection scope" operation which I use many times per day just doesn't feel right in VS Code.

[foepys]

JetBrains' All-Products Pack costs me only 150€/year + VAT (250€ individual license minus 40% for subscribing for 3+ years) which is also fully tax deductible. In the end it costs me less than my cinema budget for a year of top notch products with proper support and bug fixing where I don't have to wait months for an answer.

I stand by my 2 by 4 comment because they get the work done, just slower and more awkward. It's always super amusing how software developers with one of the highest salaries around the world (yes, even in poorer regions) complain about costs when other jobs require tens of thousands in initial investment.

[KronisLV]

As others have pointed out, you probably meant to link the all tools pack for personal use to make a comparison against: https://www.jetbrains.com/go/buy/#personal?billing=yearly

Currently that shows a cost of 250 euros per year, or about 20 euros per month (excluding VAT which varies).

For most developers, that is indeed a relatively small amount (even I opted for the ultimate package, despite earning in the low 2 figures in Latvia), whereas the 650 euros for commercial licenses would be doable for any organization that cares about their developers' experience.

All of that is excluding their loyalty discounts, programs for students and non-profits, startups etc.: https://www.jetbrains.com/go/buy/#discounts?billing=yearly

Personally, whenever I see commercial software or a SaaS/PaaS/IaaS solution, I'm tempted to throw a brick through someone's window (figuratively) because those are likely to result in unreasonable amounts of vendor lock (especially with cloud services around Kubernetes management), but personally I haven't found a better IDE than what JetBrains offer.

For Java, all of the alternatives are worse: Eclipse is buggy and crashes (though some swear by its incremental compiler and integrations), NetBeans is kind of dated and struggles with projects that have 4000+ source files (though it's cool that Apache keeps it alive and there's the whole module enable/disable functionality and their VisualVM integration is great).

For .NET, Rider is easily up there with Visual Studio, even when you're doing something more niche, like working with the Unity game engine (the performance hints are nice), or just working on .NET apps.

For PHP, Ruby, Go, Python and other languages their tools feel competent and oftentimes suggest you whatever it is that you might want to do, be it setting up your runtimes properly, your dependency management systems, install all of the dependencies, import the project config/launch profiles etc.

For Node/JavaScript I have never found a good IDE, but maybe that's because the language is sometimes a mess to work with - e.g. getting only some very basic completion in some garbage 3000 line AngularJS controller because even the IDE has no idea what the hell is going on there, or having Vue 3 use the <script> tag for adding code imports, instead of detecting that i'd like to use <script setup> but then again, they're pretty speedy with updates and if you don't do anything too crazy with projects, then it should be good.

I don't have much experience with their C/C++ offerings, or their lightweight text editor (Fleet) or the likes of DataSpell, though their DB management offering, DataGrip is pretty okay too! Though you can also configure the individual IDEs like IntelliJ to show up hints for most decent frameworks.

[mathverse]

Sure I also like to use emacs since it stood the test of the time but the point was not proprietary is better but unwillingness to support companies that sell products.

If we refuse to buy products then we end up with companies offering just services with vendor lock in. Well...we already sort of ended up in such world.

[faitswulff]

I would be more supportive of this message if it was a $90 LSP server that you could support by buying (a la intelephense), but software developers are very opinionated about their editors and not everyone wants to use IntelliJ products.

[xigoi]

Professional developers in the USA usually make 6 figures.

[sriram_malhar]

Musicians and carpenters make far less than programmers, but they still buy their tools. Software people are too entitled. Even if you are not professional, you can still afford 54c a day ($200 a year). Even a programmer in India can.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Many junior developers in my city make around $300 a month. After spending $200 on rent and most of the rest on food, you're not left with much. I understand nobody really cares about crap-holes like mine when they're making most of their money in Western Europe and North America, so just throwing it out there.

[pjmlp]

As highschool student in 80's Portugal, 10 years after 40 years dictatorship and colonial war were behind us, when software was sold as bootleg copies on bazaars, I saved enough money to eventually buy Turbo Pascal for students at 30 000 escudos.

As I wanted the real deal and not a bunch of no name floppies with copied manuals.

That would be around 150 euros, without taking into account the inflation to modern days.

And to place the price in perspective, it was a third of the minimum wage, while the overall cost of my PC took 5 years for my parents to pay back to the bank.

[cosmodisk]

Fair enough, but what's the revenue per dev in your org then? Surely it's a bit more than $300/months.

[smeagull]

I'm not paying that much for an editor that runs counter to my muscle memory, just so I can use a different programming language.

If a language requires some IDE to make it usable, then I put it in the same camp as Java: Hope the competition are using it.

[pjmlp]

No wonder FOSS languages are stuck in the pre-historic tooling.

[xigoi]

If “pre-historic” means “doesn't take several minutes to start and require 8GB of RAM”, I guess that's a good thing.

[pjmlp]

I wonder how Turbo Pascal IDE managed to fit into 640 KB....

[the_gipsy]

"IDE as tool for everything" is what's prehistoric, at this point.

