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> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of

• analognoise 4y ago
  You used magicians selling magic tricks to other magician's earlier, then said "smart" later. I think it's just domain awareness, and the "they're smart" trope needs to be dismantled. I think it plays into the technocracy problems we have now. We can solve it, we need more tech. More more more. People think we can solve social/political problems with tech - insidious.
• irrational 4y ago
  I’m a web developer. My company pays for JetBrains IntelliJ for me. And I love it. But, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, I’d use VS Code instead. I’ve used both and IntelliJ is superior to VS Code, but not to such an extent that I would pay my own money for it. But I’m more than happy to have my company buy it for me.
  • andyfleming 4y ago
    This is a product that I actually _would_ pay for as an individual. It's reasonably priced and worth the increase in efficiency and better experience. Plus their pricing is fair and flexible.
    • javajosh 4y ago
      Yes, it seems fair to me to spend real money on Jetbrain's tools, if you like them. It is strange how reluctant programmers are to spend on tools even though they are, as a rule, quite willing to let themselves be paid handsomely for their services. Yet graphic designers pay for Adobe's tools. Who can read this riddle?
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • TheGeminon 4y ago
        I think it’s because the free and OSS tools are of such a high quality for developers. There is a much bigger chasm between GIMP and Photoshop than there is between VS Code (with plugins) and JetBrains. It’s hard for many to get over the fact that JetBrains is infinitely more expensive than VS code in dollar terms.
        • oorza 4y ago
          > There is a much bigger chasm between GIMP and Photoshop than there is between VS Code (with plugins) and JetBrains. I don't believe this to be true. I think the difference is graphic designers tend to use much more of their toolings' functions, whereas almost every day I'm surprised someone I work with doesn't even know some IDE feature was possible, let alone how to use it. Hell, almost every frontend developer I've ever seen use either VSCode or WebStorm orchestrates everything from the built-in terminal and is baffled when they never see me use one - because it's all configured via run configurations, and that's a _basic_ feature.
• dehrmann 4y ago
  >> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. Hijacking the quote... I can't count the number of times I see well-paid developers using the Sublime Text trial.
  • qwerty456127 4y ago
    Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. They should make a special christmas offer %90 off and many (of those who will never pay otherwise) will pay.
    • dento 4y ago
      Do that once, and nobody will pay the full price again. They'll just be waiting for the next discount.
      • Toutouxc 4y ago
        But would that be worse than the same people just using the trial indefinitely?
        • carlmr 4y ago
          The question is how many people pay the $99 now and how many pay the $10 then. If you can't convert 10x the people you have paying now, you will be losing money.
    • dmitriid 4y ago
      > Sublime is too expensive. $99 is too much. On the other hand I have 437 games in my Steam account and countless gadgets I don't use. I guess I can skip a couple of games and a gadget or two to pay for software I use.
      • dvdkon 4y ago
        That's somewhat true for me as well, but I generally pay under 5 EUR for a game. Deciding between 20 games and a text editor doesn't look so good. Though as long as Sublime Text's developer is happy with the market share and revenue it has, I wouldn't change the price.
• giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I pay for tools independently if they are affordable and I can use them commercially (even at work, even if my employer does not pay for it). I pay for JetBrains yearly and am at the lowest renew cost as a result, so theres no incentive for me to stop paying them yearly. I also saw that you can get Visual Studio Pro for $45 a month, which is really decent considering you get a professional grade IDE all to yourself. The other thing is they have to be tools I want to use. I am an outlier I am sure. I hear often "let your employer pay for it" but they don't always necessarily pay for the tools I need to use. Having my own JetBrains license grants me strong freedom.
  • cerved 4y ago
• canadianfella 4y ago
  I’m not a programmer and I pay for github copilot. For me it is worth the productivity boost - even if I just make things for fun.
  • tomashubelbauer 4y ago
    It is surprising to me to see that you don't view yourself as a programmer. Maybe you're not a professional software developer, but writing code for fun sure sounds programmery to me.
