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I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a

I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth. Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

lol768 7y ago
>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.
- georgemcbay 7y ago
  Still commendable given how common it is these days for companies to get consumer backlash and just continue to do the same thing while comically trying to publicly convince the customer base that the new model is somehow better for them when any rational person can see it isn't. Also useful as a guide to show the customer they should go ahead and voice their displeasure when these situations arise, preferably before the product is so entrenched in the given market that they can "pull an Adobe" in this situation ("Don't like the new terms? Fuck you, pay us").
  - lol768 7y ago
    Oh, absolutely. I think they handled this particular change quite gracefully. It's a compromise.
- srcmap 7y ago
  Google must play InteliJ for the Android Studio License use, right? I wonder how big is that part of the revenue.
  - mongol 7y ago
    Given that Kotlin now also is first class development language for Android, I think Jetbrains gets plenty of revenue from Android
    - enitihas 7y ago
      I don't think Jetbrains gets any money directly by the usage of Kotlin on Android, as Kotlin too is open source, and works very well in IntelliJ Community (also open-source). In fact, I don't think IntelliJ ultimate has any extra Kotlin features.
      - dcow 7y ago
        Regardless, I’m sure they are getting money.
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        No, but IntelliJ ultimate has more features than Android Studio given there are JetBrains developed plugins that aren’t available in the CE platform. Guice support, for example. You can live without it, but if you are working on a larger Android codebase and utilize it then it may be useful.
        enitihas 7y ago
        IntelliJ Ultimate has a lot of extra features, yes, but I don't recall any of them being related to Kotlin, or Android, so I don't think the parent comment claiming kotlin usage will result in extra revenue is relevant.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    I think android studio uses the community (open source) version of IntelliJ Idea, so it should not be a big part of Jetbrains revenue.
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  > They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates. I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.
  - michaf 7y ago
    Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.
  - lol768 7y ago
    In addition to what michaf mentioned, what we have now is not what they originally proposed. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-the-jetbrains-toolbox-announcement/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t... - the perpetual license fallback did not exist under the original proposals and only happened due to backlash.
    - mynameisvlad 7y ago
      Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.
      - lol768 7y ago
        > Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized. It's useful context. Yes, it's good that they listened to their customer base - and I've not criticised the current subscription model. But I still think it's relevant and on-topic to point out that the previous model was more generous and they tried to do full-SaaS when reading the parent comment in isolation sort of suggests they did this out of the goodness of their hearts (and entirely unprompted).
- sireat 7y ago
  A huge part of the backslash actually happened here on HN when they originally proposed the pure (like Adobe and 90% of other companies) SaaS model. So Jetbrains model is an improvement over most other companies but it is not as consumer friendly as the old licensing model. I would love to have the old model back(buy now with 12 months of updates) but that ship has sailed.
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    Sure, it came about due to backlash - but they still listened to their customer base and made changes, quite publicly admitting they had pushed the subscription model too far. Honestly I’m quite happy with it as a compromise, especially with the All Products Pack - I save money every year than when I used to buy upgrades for IntelliJ and ReSharper stand-alone, and JetBrains has incentive to keep pumping out new features to keep me from deciding to utilize my fallback license.
- Lazare 7y ago
  When you say it like that, it doesn't sound amazing, but you can also phrase it as: "JetBrains listened to their customers, took feedback on board, and made meaningful changes that addressed the concerns." In a perfect world, that would the minimum expected behaviour, but in the world we live in, it's kind of surprising when it happens.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    Or.. JetBrains went ahead with a disliked move, then took a half-step back. There's still a half-step in the wrong direction remaining, on top of showing that they would have been willing to go the whole way if they could have gotten away with it.
  - monksy 7y ago
    It wasn't amazing. There was a lot of unneccessary effort to change their mind.
  - antpol 7y ago
    You can frame it whatever you want. Fact is, if not the pushback JetBrains would be worse than Adobe
  - gmiller123456 7y ago
    "JetBrains listened to their customers..." Yes, you can make something sound positive when you leave out material facts. They knew an expiring license would be much less popular than a non-expiring one before they did it. So, just saying they listened to their customers leaves out the very important detail that they ignored their customers the first time around.
thijsvandien 7y ago
True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse for Windows users, who bought licenses (on my advice, sometimes...) for a thing that realistically speaking never came out of beta. To have a usable product to begin with, they suddenly needed to pay for a subscription. There was zero response to my email explaining this, so there's that. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives.
