I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want.<p>For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they&#x27;ll never need to bug their managers to buy the new version, or suffer on years-old versions because of corporate inertia. That&#x27;s a big win.