Here's my metric: I do complicated merges once in a while. If Beyond Compare (price = 60$) helps me resolve the conflicts in few minutes, of what used to take a

Here's my metric: I do complicated merges once in a while. If Beyond Compare (price = 60$) helps me resolve the conflicts in few minutes, of what used to take an hour of cursing and sweating, I pay them and consider the money well spent, because I can spend that hour (and a lot of others) that the tool freed up for me, earning money. The tool pays for itself basically.