- optimiz3 7y ago
  Same here for Adobe Creative Suite; still on version 6 (perpetual license), which I run in a Virtual Machine due to support end-of-life.
  - dd36 7y ago
    Intuit Quickooks is same way. Hasn’t substantively changed in 20 years but they stop you from importing new data if you don’t update to latest every 3 years. They need some real competition.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      > They need some real competition. Have you tried Xero? I haven’t, but if you have, I’d be curious to hear your take on it.
      - keithnz 7y ago
        We run our company on Xero, it's pretty good!
    - projektfu 7y ago
      There’s Sage 50 if you want desktop, but even desktop QB is on life support and everyone’s going online.
kevingadd 7y ago
I understand the business reason for the licensing model so I don't really hold it against them, but after a couple years of 'Oh, you want fixes for these bugs we introduced recently? You'll have to buy another 12 months' where they constantly kept breaking new things when landing important fixes, I got fed up with the treadmill and just stopped using their products (in my case, ReSharper and dotTrace). I'd get problems like "having ReSharper for C# installed breaks VC++ compiles" (yes, really) and very often they'd just close the bugs outright or tell me the fix was only in the upcoming paid version with its own new bugs. I feel like this is the downside to the subscription license model - if you want to use the product at all you have to keep paying unless the version you've currently got is somehow perfect. And in the case of JetBrains products I've used, it is not. I wish companies like this offered something like an LTS branch where I could pay (subscription even!) for a version that just actually works instead of constantly having to put up with new features/bugs just to get fixes for workflow issues.
- mthoms 7y ago
  That's my experience also. It's like their model almost incentivizes them to introduce regressions.
meraku 7y ago
Same here. I wish everyone company with a subscription based licensing model did it this way. It should be noted though, when Jetbrains initially decided to move to this type of licensing, it was a bit different and they got a lot of backlash from existing users (including myself), but credit to them for listening and amending it to something better for customers. I've been a happy customer and Resharper user for many years and it makes my life much better, so it's great to see the company doing well.
modernerd 7y ago
You also get loyalty discounts on your subscription! After year three even their "everything" licence feels affordable for a working dev. (€649 for the first year, €389 by year three: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly ) I wish more companies did this.
- Macha 7y ago
  Their "everything" commercial license is €249 for y1, €199 for y2 and €149 for y3+ as an individual: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#personal?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#personal?billing=yearly The organizational license is only needed if your employer is paying for you or compensating you for the license cost: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What-is-the-difference-between-the-commercial-and-personal-licenses- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What...
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Considering the hassle involved in switching employers, then licenses, I’d much rather just use my personal license anyway.
ghaff 7y ago
Honestly, I don't really have a problem with subscriptions generally if it's a product that I use regularly. (Modulo "reasonable" pricing of course.) Where I have an issue is when I need a product I rarely use any longer to open an existing file or do some once in a blue moon task. At some point, software stops working with OS upgrades etc. anyway and I can deal with that. But I don't want to pay a subscription for something I use a couple times of year and don't need the latest version of.
SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
If I remember correctly when they first announced they were moving to a subscription based model a few years ago years ago there was a backlash from customers and they listened to customer complaints and modified the model to be what it is today. Another plus to them in my book for doing that.
teddyuk 7y ago
The thing I like is that their stuff makes it easier to develop and is reasonably priced. If your company won’t pay for it you can buy a personal subscription cheaply.
jariel 7y ago
I think Sketch does this and I agree, it's the way it should be.
mthoms 7y ago
This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true. When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended. In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version. For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter. EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  The OP said: > you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed Which is correct, and is the same thing you described.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    On second read, you might be right so I amended my comment... In my defense, OP's comment is ambiguously worded. What you actually get is a permanent license to the oldest release available during your subscription. OP also says: >... after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth." Also kind of unclear. And judging by the comments here, many many people misunderstand this. I think it's a general expectation that you'd get access to most up-to-date version of the product when your subscription ends. Not the version from the day your subscription started. Think about it. If there's a bad bug or regression in the old "perpetual" version you aren't entitled to the subsequent bug fixes. Bug fixes which you've been "using" for the past year. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow.
