[jillesvangurp]

Selling tools to developers is just hard. You are competing with a lot of OSS tools that are constantly adapting and changing. Any good ideas quickly get picked up and replicated. So, most commercial tools have a limited shelf life in terms of utility. Which makes them mostly just nice to haves.

There's a secondary problem here that many developers are employed and don't typically have a personal tools budget. This narrows the market effectively to developers that are free lancing or the bosses of developers that are employees.

The team managers will scrutinize a lot of spending on this front and typically not have. a lot of budget for this. And there is no such thing as a personal tools budget for developers in most companies.

Freelancers mostly just use the same tools as the companies that pay them. Which is mostly free tools. Non free tools actually complicate getting freelancers because now you need to worry about getting licenses for your contractors as well. So, there's a bias towards keeping things simple here and just avoiding such tools.