You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for a

You basically typed out what I feel. Let me add something useful here and say that it even has a name: "subscription fatigue" I was fine paying Netflix for an all-I-can-watch even if I ended up watching less than a DVDs worth of content just for the convenience of not keeping a stack of DVDs around. I'm not fine with paying Netflix, HBO, Disney, my cable provider, NRK (state owned broadcastee,mandatory) etc etc a monthly or yearly fee. So I just drop it: it is not like I need to watch it. Same with tools: I'm happy to bug my company to pay for IntelliJ as long as NetBeans is stuck in its current spot, we already pay for Jira and Confluence but I am always seeking out the open source solutions, - partially because I'm old enough to realize that $n in subscription means $n x 12 x m devs a year, partially no cost open source (contrary to popular belief here) is less hassle and partially because going proprietary feels like paying Dane geld. Edit: > Almost no one at a higher level looks at the puzzle and goes "Well we should spend $250/year to get this $250,000 asset productive". They look at the situation and go "We've got 100 developers, ain't no way we're spending $25k/year on this product. It's not in budget." Probably true in most places and it is sometimes a problem. But that institutional hesitation is also a powerful defense against every vendor who wants to inject themselves somewhere and then start jacking up the prices.