    - prox 7y ago
      You get the latest version you subbed to. So if you subbed last in 2018, you get that version. If resubbing j. 2019, the 2019 version. Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less.
lordleft 7y ago
That's an absolutely brilliant pricing model. I love it.
ljm 7y ago
Totally agree. I thought Adobe's offer would be just as good until I cancelled early and got bit in the arse. I basically paid more money to cancel than what I would have paid if I left the sub open, and of course I lost access once I did cancel. Total asshole design there. I go back to JetBrains and now I basically have to use their IDE because my company does, and it's not very easy to get the same kind of experience with Java with Vim or Emacs. I'm using CLion to help me learn C++ because it knows C++ better than I do (and on a Mac I'm not using Xcode for writing C++, only building it). For £10-£20 a month, that is discounted every 12 months, with full ownership of the last version you had... it's great. They seem to handle it a lot better than Sketch as well, who will force you to find the download page for old versions. IntelliJ just seems to give you what your license allows. I'd still go back to emacs in a pinch but I'm not proficient enough with C++ or Java and those ecosystems to know how to set my environment up. JetBrains seem to have a pretty fair and solid strategy and it must be doing well enough for them to expand their IDE-base so far.
memn0nis 7y ago
Interesting... the problem with this model is that investors / the market value SaaS revenue way higher than revenue from perpetual licenses, for a variety of reasons. Although I guess that doesn't matter when you're not raising or public :)
mroche 7y ago
As others have mentioned, the fallback license is for the point releases you have paid 12 months for, not the most recent release during your subscription (which is what your comment suggests). It’s also worth noting that the requirement is 12 consecutive months. You can’t have any breaks so you need to be actively subscribed to take advantage of this. It’s not the best solution (I am a fan of pay for a year (prepaid or monthly) and you get 12 months of updates where you keep all of them), but it’s a good compromise in the era of SaaS. And a compromise I’m willing to make for their IDEs.
baroffoos 7y ago
I was using their RubyMine editor for a few years and really liked it but then I switched jobs and ended up using vscodium and found it did basically everything I needed but was free.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
I'm amazed you think that way. It's a huge step down, and incredibly customer hostile. I stopped giving JetBrains money when they switched. If there's no perpetual licence, I'm not buying. In the old world, you bought the latest version, got upgrades for a year - sometimes more, then got a discount on upgrading come a newer version. At any time you stopped paying you kept the latest software, in sync with everyone else. You'd slowly move out of step. In JetBrain's fabulous con you pay a sub for the latest, and if you decide to stop paying - almost certainly having paid markedly more during the duration of your sub than under the old model - you get shunted to an older version, instantly putting you at least a year out of step with everyone else.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
monksy 7y ago
That didn't happen by what they tried to push. This happened because there was lots of developers threatening to walk over a pure subscription model.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  That's still the good thing. Can change the narrative to "developer tools company listens to its customers and gives them a fair deal". The effect is amoral, even if the cause is moral.
- antpol 7y ago
  Oh, I remember that pushback. Glorious days of outrage culture when it wasn't abused yet and the consumer power was strong
albertshin 7y ago
I'm curious about the counterfactual here. If they had a VC on their board, they may have been "gently guided" towards a pure subscription model since SaaS valuations are much higher. But, it sounds like a pure switch to SaaS would have alienated customers and perhaps would have forced more users to seek alternatives, and we might not have seen the business as this scale today. Wonder if this was the optimal move at the time.
bad_user 7y ago
Also the core of their main product, IntelliJ IDEA, is open source. And it's actually pretty usable for Java and Scala development for example, which is my interest in it. The Ultimate version comes with bells and whistles, but truth be told I'm only paying for it because of how happy I am with it.
sytelus 7y ago
This is a terrible terrible business model despite good intentions. Let me explain... Vast majority of developers who can pay are living in corporate world where you need to approve expenses each time charge is made. Subscription model is especially bad in that world because PO approvals for subscriptions are usually very hard, at least requiring additional justifications + process barriers. Most folks would just rather not do it or find alternatives. I've seen this first hand even when folks are very fond of product. A far better licencing model is to have one time charge and free upgrades for a year followed by nagging that can be turned off. This would have exact same effect but much easier to have purchase orders pass throughs in big company rule books. JetBrains have far more potential than $270M. One of the easiest thing they can do is to allow users in same companies to form user groups on their website. They can then approach those companies to buy site licenses with list of all these supportive users at those companies. They can then evangelize to users within same companies who are not yet using their products. This would make sure their subscription churn is lowered due to individual developers.

