15 ms·

Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model

106 points by qw3rty01 5y ago

TavsiE9s 5y ago
I hope Ghidra and alternatives take their customers.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
I'm curious about the interplay of two items from their FAQ: > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? If subscriptions are not renewed, you will lose access to the software on the day that a new subscription should have started. Please note that the software will stop working if not renewed. > 13. I have an IDA perpetual license, when do I have to change to a subscription? At the end of your current support period all renewals will be moved to the subscription model. We are offering our existing users an opportunity to pay only your current renewal price for your first year on the subscription plan. So maybe I'm mistaken, but it sounds like they're trying to renege on perpetual licenses?
- delusional 5y ago
  Just below: > 14. What if I don’t renew on the subscription plan? Existing users can continue to use the version of IDA Pro/Decompiler he have purchased under the perpetual license model indefinitely. However, they will not be able to receive product updates and tech support after the 12-month support expires. No re-downloads of past versions will be provided, so make sure to keep all necessary backups.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    That's a bit embarrassing, thanks for the correction. It didn't occur to me that some FAQ items would modify others, so I stopped reading at #13.
  - catskul2 5y ago
    > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? > 14. What if I don’t renew on the subscription plan? Not sure how a contraction and the word "on the", "plan" make those separate questions...
    - delusional 5y ago
      I agree. It's confusingly written, you basically have to read the answer (or the previous question) to guess that it's about perpetual licenses.
  - orra 5y ago
    > No re-downloads of past versions will be provided Far, far bigger films get away with nonsense like this. But IMHO it's a violation of the CJEU case UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle (paragraph 85).
ebeip90 5y ago
This is the dumbest thing they could do. “Ah yes, all you hackers and crackers, please take this DRM’ed copy of IDA and please obey the licensing agreement and don’t bypass the DRM.”
- GlitchMr 5y ago
  If I had to guess, they probably don't care about home usage of Hex-rays. Businesses have more to lose when using cracked versions of Hex-rays.
- z2 5y ago
  I've heard that IDA explicitly allows licensed users to decompile IDA itself. What's stopping someone from reverse engineering it transparently and making a competitor?
  - unbanned 5y ago
    No it doesn't, it also has a level of protection built in to stop decompiling itself
  - dymk 5y ago
    Probably patent law, unless it’s a black-box reverse engineering, in which case you can’t use a disassembler to peek at how it works
    - olliej 5y ago
      Copyright law is what you're after. Patent law doesn't care about how you get to the same thing - independent invention does not work as a defense. IANAL, I'm a random on HN, if you take this as legal advice I don't know what to tell you :D
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Because reverse engineered code is usually a mess, unmaintainable and takes a lot of effort to make even small improvements. Also, you run the risk of being accused of copyright infringement.
nekitamo 5y ago
I've been a customer since ~2010, and have been paying out of my personal pocket the $469 / year support renewal for a standard IDA Pro named license, which I've carried with me through various jobs in my career. The new subscription model will almost double my costs ($900 / year), all while I've been getting less and less value with each update. Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the product. Whereas if I stop paying now, I will maintain indefinite access to what I currently have. I think I simply won't renew next year, and will rely on Ghidra to fill any gaps going forward.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  This is going to increase my costs from $4800/year to $8000/year, and yeah, no more perpetual license. I’ve been paying for Hex-Rays out of my own pocket for a decade because it’s a great tool, but $8000/year for a personal license subscription? Forget it.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the product. Wow, not even a perpetual fallback license? I wasn't super thrilled when Jetbrains switched to a more subscription-based system, but being grandfathered in (so I didn't have to restart the subscriptions as if I were a new client), the heaps of existing goodwill they'd built up, made the changeover much less of an issue, and super importantly finally listening to customer and adding perpetual fallback licenses alleviated much of the fear.
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    As an aside, "grandfathered in" is a historically terrible term. The term you're looking for is a "legacy license". It's not terribly well known just how terrible this phrase actually is. I ran across it myself probably a few months back. > "If all these white people are going to be noncitizens along with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts. The solution? A half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back then. This was called the grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early 1890s. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586...
rowanG077 5y ago
Another one bites the dust. It's fortunate we have ghidra all though it can't compete yet on feature level. I guess the positive thing is that ghidra development will accelerate now.
- rene77 5y ago
  Ghidra's existance is a bit unfortunate, really. While it was released relatively recently, it's already a dated product permanently stuck with a clunky UI. And by being free, it'll create an extremely high bar for possible commercial products to clear. Combined with the extremely small market of low-cost SRE tools (so small in fact, that Hopper's author decided against porting their tool to Windows), we'll be stuck with IDA and Ghidra (and all their idiosyncrasies) for the next decade at least. Which is a damn shame.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    I don't think Ghidras existence is unfortunate at all. Without it I, and a few people I know, would never have even touched this space. Ghidra is not perfect but a slick GUI is not something that is important in such a product.
