&gt;  it&#x27;s hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life<p>I paid JetBrains $100, because their IDE is awesome, and worth every penny. $100 is probably worth more to me since I am third-worlder[1], I earn far less than 6 figures.<p>&gt;Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is<p>No - it wasn&#x27;t about the money for me; I was one of the very vocal critics about that[2]. The subscription was actually worked out cheaper per year! My complaint was that once you stopped paying subscriptions, your IDE would stop working (they have since backtracked). Previously, if your licence expired, you&#x27;d be left with a working IDE which you can no longer upgrade&#x2F;get updates for, but <i>working</i> nonetheless.<p>It also didn&#x27;t help that I felt personally betrayed by the decision after recommending JB to my colleagues and coworkers for years.<p>1. Middle class third-worlder, but $100 is a larger percentage of my income vs. first-wolrd<p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10171551" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10171551</a>