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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’

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
    [deleted]
  - 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.
      - theamk 4y ago
        That makes sense though.. Terminal commands are easy to put into team wiki or record in personal notes or put into your CI config. There is a command history, it is easy to chain commands, etc.. Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible.
        oorza 4y ago
        IDE's native tooling makes you more productive because you set it up and never interact with it. If you need to manually do stuff, or do it all the time, you can slap it behind a keybinding. My cmd+F6 to do everything that needs to be done to get the iOS app built and debugging inside a simulator is obviously going to be more productive than having to jump into the terminal every time. Ditto for the run configuration (also cmd+F6 in a different project) that spins up docker and all that blah blah to get the API server running. This is what I'm talking about, for what it's worth, a programmer doesn't immediately see the utility in the tool and doesn't use it, and that's the story for 99% of the things an IDE does. It's always faster to do it yourself once, or twice, especially considering setup time and learning curve, so people don't make use of the tools. I see people using grep instead of their IDE search because they cbf to figure out how to do it in the IDE! It's like we're carpenters who hate power tools.
        vladvasiliu 4y ago
        > Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible. I have a friend who works as a dev for a decently sized software editor, so he's seen his fair share of people interacting with the tools. They work mainly with Java and the company pays for Intellij for everyone. He's often complaining about how people never try to learn the IDE and always do things manually. They usually don't really know what they're doing in the terminal, either (they mostly use Windows, so the terminal is rarely second nature). But whenever he shows them a few nicer features, typically around refactoring and such, they're always blown away and never look back. He has, of course, interacted with his fair share of graybeards who only use vim, but those people don't usually take ages to accomplish simple tasks.
  - capitalsigma 4y ago
    Because developers want to be able to hack on their own tools: fix bugs, add features, whatever. Graphics designers do not have the skills to hack on their own tools, so there isn't a huge population of them sitting around going "damn, I wish I had feature X -- I know, I'll build my own editor and open source it!"
    - PraetorianGourd 4y ago
      Some do. Probably over-represented on HN. Others want to work their hours and spend the rest of their time with non-technical hobbies, or with family, or literally anything else. If that isn’t you, no big deal. But we should not paint all developers with the same brush.
      - capitalsigma 4y ago
        Enough developers want to hack on their own tools that the market is smaller than you would naively expect, counting the number of developers and how many tools they each use. It's a bit like asking "how come we're having so much trouble selling our extended warranty to professional mechanics, even though professional drivers buy extended warranties all the time?"
        PraetorianGourd 4y ago
        The real reason is that there are free alternatives. For many people, “free and open source” is the same as just “free”. Again, I can fix most things on my car. I can afford the tools needed. But I don’t want to because opportunity cost. One thing I have always found weird is the whole, “hey can you look at my computer? It is all slow” is considered okay to ask anyone in IT, but it (at least in the circles I was raised) inappropriate to ask a mechanic in the family to work on your car, the accountant to do your taxes, the plumber to replace your toilet. And even with mechanics, some like to work on specific cars as a hobby, much like an engineer might want to play around with ML and work on a CRUD app for pay.
        4y ago
  - nikkwong 4y ago
    > if you like them. Important caveat here. My only exposure to JetBrains had been through Intellij which was thoroughly unpleasant around 2012-2013. That impression has left me forever sour towards them. Surprised to hear people say that it could be a step up from VSCode. It looks like "Fleet" is their VSCode competitor? I'm not sure if the homepage does a good job at communicating how this improves over of VSCode. First of all VSCode has an enormous ecosystem of tools which seems hard to replicate. In terms of advertised features for Fleet, it seems like the one most highlighted on the page is multiplayer, which would possibly enable others watching me code live? Sounds nerve-wracking. Although I could imagine some helpful scenarios when pair-programming or something. Other items that are advertised don't really encourage me to want to make the leap, especially as something I have to pay for. It sounds like they could host your code, or something like that, which could be nice. An annoying part of my workflow is that I work on the same codebase between multiple machines and every time I hop between machines I have to commit the changes to a private repository that is separate from my team's repository. It seems like it would be somewhat straight-foward to have the same code shared between all machines. Other than that I would be interested to hear on how any Jetbrains products would improve productivity.
