[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.