• deleted 4y ago
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• jollofricepeas 4y ago
  Yep. Sublime Text. I sat through scores of interviews and pairing sessions with developers back when Sublime was a thing and the vast majority (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of that pop-up asking for support then pay the measly $30 or whatever regardless of their massive incomes and increased productivity that Sublime brought them. We developers are no more altruistic than anyone else regardless of the lies we fed ourselves in the early days of FOSS, internet, bitcoin, etc. :(
  • xavdid 4y ago
    It's worth mentioning that a ST4 license is $99 USD (and ST3 used to be $80). Still a relative drop in the bucket for how powerful ST is and how much value its users derive from it, but there _is_ a bit of sticker shock when comparing it to most other software. I say this as someone who, as a broke college student, got very good at hitting esc every 10 times I saved (which is how often it asks). I eventually switched to VSCode, and the rest is history.
    • wingerlang 4y ago
      I've been using Sublime Text for as long as I can remember and being good at exiting the popup is pretty accurate, I feel as if I don't even recognize it being there anymore.
  • alibarber 4y ago
    Oh I've had colleagues look at me strange for actually having bought a licence. We are sometimes a parody of ourselves...
  • nebulous1 4y ago
    I think ST was a huge financial success overall though.
  • newaccount74 4y ago
    > the vast majority (>90%) of devs would rather exit out of that pop-up Converting just 5% of users to paying customers is considered pretty good for shareware/freemium, so just because you saw a lot of people using the trial does not mean it is unsustainable. I have no idea how much the developer of Sublime Text makes, but considering that they have been around since 2008 I would assume it's definitely sustainable.
• keyle 4y ago
  I have to disagree. I pay for tools if they're good and they're saving me - time - headache - improve my quality or quantitive results I very often do not want to pay if the product isn't as good as it claims or simply not good enough. Software developers very simply would rather build their own half assed solution to a problem rather than pay for a half assed solution. Offer quality, we'll pay.
  • ChrisRR 4y ago
    Remember that a single data point does not show a trend.
• fastball 4y ago
  Anecdote for me: I tried Kite a few years ago but didn't feel like I was getting much value out of it and never payed for it. In contrast, I started paying for Github Copilot as soon as it was no longer free. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
  > Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools I believe this is incorrect. I pay for many tools, but I would not pay for Kite. The problem is not that developers don't pay for tools, but that Kite, or AI-assisted code, does not address a pain point. It's a slight improvement, but I don't feel pain when I need to write code without it. That's different from something like CI tools that I pay for. When I need to wait long for CI to finish I get annoyed. That's when I pay.
• sebazzz 4y ago
  I (=as the employee of the company) often don't want to bother to pay, because a business case, then getting the invoice right (if that is even possible and the seller allows paying by PO), then getting it paid in time, is often not worth it. Often free alternatives exist, which makes it even more a no-brainer. Never mind that as a whole we are an enormous company but software dev is not core business so really we are a small part of a whole, yet some sellers only want to sell the most expensive enterprise tier.
• vl 4y ago
  Be it as it may, everyone I know who tried Copilot trial is now paying for it. While my company expenses it, I started paying with my own money before that.
• nikanj 4y ago
  If my employee would rather not pay for a tool, why would I spend my own money to help them save money? The blog post was quite clear on the ”the tech doesn’t work” part, which seems like a more likely reason for their demise. Selling developer tools is hard, but selling non-functional tools is exponentially harder
• edanm 4y ago
  > It's like trying to sell magic tricks to magicians. Sell magic to regular people, and you'll see some significant revenue. Just FYI, magic tricks are basically only sold to magicians. There's a thriving market of magic shops, especially online, where magicians go to buy new tricks (in the form of books/videos), new "gimmicks", etc. I'd wager that a significant portion of all magic that is done is actually by magicians, for magicians, and partly in order to sell magic tricks.
