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You raise some good points, and having built multiple tools and a business that failed, I'm well aware of the tradeoffs between the cost to build and maintain vs. potential revenue growth. However, I'm confused by, "If social-sign-in is too much of a barrier..." Nowhere in my comment is that what I was bugged by. I've signed up for plenty of random services with disposable emails (or, sometimes, even less-disposable ones). As for the barrier to entry, I've worked with plenty of tools / libraries that took me hours to potentially get up and running, so again, not a barrier-to-entry problem. I find your opinion on "not requiring sign-in" pointing to trivial apps baffling. A quick "dnf list installed | wc -l" shows that I have over 5000 installed packages. While many of those are libraries, I have everything from IDEs, Browsers, CAD applications, software ecosystems, tools (both visualization and otherwise), and more. Sign in simply tells me that when you shut down the service or change it in some way that breaks everything and makes it worse in a few years, that I have no real recourse. As for a lot of "hosted" services, I'm personally weird because I have a homelab and like doing a lot of self-hosted stuff, both as a hobby and for my own privacy reasons. This means that a lot of the "We're hosting it _for_ you!" arguments don't hold water for me, and frequently don't feel like the right fit for the product, instead being driven by business. But I also get the need to _have_ a business at all - the competition is brutal. As an example, when MS is willing to devote an incredible amount of resources towards building an "open source" IDE and an incredible number of people are willing to build free (beer & speech) plugins on top of it, how do you even begin to compete? I've seen a lot less mention of Sublime text in the last few years and everyone and their mother seems to be using VSCode. So, to go back to the pricing, right now I'm not sure. This feels like the ~$100 / year for a personal license project. If it was $10 / month, that's probably worth trying out for at least a single month and seeing if it does have the expected value. As others have alluded to, since this is a standalone tool, that means there is friction for using it alongside / outside of your IDE. Is it valuable enough to overcome that and remember to alt-tab over to it or keep it surfaced among a hundred other windows and tabs? Maybe! |