While it is indeed free, it comes with online activation and needs to be tied to a Live account (or whatever it&#x27;s called these days) after the first 30 days. This is a pretty stupid decision IMO, as I discovered a few weeks back on a non-internet-connected dev server.<p>And I say that as a longtime VS fan and advocate!<p>(Of course, I guess JetBrains products would suffer exactly the same problem now with the new SaaS model - I  just needed a rant about this particular issue.)