  - ahepp 5y ago
    The market is guaranteed to stay small if the "hobbyist" version of the software is $350/y. I've heard great things about it, but that's pretty far outside the "try it out for fun" range. I had a lot of fun experimenting with hardware hacking and dumping the firmware of an ARM device I own, but I'm certainly not paying $350 for one architecture for one year just to explore whether or not I like reverse engineering. What about kids hacking raspberry pis? I respect people's right to sell software, but I'm tempted to crack out the world's tiniest violin when I hear people complain that FOSS is eating their lunch. Consider how much good FOSS compilers have done for the world, and how many more people were able to program computers that otherwise would never have been able to afford it.
    - rene77 5y ago
      I believe the pricing is high by necessity - we're talking about employing some dozen of people on the higher end of competency doing terribly unexciting work. Hobbyists should settle on the Hopper tool, which is $99 a year. Also, if you wanted to advocate for FOSS, compilers are an all around terrible example. In fact, they prove my point: thanks to GCC and the likes, we're still stuck with hodgepodge of fragile build systems, platform-dependent code and poor IDE integrations. Hell, modern programmers will be right at home with 1988's compilers, seeing how Makefiles are still somehow relevant even today. Compare that with the early 90's Turbo Pascal which had an IDE with a built-in help system, a build system, a debugger, and a profiler. We could've had competition to improve upon all that, and instead it's 2021, and you have to spend hours per project to keep the tooling from breaking. In my carreer, I've probably spent more paid hours setting up "free" tooling than I paid for commercial tools. It's just a sad lose-lose situation for everyone.
loves_mangoes 5y ago
Taking away the option of perpetual licenses is an interesting business decision. Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription (which is a great incentive to keep people renewing!) Historically, IDA Pro's sales and licensing has always been a bit of a headache for customers. I could understand that the OPEX model makes it easier for some companies to keep renewing. That just goes to show that I'm not their target market. Even if IDA had a pay-what-you-want option, the 10-20 I'd be willing to pay per month while using a leaked version is clearly completely negligible compared to what they normally charge. And I'm happy to just use Ghidra instead of bothering with an IDA leak, so I suspect this announcement might simplify things for their existing corp users, but it'll probably not do a great job of expanding the home userbase.
- dcminter 5y ago
  JetBrains had a mis-step on the way to that model (but had the sense to listen to their customers): 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...
- skoskie 5y ago
  Jetbrains is also just $5/mo for the one app I use, and I get a lot of functionality for that.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription That happened after they announced the switch to a subscription model to overwhelmingly negative feedback.
  - ygjb 5y ago
    You do realize that is a win from a customer service and reputation perspective? Jetbrains listened to their customers, and amended their model. That is the kind of responsiveness I would appreciate in a vendor, especially if it's a vendor that produces tools that I enjoy using or help me make money. Anyone who has worked on customer facing projects or tools know there is always overwhelmingly negative feedback to billing increases. What is less common is vendors being responsive to that in a way that is actually beneficial to customers. That is doubly the case when you are dealing with high quality, specialty tools that have free or open source competitors that are good enough to get by, but not great (Adobe suite vs various free and open tools, for example).
jchw 5y ago
Dear Hex Rays: I’m not switching to subscription for these prices. Signed, a paying customer with multiple licenses, and future Ghidra user.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter. From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription costs are only a fraction of an annual salary. Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind. ~$1K/year isn't out of the realm of what I pay for other tools, but it's really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get 95% of the way there without the subscription model. IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes even more developer attention toward improving the open-source alternatives.
- nekitamo 5y ago
  By squeezing out hobbyists and individuals, they're shooting themselves in the foot over the long term. The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal license, and play with it in my own time. Going forward they're going to miss out on this word-of-mouth marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales expansion going forward.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    They should probably supplement this "expensive corporate SaaS pricing" model with a "free for personal use" option if they want to have any hope of maintaining their standing.
    - wila 5y ago
      You mean like this? https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/ https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/
      - anonymousiam 5y ago
        Not sure if they've changed things because I haven't bought a product from them for almost 10 years, but back then the free option was several releases behind the current offering, and lacking many features. Also, back then there was NO free version of HexRays (a separate product).
marcodiego 5y ago
https://ghidra-sre.org/ https://ghidra-sre.org/
- alpanka 5y ago
  Nice try NSA! ... Oh wait.
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  Nice - last time I was looking for a decompiler this wasn't a thing. Clearly I've been out of the loop for a while.
unixhero 5y ago
Ah the good old death of good tools.
marcodiego 5y ago
This is what happens: you've got enough corporate clients dependent on your product; you know they can pay what you're asking and it would be even more expensive for them to invest in alternatives; you also see that alternatives will improve and take youR market in the long run, but when that happens will be already retired. I think we've seen this happen with other tools before.
- jchw 5y ago