    - acchow 4y ago
      Strange. In my experience, IntelliJ from 2012 is a superior experience to VSCode today.
      - realusername 4y ago
        To each their own, I would still continue to use VSCode even if IntelliJ's current version was free. Even Jetbrain themselves realised this since they are creating a VSCode clone called Fleet.
      - nikkwong 4y ago
        Granted; I was very junior then--and I think my issues may have been mostly related to the finnicky nature of java tooling and dependencies rather than the IDE itself.
      - happymellon 4y ago
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    I donate to the FSF and subscribe to iTerm2's patreon, FWIW. I have to admit, though, I think the world would be a much more drab and less productive place if open source were completely dominant. We'd all be chiding each other to donate more and pitch in more, while barely scraping by in comparison to the vast wealth sloshing around today. Maybe it would be a BETTER world if it weren't all fueled by addictive mobile games, privacy invasive advertising, etc. But we'd be a lot less rich
  - iopq 4y ago
    Because I'm always disappointed with paid proprietary software eventually. Despite some shortcomings, I used Windows 7. Anything after that had a confusing interface with two settings panels, some kind of an attempt to bring a tablet interface to desktop, loss of control over my computer. After installing NixOS, I never actually boot into Windows 10 anymore. Naturally, I never use MS Office or Photoshop anymore. It would feel weird to buy some proprietary software, even if it is good. Why not contribute to an open source effort?
  - brabel 4y ago
    I also pay for JB tools. But that's because it's well beyond me or other open source developers to make a product that's competitive with it, and the competition is well behind (VS Code and Eclipse are good, but once you learn IntelliJ more advanced stuff, you feel like a programming God - something worth paying for ;) ). An IDE is insanely complex nowadays. I am not sure what Kite had in mind, but to me, what they were proposing would be "just" an IntelliJ Plugin. And I don't pay, and can't see myself paying, for any plugin.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    > 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. Ability to find someone willing to pay XYZ for foobar does not imply that I am willing to pay the same amount of money for something similar. In fact, by doing this exact transactions it means that I find such transaction advantageous for me. Also, I had enough stories of lock-in and losing access to proprietary systems that I prefer vastly inferior open source. Also, I am not aware of paid systems worth paying for. I use primarily Linux (Lubuntu), git, Codium, Python, Kotlin, pgsql, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox, uBlock Origin, Leechblock, sqlite. For what I can pay that makes it worth it? For contributing back, I prefer working on code over donations (due to geoeconomical situation and ability too direct my effort precisely where I care about things over donations often being wasted)
  - H1Supreme 4y ago
    Designers have to spend money on their tools. There's no other option. Developer's don't. Plus, developers can make their own tools if they need to.
  - adql 4y ago
    Graphics designers don't have much choice because even if they decide they are entirely fine with free program, the graphics design world runs on Adobe file formats. Not the case for programming
  - eadmund 4y ago
    I am glad to pay for software, but I want it to be free as in freedom: I insist on being able to modify, fix, extend and share it. So all of my tools I rely on are AGPL, GPL or BSD-licensed.
kyawzazaw 4y ago
Disagree on this example though.
- arcticfox 4y ago
  Me too - I would, on the other hand, pay to use VS Code instead of Intellij if I had to.
hsuduebc2 4y ago
It is very cheap compared to what developers usually earns.
- ChrisRR 4y ago
  Depends on your country
mythz 4y ago
JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.