• ComodoHacker 4y ago
  >> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. That was a really shocking insight for me. We do not own our means of production. And suffer all the textbook consequences that follow. Maybe unions could help with that. Imagine using union-funded licenses, compute, storage etc. to experiment with your side projects, build your prototypes without risk of losing IP to your current employer.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  I pay for tools, even though I'm kinda broke and would prefer to save a few hundred a year - my IDE delivers a lot of value and the support is excellent (thanks Jetbrains). I installed Kite briefly but it seemed so resource hungry I switched it off soon after without ever really trying to use it. That's not a judgement on Kite, I just didn't have the time or resources to spend at the time I encountered it. I'm sorry it hasn't worked out for them, but they get my respect for this unusually frank self-assessment, real humility, and following through on the fine words with the actions of sharing their tools they built. They achieved a lot and I hope their future endeavors are wildly successful.
• narag 4y ago
  The challenge is that when you're building software for developers, they already know how it must work. Do you mean that what you built didn't worked as it should? I don't understand, I've paid multiple times for tools that I find useful, even if they weren't perfect. This misconception has been promoted by companies with an interest in promoting their platforms, using the expeditive procedure of subsidizing (often inferior) tools, with the collateral effect of making impossible for tools vendors to compete. But by no means it's a law of physics. Make something programmers want. It's weird how little have the tools improved in twenty years.
• codeisawesome 4y ago
  What’s the best book/material on how to build a business like your friend’s? Discovering the niche, and expanding the client base are the main questions.
• jwmoz 4y ago
  Not strictly true e.g. I pay for Pycharm.
• deleted 4y ago
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• newaccount74 4y ago
  >> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools. > I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. Just because your startup failed doesn't mean an entire category is unsustainable. I've been living from sales of a developer tool for the last 10 years, and there are plenty of other paid developer tools out there that show developers absolutely do pay for developer tools. Now, maybe some of the startups have unrealistic expectations. A Python documentation reader probably wont turn into a billion dollar revenue company no matter how smart it is. But I'm pretty sure there is a market for dev tools. Maybe the market is smaller, or harder to crack than you thought, but saying "there is no way" isn't going to help anyone.
  • origin_path 4y ago
    Could you talk a bit more about your success? What does it do, what pricing model do you use, how long did it take you to acquire customers, do you feel it's worth it? Asking for a friend, of course.
    • newaccount74 4y ago
      I don't want to talk about it in detail, because I am trying to stay anonymous on HN. It's a Mac app, pricing model is perpetual license with paid upgrades for major new versions (every 3-5 years). Customers are roughly 50% individual devs and 50% companies who buy for their employees, and a bunch of educational licenses, but I don't earn much from them. I got initial traction by being mentioned by some popular bloggers and twitterers, but I only started making a full time income after two or three years. I think marketing is mostly word of mouth, and lots of people using the trial version who eventually buy a license, but for the most part I have no idea how people find my app. As for whether it's worth it -- it's a cushy job, I can take care of my kids and don't need to worry about putting in enough hours, because nobody cares how much I work. On the other hand it does get somewhat boring after 10 years. I've been hearing the same feature requests and ideas for improvements for 10 years. My customers are all the same average tech dudes like myself. Sometimes an interesting bug shows up, and when I track it down that's the highlight of my week.
• lefstathiou 4y ago
  We are in the market for an on prem OCR tool. Would you mind making a referral to your buddy? Email in my profile.
• HeavyStorm 4y ago
  I've paid for jetbrains multiple times, even though it's quite expensive for someone making money in a a third world currency. I pay for copilot. However, I would never pay for stuff that I can get free. I could talk to my company to buy it, but I would settle for something close and free if it come to that.
  • a-bashtannik 4y ago
    People in 3rd countries use pirate copies / cracks very often. In my country (Moldova) that's absolutely OK having everything pirated even in government structures. AFAIK all JetBrains products are available cracked. I am an individual developer and I pay for my PHPStorm and GitHub CoPilot - it saves me so much time, I could never imagine. This software is completely worthy to be paid for, even considering "free" copies are available.