  IMO: IDA Home was the response to Ghidra. They could’ve raised or lowered rates without this change. But, subscriptions are probably a response to… perpetual licenses. Because I can keep using my current version of IDA forever, and with updates usually slower than the speed of smell it’s pretty alluring sometimes. I mean fuck, IDA Pro hasn’t updated since like April. Not because there's no bugs or no features that could be added, it just doesn’t get that much updates in a year. This is not the worst thing and I am sure there’s a reason, but yeah it makes the value proposition of keeping the support license alive a lot weaker. Of course Hex Rays wants people to ditch perpetual licenses. Because I can just not pay and use my current IDA and Hex Rays licenses as long as I want. And at this point, I am probably going to do exactly that, and transition to greener pastures as I am able to. It’s not like their licensing was generous before either. Before, you had to pay separately for each decompiler, including x86 vs x64, AND for each platform you want to run IDA on, you need another full set of licenses. That fucking sucks. This new scheme may have improved some of that, but at the cost of perpetual licenses and both higher starting and renewal rates, it’s extremely difficult to see this as a win. I wanted to like Hex Rays. The high cost was literally never an issue for me other than for accessibility reasons. The software is useful and featureful and the lack of annoying DRM was good. But this, plain ass sucks. Between IDA Home and subscriptions, it’s hard to imagine how much harder Hex Rays could spit on home users other than flat out telling them to take a hike. And yeah, at the end of the day I’m sure a lot of thought went into this, but I hope the response doesn’t go unheeded. I am not downgrading to a subscription under any conditions.
nice_byte 5y ago
i liked the old design on their website better. though this one fits better with the whole "software as a service" thing, i suppose.
0xbadc0de5 5y ago
I had used IDA+HexRays for a few years between 2009 - 2017 but abandoned it entirely in favor of Binary Ninja and Ghidra (and to a lesser extent Hopper and Radare). While IDA certainly has the first mover advantage, I've found that Binja and Ghidra in combination are able to achieve full coverage of my targets. If you're just targeting x86, you can probably get away fine with Ghidra. Although I've found for non x86 ISA's, Ghidra and Binja each have better or worse support for certain arch's but the ven diagrams overlap to full coverage.
MikeBVaughn 5y ago
I really like IdaPro, but this guarantees that I move to Ghidra. I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service. That is absolutely, 100% a complete deal breaker when it comes to the prospect of me ever doing business with Hex-Rays.
- ntauthority 5y ago
  > I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service. IDA never offered redownloads past the end of your 'support period'. As their last renewal email to me said: > Please check our web site and the protected area for new files. If you find anything interesting or useful, feel free to download it immediately. Once your support period is over, the server will not prepare new download links!
  - MikeBVaughn 5y ago
    Thanks for catching that! The core point still stands, though, I think that approach is customer-hostile and entirely at odds with the sort of customer service I expect from a company offering a subscription.
livinginfear 5y ago
> We have halved the price of our products on this new model and hope that it will allow more users to access the software. I love the gall they have to say this. When I saw the headline, I thought that a subscription model might provide more amenable pricing than the USD$1800 for IDAPro, and actually give access to more users. At this pricing, they've absolutely ensured that I never pay again. IDAPro is already a product that's diminishing in comparison to the competition year after year.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Does anyone know whether it is possible to purchase a legacy license (and don't expect any update once they move to subscription model) for IDA right now? I'm preparing to get into reverse engineering but haven't looked into IDA because I'm still sharpening up my C, assembly and Operating System skills. Actually, for a hobbyist, maybe the Home edition is good enough? It does have Pytho scripting capacity, local debugger (I guess I can just use Windbg for windows) and decompiler (although it's cloud based so I'm not sure what does it mean). Edit just checked the quote for IDA Pro and it's some 5000+ USD, it's a bit heavy for me.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I'm not really familiar with the relative merits of the different tools, but: If you're just getting into this area, perhaps it makes sense to gain expertise with a tool that is likely to be around for a while (e.g. Ghidra) rather than one with a now-uncertain future?
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Thanks, concerning the popularity of Ghidra yeah will try it out.
- roblabla 5y ago
  Honestly, as a hobyist, I'd really recommend looking into Ghidra. It's really great, can be modified to suit your needs much more easily both thanks to its open source nature but also because of its really good API (IDA's scripting API is a huge mess...). Its decompiler is also really really good, and keeps getting better. This is coming from someone who has access to an IDA Pro license through work, and uses both it and Ghidra daily. IDA does a few things better than Ghidra (Lumina is much better than ghidra's FIDB, the debugger support is a bit more feature-complete), but it's certainly not worth the steep price IMO.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Thanks. Guess I'm going to try out Ghidra later. It probably has way more than what I need.
fileoffset 5y ago
IDA license has always been a joke. Long live Ghidra!
sharklazer 5y ago
Oddly, I’ve written my own decompiler stack from scratch for ARM thumb to “dumb” C for embedded systems, based on radare2. I looked at all the existing tooling and said “That would make sense in a professional capacity” before this change. But this is a little ridiculous, given how easy it is to write decompilation and reveng tooling, if you’ve got some compiler know-how and you’re willing to read manuals for those tricky details. Also, just to be clear, my tooling only really covered what I needed. It was pretty crude. But amazingly simple to stitches together aside from a few gotchas.