lol768 7y ago

>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

georgemcbay 7y ago
Still commendable given how common it is these days for companies to get consumer backlash and just continue to do the same thing while comically trying to publicly convince the customer base that the new model is somehow better for them when any rational person can see it isn't. Also useful as a guide to show the customer they should go ahead and voice their displeasure when these situations arise, preferably before the product is so entrenched in the given market that they can "pull an Adobe" in this situation ("Don't like the new terms? Fuck you, pay us").
- lol768 7y ago
  Oh, absolutely. I think they handled this particular change quite gracefully. It's a compromise.
srcmap 7y ago
Google must play InteliJ for the Android Studio License use, right? I wonder how big is that part of the revenue.
- mongol 7y ago
  Given that Kotlin now also is first class development language for Android, I think Jetbrains gets plenty of revenue from Android
  - enitihas 7y ago
    I don't think Jetbrains gets any money directly by the usage of Kotlin on Android, as Kotlin too is open source, and works very well in IntelliJ Community (also open-source). In fact, I don't think IntelliJ ultimate has any extra Kotlin features.
    - dcow 7y ago
      Regardless, I’m sure they are getting money.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      No, but IntelliJ ultimate has more features than Android Studio given there are JetBrains developed plugins that aren’t available in the CE platform. Guice support, for example. You can live without it, but if you are working on a larger Android codebase and utilize it then it may be useful.
      - enitihas 7y ago
        IntelliJ Ultimate has a lot of extra features, yes, but I don't recall any of them being related to Kotlin, or Android, so I don't think the parent comment claiming kotlin usage will result in extra revenue is relevant.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I think android studio uses the community (open source) version of IntelliJ Idea, so it should not be a big part of Jetbrains revenue.
ScottBurson 7y ago
> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates. I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.
- michaf 7y ago
  Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.
- lol768 7y ago
  In addition to what michaf mentioned, what we have now is not what they originally proposed. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-the-jetbrains-toolbox-announcement/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t... - the perpetual license fallback did not exist under the original proposals and only happened due to backlash.
  - mynameisvlad 7y ago
    Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.
    - lol768 7y ago
      > Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized. It's useful context. Yes, it's good that they listened to their customer base - and I've not criticised the current subscription model. But I still think it's relevant and on-topic to point out that the previous model was more generous and they tried to do full-SaaS when reading the parent comment in isolation sort of suggests they did this out of the goodness of their hearts (and entirely unprompted).
sireat 7y ago
A huge part of the backslash actually happened here on HN when they originally proposed the pure (like Adobe and 90% of other companies) SaaS model. So Jetbrains model is an improvement over most other companies but it is not as consumer friendly as the old licensing model. I would love to have the old model back(buy now with 12 months of updates) but that ship has sailed.
- snuxoll 7y ago
  Sure, it came about due to backlash - but they still listened to their customer base and made changes, quite publicly admitting they had pushed the subscription model too far. Honestly I’m quite happy with it as a compromise, especially with the All Products Pack - I save money every year than when I used to buy upgrades for IntelliJ and ReSharper stand-alone, and JetBrains has incentive to keep pumping out new features to keep me from deciding to utilize my fallback license.
Lazare 7y ago
When you say it like that, it doesn't sound amazing, but you can also phrase it as: "JetBrains listened to their customers, took feedback on board, and made meaningful changes that addressed the concerns." In a perfect world, that would the minimum expected behaviour, but in the world we live in, it's kind of surprising when it happens.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  Or.. JetBrains went ahead with a disliked move, then took a half-step back. There's still a half-step in the wrong direction remaining, on top of showing that they would have been willing to go the whole way if they could have gotten away with it.
- monksy 7y ago
  It wasn't amazing. There was a lot of unneccessary effort to change their mind.
- antpol 7y ago
  You can frame it whatever you want. Fact is, if not the pushback JetBrains would be worse than Adobe
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  "JetBrains listened to their customers..." Yes, you can make something sound positive when you leave out material facts. They knew an expiring license would be much less popular than a non-expiring one before they did it. So, just saying they listened to their customers leaves out the very important detail that they ignored their customers the first time around.

thijsvandien 7y ago

True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse for Windows users, who bought licenses (on my advice, sometimes...) for a thing that realistically speaking never came out of beta. To have a usable product to begin with, they suddenly needed to pay for a subscription. There was zero response to my email explaining this, so there's that. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives.