[pjmlp]

Sure, some people enjoy being stuck with workflows born out of phosphor terminals.

[fomine3]

That's why I buy JetBrains all products pack. It supports many languages.

[KronisLV]

I'm tempted to ask what languages you're using and what has your best experience with them been like.

Because as messy as Java is, refactoring codebases in it that have been kept alive for close to a decade is surprisingly not madness-inducing (most of the time), at least in some of the sane frameworks. Apart from, you know, legacy projects basically killing your career in the long term.

I'm not sure what other language I'd feel comfortable with changing how some method works across 50 other places that call it and have the IDE do most of the heavy lifting.

Yes, I have Stockholm syndrome, probably. Yes, I'd prefer to retire to planting potatoes in a farm, rather than work with NullPointerExceptions.

[sangnoir]

How much would a carpenter pay for a fancy bench top for their workshop? I'm guessing not a lot, since they can make one themselves.

Programmers are toolmakers, and are therefore harsh critics of tools they use; just like a carpenter will tell you everything that's wrong with the design, and choice of wood that went into a pricey, but ultimately-affordable-to-a-carpenter bench top. Having access to cheaper, good-enough alternatives is part of it.

[sriram_malhar]

A carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw. A basic table saw costs $300ish.

I'm not writing my own IDE or my own database. I can, and I have, in times past. I do pay for tools that I need.

[sangnoir]

> A carpenter is not going to make his/her own table saw.

This is where the analogy breaks down, but they'd likely download a free one made by a consortium of other carpenters, which can be customized to their needs

> I do pay for tools that I need.

As have I: I was paying JetBrains yearly until they published plans to brick my IDE if I dared stopped sending them money. They walked this back after an uproar - but that episode showed me that I was also playing in their sandbox and subject to their every whim. I now default to using tools that can be forked at a moments notice (by myself or others)

Also, JetBrains IDEs were far ahead of the competition back then. For the tech stack and codebases I now work on (or perhaps additional experience?), none of the JetBrains IDEs are worth the effort. vim and a handful of plugins & scripts are adequate 95% of the times, VSCode takes me up to 98%, and it's diminishing returns beyond that

[makeitdouble]

This is an undue attack. We buy our computers and screens and keyboards, most of us are on commercial OS, we pay for SaaS at a non trivial price, and most of us also use additional personal apps that aren't free (including password managers, mail clients etc.). Those are actual tools for the trade.

Arguing we should also buy every Jetbrains product is like arguing carpenters should buy line drawing AR goggles. Perhaps some will see the value in it, but it's far from an noncontroversial POV. If you feel a tool as as much downsides than upsides in your workflow, you don't use it, whatever its price is.

[philliphaydon]

“I’ll pay $1000’s to get all setup and running with everything I need, including a bunch of stuff I don’t need, but not the last $90 for some productive software to make more money”

Yeah ok.

[lodovic]

Some people really like these tools, and that is OK. But not everyone has the same workflow. I personally get a JetBrains license from the project I work on - but I refuse to use it, as I find their tools pedantic, slow, and eating my computer's resources. Ymmv.

[philliphaydon]

Oh absolutely, if someone perfers emacs or vim, VS, VSCode, some JetBrains IDE. Punch cards.

Whatever makes them happy and productive, that's great. I've seen people use Vim and its crazy how productive some people are with it.

My point is complaining about the price of some software like it's blocking them from doing anything. They spend all this money on all this hardware and software, but when it comes to development, oh it costs too much I don't want to pay $90 for something to earn money...

[makeitdouble]

Is this a JetBrains commercial account ? Am I at fault for not liking their product that much, and thus not paying them their apparently deserved yearly subscription ?

This feels pretty weird to be faulted for using other companies' products. And no, switching to Jetbrains' doesn't make me more money. Could be the reverse from my past trials.

[philliphaydon]

It's not about liking or not liking a product. You're complaining about pay for a product. If you like a product and its helpful why are you against paying for it?

[xigoi]

You forgot the additional $1000 for a computer powerful enough to run JetBrains.

[philliphaydon]

Sorry I meant to type $1000’s. Corrected it.

I ran JetBrains software on one of those 1.5ghz MacBook 12” and it was totally fine.

I don’t think it needs “powerful” hardware.

Not like visual studio. Now that’s a pain!

[philderbeast]

If you work for a company, in any field, and they don't supply the tools for you to do your job, they are doing them selves a disservice.

If you want your employees to be productive, you provide them tools to achieve that, otherwise you get what you pay for.

It's the Companies that are acting entitled in this situation, not the workers.

[einpoklum]

1. A Musician has one tool. Ok, maybe a note-stand etc. But in software, there are thousands of "tools" you can buy.

2. Physical tools vs making copies of some bytes. No need to retread this here, but bottom line: Not comparable.

[sriram_malhar]

No semi-successful professional musician is so bare. Software engineers are not your average starving type of people (unless they are willingly doing intermittent fasting!)