106 points by qw3rty01 5y ago

I hope Ghidra and alternatives take their customers.

I'm curious about the interplay of two items from their FAQ: > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? If subscriptions are not renewed, you will lose access to the software on the day that a new subscription should have started. Please note that the software will stop working if not renewed. > 13. I have an IDA perpetual license, when do I have to change to a subscription? At the end of your current support period all renewals will be moved to the subscription model. We are offering our existing users an opportunity to pay only your current renewal price for your first year on the subscription plan. So maybe I'm mistaken, but it sounds like they're trying to renege on perpetual licenses?

delusional 5y ago
Just below: > 14. What if I don’t renew on the subscription plan? Existing users can continue to use the version of IDA Pro/Decompiler he have purchased under the perpetual license model indefinitely. However, they will not be able to receive product updates and tech support after the 12-month support expires. No re-downloads of past versions will be provided, so make sure to keep all necessary backups.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  That's a bit embarrassing, thanks for the correction. It didn't occur to me that some FAQ items would modify others, so I stopped reading at #13.
- catskul2 5y ago
  > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? > 14. What if I don’t renew on the subscription plan? Not sure how a contraction and the word "on the", "plan" make those separate questions...
  - delusional 5y ago
    I agree. It's confusingly written, you basically have to read the answer (or the previous question) to guess that it's about perpetual licenses.
- orra 5y ago
  > No re-downloads of past versions will be provided Far, far bigger films get away with nonsense like this. But IMHO it's a violation of the CJEU case UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle (paragraph 85).

ebeip90 5y ago

This is the dumbest thing they could do. “Ah yes, all you hackers and crackers, please take this DRM’ed copy of IDA and please obey the licensing agreement and don’t bypass the DRM.”