optimiz3 7y ago
Same here for Adobe Creative Suite; still on version 6 (perpetual license), which I run in a Virtual Machine due to support end-of-life.
- dd36 7y ago
  Intuit Quickooks is same way. Hasn’t substantively changed in 20 years but they stop you from importing new data if you don’t update to latest every 3 years. They need some real competition.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    > They need some real competition. Have you tried Xero? I haven’t, but if you have, I’d be curious to hear your take on it.
    - keithnz 7y ago
      We run our company on Xero, it's pretty good!
  - projektfu 7y ago
    There’s Sage 50 if you want desktop, but even desktop QB is on life support and everyone’s going online.

kevingadd 7y ago

I understand the business reason for the licensing model so I don't really hold it against them, but after a couple years of 'Oh, you want fixes for these bugs we introduced recently? You'll have to buy another 12 months' where they constantly kept breaking new things when landing important fixes, I got fed up with the treadmill and just stopped using their products (in my case, ReSharper and dotTrace). I'd get problems like "having ReSharper for C# installed breaks VC++ compiles" (yes, really) and very often they'd just close the bugs outright or tell me the fix was only in the upcoming paid version with its own new bugs. I feel like this is the downside to the subscription license model - if you want to use the product at all you have to keep paying unless the version you've currently got is somehow perfect. And in the case of JetBrains products I've used, it is not. I wish companies like this offered something like an LTS branch where I could pay (subscription even!) for a version that just actually works instead of constantly having to put up with new features/bugs just to get fixes for workflow issues.

mthoms 7y ago
That's my experience also. It's like their model almost incentivizes them to introduce regressions.

meraku 7y ago

Same here. I wish everyone company with a subscription based licensing model did it this way. It should be noted though, when Jetbrains initially decided to move to this type of licensing, it was a bit different and they got a lot of backlash from existing users (including myself), but credit to them for listening and amending it to something better for customers. I've been a happy customer and Resharper user for many years and it makes my life much better, so it's great to see the company doing well.

modernerd 7y ago

You also get loyalty discounts on your subscription! After year three even their "everything" licence feels affordable for a working dev. (€649 for the first year, €389 by year three: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly ) I wish more companies did this.

Macha 7y ago
Their "everything" commercial license is €249 for y1, €199 for y2 and €149 for y3+ as an individual: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#personal?billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#personal?billing=yearly The organizational license is only needed if your employer is paying for you or compensating you for the license cost: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What-is-the-difference-between-the-commercial-and-personal-licenses- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207241075-What...
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Considering the hassle involved in switching employers, then licenses, I’d much rather just use my personal license anyway.

ghaff 7y ago

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with subscriptions generally if it's a product that I use regularly. (Modulo "reasonable" pricing of course.) Where I have an issue is when I need a product I rarely use any longer to open an existing file or do some once in a blue moon task. At some point, software stops working with OS upgrades etc. anyway and I can deal with that. But I don't want to pay a subscription for something I use a couple times of year and don't need the latest version of.

SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago

If I remember correctly when they first announced they were moving to a subscription based model a few years ago years ago there was a backlash from customers and they listened to customer complaints and modified the model to be what it is today. Another plus to them in my book for doing that.

teddyuk 7y ago

The thing I like is that their stuff makes it easier to develop and is reasonably priced. If your company won’t pay for it you can buy a personal subscription cheaply.

jariel 7y ago

I think Sketch does this and I agree, it's the way it should be.

mthoms 7y ago

This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true. When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended. In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version. For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter. EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.

RussianCow 7y ago
The OP said: > you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed Which is correct, and is the same thing you described.
- mthoms 7y ago
  On second read, you might be right so I amended my comment... In my defense, OP's comment is ambiguously worded. What you actually get is a permanent license to the oldest release available during your subscription. OP also says: >... after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth." Also kind of unclear. And judging by the comments here, many many people misunderstand this. I think it's a general expectation that you'd get access to most up-to-date version of the product when your subscription ends. Not the version from the day your subscription started. Think about it. If there's a bad bug or regression in the old "perpetual" version you aren't entitled to the subsequent bug fixes. Bug fixes which you've been "using" for the past year. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow.
  - prox 7y ago
    You get the latest version you subbed to. So if you subbed last in 2018, you get that version. If resubbing j. 2019, the 2019 version. Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less.

lordleft 7y ago

That's an absolutely brilliant pricing model. I love it.

