You DO know that apart from a programmer and a helper sales guy, ST has none of all those other &quot;roles&quot;.<p>And judging from the community size, polls, and similar numbers from other project, it has sold at least 10.000 licenses (x70 -&gt; 700,000) and i all probability much more.<p>&gt;<i>The result of this analysis is the current market. The only way to develop a text editor is either all volunteers (like Atom), a small part of a large corporation&#x27;s marketing budget (VSCode), or a labor of love from one and a half underfunded and overworked people who we somehow expect to stop being underfunded and overworked even though we only paid them like half a billable hour several years ago (ST).</i><p>Maybe it&#x27;s the analysis that&#x27;s way off base, especially the dev numbers.<p>In fact the whole breakdown sounds ludicrous, like assuming the only dev work out there is done in cushy Facebook style jobs in the Valley or with extravagant VC money.<p>In fact tons of successful indie apps, not just editors, fly in the face of all you wrote above. No reason to believe a graphics editor (e.g. Acorn) or VST plugin (e.g. uHe Diva) or FTP Editor (e.g. Transmit) has much more potential users than a language&#x2F;OS agnostic programming editor. And yet, all these companies exist for years, and even have several employees and nice offices.<p>As for editors, there&#x27;s not only IntelliJ, that has tons of people working for it and is doing just fine, but other long time companies, like UltraEdit (that boasts 2 million users), a whole ecosystem around paid Eclipse plugins, etc.