GlitchMr 5y ago
If I had to guess, they probably don't care about home usage of Hex-rays. Businesses have more to lose when using cracked versions of Hex-rays.
z2 5y ago
I've heard that IDA explicitly allows licensed users to decompile IDA itself. What's stopping someone from reverse engineering it transparently and making a competitor?
- unbanned 5y ago
  No it doesn't, it also has a level of protection built in to stop decompiling itself
- dymk 5y ago
  Probably patent law, unless it’s a black-box reverse engineering, in which case you can’t use a disassembler to peek at how it works
  - olliej 5y ago
    Copyright law is what you're after. Patent law doesn't care about how you get to the same thing - independent invention does not work as a defense. IANAL, I'm a random on HN, if you take this as legal advice I don't know what to tell you :D
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Because reverse engineered code is usually a mess, unmaintainable and takes a lot of effort to make even small improvements. Also, you run the risk of being accused of copyright infringement.

nekitamo 5y ago

I've been a customer since ~2010, and have been paying out of my personal pocket the $469 / year support renewal for a standard IDA Pro named license, which I've carried with me through various jobs in my career. The new subscription model will almost double my costs ($900 / year), all while I've been getting less and less value with each update. Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the product. Whereas if I stop paying now, I will maintain indefinite access to what I currently have. I think I simply won't renew next year, and will rely on Ghidra to fill any gaps going forward.

teakettle42 5y ago
This is going to increase my costs from $4800/year to $8000/year, and yeah, no more perpetual license. I’ve been paying for Hex-Rays out of my own pocket for a decade because it’s a great tool, but $8000/year for a personal license subscription? Forget it.
masklinn 5y ago
> Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the product. Wow, not even a perpetual fallback license? I wasn't super thrilled when Jetbrains switched to a more subscription-based system, but being grandfathered in (so I didn't have to restart the subscriptions as if I were a new client), the heaps of existing goodwill they'd built up, made the changeover much less of an issue, and super importantly finally listening to customer and adding perpetual fallback licenses alleviated much of the fear.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  As an aside, "grandfathered in" is a historically terrible term. The term you're looking for is a "legacy license". It's not terribly well known just how terrible this phrase actually is. I ran across it myself probably a few months back. > "If all these white people are going to be noncitizens along with blacks, the idea is going to lose a lot of support," says James Smethurst, who teaches African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts. The solution? A half-dozen states passed laws that made men eligible to vote if they had been able to vote before African-Americans were given the franchise (generally, 1867), or if they were the lineal descendants of voters back then. This was called the grandfather clause. Most such laws were enacted in the early 1890s. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586...

rowanG077 5y ago

Another one bites the dust. It's fortunate we have ghidra all though it can't compete yet on feature level. I guess the positive thing is that ghidra development will accelerate now.

rene77 5y ago
Ghidra's existance is a bit unfortunate, really. While it was released relatively recently, it's already a dated product permanently stuck with a clunky UI. And by being free, it'll create an extremely high bar for possible commercial products to clear. Combined with the extremely small market of low-cost SRE tools (so small in fact, that Hopper's author decided against porting their tool to Windows), we'll be stuck with IDA and Ghidra (and all their idiosyncrasies) for the next decade at least. Which is a damn shame.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  I don't think Ghidras existence is unfortunate at all. Without it I, and a few people I know, would never have even touched this space. Ghidra is not perfect but a slick GUI is not something that is important in such a product.
- ahepp 5y ago
  The market is guaranteed to stay small if the "hobbyist" version of the software is $350/y. I've heard great things about it, but that's pretty far outside the "try it out for fun" range. I had a lot of fun experimenting with hardware hacking and dumping the firmware of an ARM device I own, but I'm certainly not paying $350 for one architecture for one year just to explore whether or not I like reverse engineering. What about kids hacking raspberry pis? I respect people's right to sell software, but I'm tempted to crack out the world's tiniest violin when I hear people complain that FOSS is eating their lunch. Consider how much good FOSS compilers have done for the world, and how many more people were able to program computers that otherwise would never have been able to afford it.
  - rene77 5y ago
    I believe the pricing is high by necessity - we're talking about employing some dozen of people on the higher end of competency doing terribly unexciting work. Hobbyists should settle on the Hopper tool, which is $99 a year. Also, if you wanted to advocate for FOSS, compilers are an all around terrible example. In fact, they prove my point: thanks to GCC and the likes, we're still stuck with hodgepodge of fragile build systems, platform-dependent code and poor IDE integrations. Hell, modern programmers will be right at home with 1988's compilers, seeing how Makefiles are still somehow relevant even today. Compare that with the early 90's Turbo Pascal which had an IDE with a built-in help system, a build system, a debugger, and a profiler. We could've had competition to improve upon all that, and instead it's 2021, and you have to spend hours per project to keep the tooling from breaking. In my carreer, I've probably spent more paid hours setting up "free" tooling than I paid for commercial tools. It's just a sad lose-lose situation for everyone.