• mirzap 4y ago
  They do pay, but they can not pay same amount as some corporation can. If you target individuals you need to find good pricing model for them. The best model - at least for me, that always attract me is pay for a year of subscription to updates. After 1y passes you can pay at lower rate to continue receiving updates for new features and bug fixes or you can continue to use the latest version before your support has expired. I'm hooked instantly to this since it brings me value without constant commitment. One year I may decide to extend one tool, the other I pay extension for other tool. Jetbrains' pricing model is also good, they reduce price each year (until 3rd), so you get rewarded for having a long term subscription. If you break commitment you get the regular pricing and you start over. I remember trying Kite, but I removed it once I saw the pricing. It was more expensive than Jetbrains IDEs (which are less than 2$ a month for individuals when you pay in a bundle - 149$ at the time) which bring much more value for the money. For me it didn't make sense to pay 20$ for just incremental improvement (if even that) over Jetbrains Intelisense.
• spi 4y ago
  > towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in software. Eg: Data scientists or business. A bit tangential to the original post, but where does this belief that data scientists are non-technical folks? I am a data scientist myself, and in my view it's way more technical than most software development. Albeit I wouldn't still call neither data scientists nor software engineers "smarter" than the average. Sure, if you want to train your bread and butter text classifier it just takes 10 lines of boilerplate code. But you don't need an AI-assisted tool for that - you just go to hugging face, copy paste those 10 lines, done, it's certainly faster than getting some AI-assisted code editor work for you. For everything that is a bit more complicated, you need endless adjustments to your code, and it's quite unlikely more than a handful of people before you ever wrote the same code. It is, indeed, a somewhat painful and slow process (because just "testing" your code often takes minutes, if not hours, so finding out bugs becomes annoying). And a somewhat simple, AI-based, error highlight tool might be useful to weed out the most stupid ones and save some time. But I will never trust something like copilot (or Kite, I guess, which I never tried) to write my code for me, as the challenging parts of the work involve long-term connection between different pieces of code (data loader, loss function, model function) that are written independently but must "cooperate" in a very non-trivial way. It is not at all uncommon that I make hours-long screen sharing calls with a colleague, discussing non-trivial mathematical computations, only to end up changing one or two lines of code that don't have an immediate link with the problem we are trying to solve. This kind of things are notoriously hard for AI to grasp, so they can't do any decent job in writing that for me. Add on top that a lot of the code you find freely online is just ridiculously bad or broken, and you might only get unusable models generated by AI engines trained on those. So, what kind of work are you referring to when talking about "data scientists or business" in your comment?
  • ogarten 4y ago
    I found that "being technical" means different things to different people. In the software world people seem to be referred to as technical when they write software systems not as much as singular scripts. Data science is definitely technical but a lot of code work tends to happen in Jupyter notebooks or something similar. The main challenge is in understanding the ML/AI algorithms, the possible choices for your analyses that actually make sense for the problem, ... . Besides that, due to the AI hype, there are so many people in data science who don't know much about coding or software engineering. Therefore, helping these people might be profitable (or not).
• Maxburn 4y ago
  OCR and document scanning companies is a big deal. I have a family member that used to do sales in this area and indeed companies with a lot of records and paper are paying big to get that digitized.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  Maybe I am older, having started in the late 90's. But I think developer tools nowadays are so cheap compared to my salary that I pay for them without thinking twice.
  • xtracto 4y ago
    I clearly remember paying around $80 USD for a WholeTomato [1] license back in 2003 for C# when I first came out of University into my first job. And that was a glorified auto-completer. Software has turned really cheap. The downside of is that it is almost a commodity, but the development effort has not really decreased correspondingly. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030618043241/http://www.wholetomato.com:80/purchase/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030618043241/http://www.wholet...
• sroussey 4y ago
  Developers will pay for things that don’t like to do that are outside their comfort zone and they don’t have the time or inclination.