ljm 7y ago

Totally agree. I thought Adobe's offer would be just as good until I cancelled early and got bit in the arse. I basically paid more money to cancel than what I would have paid if I left the sub open, and of course I lost access once I did cancel. Total asshole design there. I go back to JetBrains and now I basically have to use their IDE because my company does, and it's not very easy to get the same kind of experience with Java with Vim or Emacs. I'm using CLion to help me learn C++ because it knows C++ better than I do (and on a Mac I'm not using Xcode for writing C++, only building it). For £10-£20 a month, that is discounted every 12 months, with full ownership of the last version you had... it's great. They seem to handle it a lot better than Sketch as well, who will force you to find the download page for old versions. IntelliJ just seems to give you what your license allows. I'd still go back to emacs in a pinch but I'm not proficient enough with C++ or Java and those ecosystems to know how to set my environment up. JetBrains seem to have a pretty fair and solid strategy and it must be doing well enough for them to expand their IDE-base so far.

memn0nis 7y ago

Interesting... the problem with this model is that investors / the market value SaaS revenue way higher than revenue from perpetual licenses, for a variety of reasons. Although I guess that doesn't matter when you're not raising or public :)

mroche 7y ago

As others have mentioned, the fallback license is for the point releases you have paid 12 months for, not the most recent release during your subscription (which is what your comment suggests). It’s also worth noting that the requirement is 12 consecutive months. You can’t have any breaks so you need to be actively subscribed to take advantage of this. It’s not the best solution (I am a fan of pay for a year (prepaid or monthly) and you get 12 months of updates where you keep all of them), but it’s a good compromise in the era of SaaS. And a compromise I’m willing to make for their IDEs.

baroffoos 7y ago

I was using their RubyMine editor for a few years and really liked it but then I switched jobs and ended up using vscodium and found it did basically everything I needed but was free.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

I'm amazed you think that way. It's a huge step down, and incredibly customer hostile. I stopped giving JetBrains money when they switched. If there's no perpetual licence, I'm not buying. In the old world, you bought the latest version, got upgrades for a year - sometimes more, then got a discount on upgrading come a newer version. At any time you stopped paying you kept the latest software, in sync with everyone else. You'd slowly move out of step. In JetBrain's fabulous con you pay a sub for the latest, and if you decide to stop paying - almost certainly having paid markedly more during the duration of your sub than under the old model - you get shunted to an older version, instantly putting you at least a year out of step with everyone else.

deleted 7y ago
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monksy 7y ago

That didn't happen by what they tried to push. This happened because there was lots of developers threatening to walk over a pure subscription model.

sudhirj 7y ago
That's still the good thing. Can change the narrative to "developer tools company listens to its customers and gives them a fair deal". The effect is amoral, even if the cause is moral.
antpol 7y ago
Oh, I remember that pushback. Glorious days of outrage culture when it wasn't abused yet and the consumer power was strong

albertshin 7y ago

I'm curious about the counterfactual here. If they had a VC on their board, they may have been "gently guided" towards a pure subscription model since SaaS valuations are much higher. But, it sounds like a pure switch to SaaS would have alienated customers and perhaps would have forced more users to seek alternatives, and we might not have seen the business as this scale today. Wonder if this was the optimal move at the time.

bad_user 7y ago

Also the core of their main product, IntelliJ IDEA, is open source. And it's actually pretty usable for Java and Scala development for example, which is my interest in it. The Ultimate version comes with bells and whistles, but truth be told I'm only paying for it because of how happy I am with it.

sytelus 7y ago

This is a terrible terrible business model despite good intentions. Let me explain... Vast majority of developers who can pay are living in corporate world where you need to approve expenses each time charge is made. Subscription model is especially bad in that world because PO approvals for subscriptions are usually very hard, at least requiring additional justifications + process barriers. Most folks would just rather not do it or find alternatives. I've seen this first hand even when folks are very fond of product. A far better licencing model is to have one time charge and free upgrades for a year followed by nagging that can be turned off. This would have exact same effect but much easier to have purchase orders pass throughs in big company rule books. JetBrains have far more potential than $270M. One of the easiest thing they can do is to allow users in same companies to form user groups on their website. They can then approach those companies to buy site licenses with list of all these supportive users at those companies. They can then evangelize to users within same companies who are not yet using their products. This would make sure their subscription churn is lowered due to individual developers.