loves_mangoes 5y ago

Taking away the option of perpetual licenses is an interesting business decision. Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription (which is a great incentive to keep people renewing!) Historically, IDA Pro's sales and licensing has always been a bit of a headache for customers. I could understand that the OPEX model makes it easier for some companies to keep renewing. That just goes to show that I'm not their target market. Even if IDA had a pay-what-you-want option, the 10-20 I'd be willing to pay per month while using a leaked version is clearly completely negligible compared to what they normally charge. And I'm happy to just use Ghidra instead of bothering with an IDA leak, so I suspect this announcement might simplify things for their existing corp users, but it'll probably not do a great job of expanding the home userbase.

dcminter 5y ago
JetBrains had a mis-step on the way to that model (but had the sense to listen to their customers): 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...
skoskie 5y ago
Jetbrains is also just $5/mo for the one app I use, and I get a lot of functionality for that.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription That happened after they announced the switch to a subscription model to overwhelmingly negative feedback.
- ygjb 5y ago
  You do realize that is a win from a customer service and reputation perspective? Jetbrains listened to their customers, and amended their model. That is the kind of responsiveness I would appreciate in a vendor, especially if it's a vendor that produces tools that I enjoy using or help me make money. Anyone who has worked on customer facing projects or tools know there is always overwhelmingly negative feedback to billing increases. What is less common is vendors being responsive to that in a way that is actually beneficial to customers. That is doubly the case when you are dealing with high quality, specialty tools that have free or open source competitors that are good enough to get by, but not great (Adobe suite vs various free and open tools, for example).

jchw 5y ago

Dear Hex Rays: I’m not switching to subscription for these prices. Signed, a paying customer with multiple licenses, and future Ghidra user.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter. From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription costs are only a fraction of an annual salary. Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind. ~$1K/year isn't out of the realm of what I pay for other tools, but it's really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get 95% of the way there without the subscription model. IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes even more developer attention toward improving the open-source alternatives.

nekitamo 5y ago
By squeezing out hobbyists and individuals, they're shooting themselves in the foot over the long term. The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal license, and play with it in my own time. Going forward they're going to miss out on this word-of-mouth marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales expansion going forward.
- ohazi 5y ago
  They should probably supplement this "expensive corporate SaaS pricing" model with a "free for personal use" option if they want to have any hope of maintaining their standing.
  - wila 5y ago
    You mean like this? https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/ https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/
    - anonymousiam 5y ago
      Not sure if they've changed things because I haven't bought a product from them for almost 10 years, but back then the free option was several releases behind the current offering, and lacking many features. Also, back then there was NO free version of HexRays (a separate product).

marcodiego 5y ago

https://ghidra-sre.org/ https://ghidra-sre.org/

alpanka 5y ago
Nice try NSA! ... Oh wait.
jamesfinlayson 5y ago
Nice - last time I was looking for a decompiler this wasn't a thing. Clearly I've been out of the loop for a while.

unixhero 5y ago

Ah the good old death of good tools.

marcodiego 5y ago

This is what happens: you've got enough corporate clients dependent on your product; you know they can pay what you're asking and it would be even more expensive for them to invest in alternatives; you also see that alternatives will improve and take youR market in the long run, but when that happens will be already retired. I think we've seen this happen with other tools before.

jchw 5y ago
IMO: IDA Home was the response to Ghidra. They could’ve raised or lowered rates without this change. But, subscriptions are probably a response to… perpetual licenses. Because I can keep using my current version of IDA forever, and with updates usually slower than the speed of smell it’s pretty alluring sometimes. I mean fuck, IDA Pro hasn’t updated since like April. Not because there's no bugs or no features that could be added, it just doesn’t get that much updates in a year. This is not the worst thing and I am sure there’s a reason, but yeah it makes the value proposition of keeping the support license alive a lot weaker. Of course Hex Rays wants people to ditch perpetual licenses. Because I can just not pay and use my current IDA and Hex Rays licenses as long as I want. And at this point, I am probably going to do exactly that, and transition to greener pastures as I am able to. It’s not like their licensing was generous before either. Before, you had to pay separately for each decompiler, including x86 vs x64, AND for each platform you want to run IDA on, you need another full set of licenses. That fucking sucks. This new scheme may have improved some of that, but at the cost of perpetual licenses and both higher starting and renewal rates, it’s extremely difficult to see this as a win. I wanted to like Hex Rays. The high cost was literally never an issue for me other than for accessibility reasons. The software is useful and featureful and the lack of annoying DRM was good. But this, plain ass sucks. Between IDA Home and subscriptions, it’s hard to imagine how much harder Hex Rays could spit on home users other than flat out telling them to take a hike. And yeah, at the end of the day I’m sure a lot of thought went into this, but I hope the response doesn’t go unheeded. I am not downgrading to a subscription under any conditions.