[dizhn]

I wonder if anybody has 'one' guitar. I don't really know anyone who does.

[sam0x17]

We pay $3500 every 2 years to have up-to-date hardware

[sam0x17]

And if we try to re-sell our equipment to try to recoup some of that cost, best you can get is like 1/4th the original price typically by the time it's time to sell

[implying]

Putting fundamental features of the language behind a price barrier at all will keep students and people who want to experiment with the language out of the ecosystem. This isn't a papercut, it's an intentional omission that has backfired and can only be fixed by tooling. If the only way to access an often necessary feature is proprietary, why not make the whole language proprietary at that point?

[Nursie]

> students

https://www.jetbrains.com/community/education/#students

[thegeekpirate]

The language has a tool that does this, and every editor I can think of uses it (https://github.com/golang/tools/tree/master/cmd/guru), specifically implements.go if you're interested.

[yencabulator]

Guru has been replaced by gopls, using the common LSP protocol.

[bmitc]

What's even worse is getting companies to pay for this stuff. Getting a company to buy software to help you do your job is like pulling teeth.

[foolfoolz]

any company will let you expense a few hundred dollars for a tool you use literally every day many hours a day. if you’re having trouble they are not good to work for or you’re asking the wrong way

[KronisLV]

> if you’re having trouble they are not good to work for

That is true, but also in some places that is also the status quo: especially in countries where the developers don't get 6 figure salaries and don't create as much value to their respective companies.

[imaginaryNumb3r]

how is this not common sense

[Jistern]

I concur.

[philderbeast]

if a company wont pay for an IDE for there developers then I certainly won't be paying for it out of my pocket.

if they can't justify paying ~$100 for my ide of choice, then they are costing them selves far more in lost productivity, and that's not my problem.

[cvak]

IDEA is 650€/ year for our company.

Not saying Company should not pay that, but it's not $100

[sam0x17]

I dunno I've been in plenty of situations where a department head will literally beg me to buy things so they can reach the same budget spend as last year so their budget isn't slashed (DoD), and have seen the same situation in VC-backed startups looking to come up with tax write offs. Businesses for the most part love spending money and would rather do that than pay taxes, which is definitely a problem with corporate society these days.

[sokoloff]

No sane business wants to spend $100 to save $15-30 in taxes.

[sam0x17]

Tell that to Amazon or any FANG company that doesn't pay taxes because their clever use of writeoffs and "losses"

[sokoloff]

They're spending $100 to invest in the growth of their company, which is quite different from "love spending money" or "begging for something to buy" to reduce their taxes.

[zenlot]

In most cases you cannot use personal licence on a company hardware. JetBrains also have separation between individual licences and organization licences.

[fomine3]

JetBrains allows users to use personal license for work, but declines company to buy cheap personal license. I think this is good pricing. I agree that make company to buy license is annoying.

[bmitc]

I'm not talking about the distinction between free non-commercial and commercial licenses. I'm just talking in general that it's tough to get companies to purchase any software.

[dehrmann]

I'm shocked at how often I see software engineers not paying for Sublime Text. These are people who get paid to write software not paying for software.

[deltaonefour]

The use to pirate stuff all the time. Now it's actually more convenient for me to buy it.

But the philosophy I always had was that as long as there were enough people like you paying for software, I wouldn't have to.

[philliphaydon]

I think most people in the industry pirated software when they were students or just beginning. But now that we make money it’s easier to just buy it.

Friend of mine pirated photoshop when he was studying and after he finished and started his own business he started paying for it.

[cosmodisk]

Photoshop being easy to pirate was a feature for Apple: the uptake was absolutely insane across all possible levels and eventually nobody uses anything else. Same with Microsoft in 90s: when students asked Bill what he's planning to do with the whole China copying it, he replied that let them get used to it and we'll find a way to charge later.

[cosmodisk]

*a feature for Adobe, not Apple

[Fnoord]

All too often the proprietary piece of software sucks, including their price, but its still the best. For example Burp Suite.

[sam0x17]

I've looked at it before and I just don't get the appeal. UI doesn't feel sexy enough for me to spend 80% of my day in it.

[beebmam]

I think a tool like GitHub Copilot is worth far more than $90/year and I'll gladly pay for it. Probably up to $500/year or even $1000/year I'd pay for Copilot. It has saved me so much headache and time. There's no real competitor for that product and I'm looking forward to it going GA. I'd use emacs/vim and Copilot any day over an IDE.

But I'm not sure any IDE is worth $90/year when VS Code is free. The extensions for VS Code are next-level, especially the SSH extension. No other IDE comes remotely close to how well that extension works for its use case.

[Fnoord]

With VS Code, you pay with your privacy and your resources. These add up slowly and silently.

[AtlasBarfed]

Well, the companies won't buy it for them without wasting about 10x the cost in approval paperwork.

[sanderjd]

Not to mention how much the company paying their salary (who should be paying for their IDE) makes!

[prmoustache]

Regardless of the price jetbrains intellij based editors are so slow they are borderline unusable.