nice_byte 5y ago

i liked the old design on their website better. though this one fits better with the whole "software as a service" thing, i suppose.

0xbadc0de5 5y ago

I had used IDA+HexRays for a few years between 2009 - 2017 but abandoned it entirely in favor of Binary Ninja and Ghidra (and to a lesser extent Hopper and Radare). While IDA certainly has the first mover advantage, I've found that Binja and Ghidra in combination are able to achieve full coverage of my targets. If you're just targeting x86, you can probably get away fine with Ghidra. Although I've found for non x86 ISA's, Ghidra and Binja each have better or worse support for certain arch's but the ven diagrams overlap to full coverage.

MikeBVaughn 5y ago

I really like IdaPro, but this guarantees that I move to Ghidra. I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service. That is absolutely, 100% a complete deal breaker when it comes to the prospect of me ever doing business with Hex-Rays.

ntauthority 5y ago
> I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service. IDA never offered redownloads past the end of your 'support period'. As their last renewal email to me said: > Please check our web site and the protected area for new files. If you find anything interesting or useful, feel free to download it immediately. Once your support period is over, the server will not prepare new download links!
- MikeBVaughn 5y ago
  Thanks for catching that! The core point still stands, though, I think that approach is customer-hostile and entirely at odds with the sort of customer service I expect from a company offering a subscription.

livinginfear 5y ago

> We have halved the price of our products on this new model and hope that it will allow more users to access the software. I love the gall they have to say this. When I saw the headline, I thought that a subscription model might provide more amenable pricing than the USD$1800 for IDAPro, and actually give access to more users. At this pricing, they've absolutely ensured that I never pay again. IDAPro is already a product that's diminishing in comparison to the competition year after year.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Does anyone know whether it is possible to purchase a legacy license (and don't expect any update once they move to subscription model) for IDA right now? I'm preparing to get into reverse engineering but haven't looked into IDA because I'm still sharpening up my C, assembly and Operating System skills. Actually, for a hobbyist, maybe the Home edition is good enough? It does have Pytho scripting capacity, local debugger (I guess I can just use Windbg for windows) and decompiler (although it's cloud based so I'm not sure what does it mean). Edit just checked the quote for IDA Pro and it's some 5000+ USD, it's a bit heavy for me.

CoastalCoder 5y ago
I'm not really familiar with the relative merits of the different tools, but: If you're just getting into this area, perhaps it makes sense to gain expertise with a tool that is likely to be around for a while (e.g. Ghidra) rather than one with a now-uncertain future?
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Thanks, concerning the popularity of Ghidra yeah will try it out.
roblabla 5y ago
Honestly, as a hobyist, I'd really recommend looking into Ghidra. It's really great, can be modified to suit your needs much more easily both thanks to its open source nature but also because of its really good API (IDA's scripting API is a huge mess...). Its decompiler is also really really good, and keeps getting better. This is coming from someone who has access to an IDA Pro license through work, and uses both it and Ghidra daily. IDA does a few things better than Ghidra (Lumina is much better than ghidra's FIDB, the debugger support is a bit more feature-complete), but it's certainly not worth the steep price IMO.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Thanks. Guess I'm going to try out Ghidra later. It probably has way more than what I need.

fileoffset 5y ago

IDA license has always been a joke. Long live Ghidra!

sharklazer 5y ago

Oddly, I’ve written my own decompiler stack from scratch for ARM thumb to “dumb” C for embedded systems, based on radare2. I looked at all the existing tooling and said “That would make sense in a professional capacity” before this change. But this is a little ridiculous, given how easy it is to write decompilation and reveng tooling, if you’ve got some compiler know-how and you’re willing to read manuals for those tricky details. Also, just to be clear, my tooling only really covered what I needed. It was pretty crude. But amazingly simple to stitches together aside from a few gotchas.