  - lgas 4y ago
    > I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price. To be fair, that's true of almost everything.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
    - skrtskrt 4y ago
      And the price goes down every year you renew for like four years I think? By year 4 you’re getting the all products pack for like $150/ year
      - 4y ago
OOPMan 4y ago
I pay for IntelliJ myself so I always have my preferred tool no matter where I work. When GitHub Copilot decided they wanted to charge $10 a month after the beta was over I noped out. For what it does, it sure as shit isn't worth paying more than my yearly subscription to IntelliJ...
number6 4y ago
I am in charge of the Software Team and do have financial support from the company e.g. if I deem a tool necessary it will be purchased – no, or little questions asked. It was insanly hard for met to justify, untill I saw the stuff marketing buys. Best decision to get the tool for our team
vjust 4y ago
Call me biased because I hate java. Oddly if a person hates Java, they should love intelliJ. I hated PyCharm because of its Java-centric heritage. I am a CLI guy. The closest I've come to loving an IDE is VSCode.
izacus 4y ago
IntelliJ suite is like 120$ a year, is that too much out of developer pay?
- snorremd 4y ago
  For someone working out of Silicon Valley? No. For someone working out of Bangalore, maybe?
cfn 4y ago
I have been paying for Resharper (and now Rider and DataGrip) for over fifteen years. Some companies where I worked paid for it other didn't but it didn't matter. It improves the quality of my code and I believe it gives me a competitive edge. It also helps keeping me sane as I work with a lot of legacy code. I see it like a construction worker that uses his own tools instead of the broken down ones of the site. It makes good business sense that I can work faster and better when I use better tools. I also pay for other tools such as dbForge and SmartSvn/Git but Jetbrains' tools have been the longest running ones (I hope this does not sound like I am a fanboy or something).
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Resharper is really great for VS, and I would probably be willing to pay for it if the performance were a bit better. Some of this is probably VS' fault. I'm excited to try CLion again once my project supports it, but from what I remember the debugging experience is not so good.
ChrisRR 4y ago
As a C dev I pay for CLion out of my own pocket. Partially because it's a great quality tool, and partially because there's not enough good quality tools for working in C on the market so I like to support the ones that do
jasmer 4y ago
You may want to reconsider, or rather, consider the value of your own time. If you value your time just even a little bit, consider how many of those tools are multipliers. Obviously not 'JIRA' for a single dev, but in many cases JetBrains is worth it. Would you wear Basketabll sneakers out for a jog? Well you could, but if you're going to run buy a pair of running shoes. Probably once a year. Costs about the same as Jetbrains for a year - as a very crude analogy. At least in some cases.
adql 4y ago
One big refactor paid for mine in saved time... Would be silly for corpo to not buy it for developers
dotancohen 4y ago
As a software developer with my own business, Jetbrains was the only piece of software that I paid for. Everything else was open source.

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
  [deleted]
- 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.
    - theamk 4y ago
      That makes sense though.. Terminal commands are easy to put into team wiki or record in personal notes or put into your CI config. There is a command history, it is easy to chain commands, etc.. Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible.
      - oorza 4y ago
        IDE's native tooling makes you more productive because you set it up and never interact with it. If you need to manually do stuff, or do it all the time, you can slap it behind a keybinding. My cmd+F6 to do everything that needs to be done to get the iOS app built and debugging inside a simulator is obviously going to be more productive than having to jump into the terminal every time. Ditto for the run configuration (also cmd+F6 in a different project) that spins up docker and all that blah blah to get the API server running. This is what I'm talking about, for what it's worth, a programmer doesn't immediately see the utility in the tool and doesn't use it, and that's the story for 99% of the things an IDE does. It's always faster to do it yourself once, or twice, especially considering setup time and learning curve, so people don't make use of the tools. I see people using grep instead of their IDE search because they cbf to figure out how to do it in the IDE! It's like we're carpenters who hate power tools.
      - vladvasiliu 4y ago
        > Unless using IDE's native tooling is making you much more productive (say its debugging does not work without it) it is better to avoid it if possible. I have a friend who works as a dev for a decently sized software editor, so he's seen his fair share of people interacting with the tools. They work mainly with Java and the company pays for Intellij for everyone. He's often complaining about how people never try to learn the IDE and always do things manually. They usually don't really know what they're doing in the terminal, either (they mostly use Windows, so the terminal is rarely second nature). But whenever he shows them a few nicer features, typically around refactoring and such, they're always blown away and never look back. He has, of course, interacted with his fair share of graybeards who only use vim, but those people don't usually take ages to accomplish simple tasks.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  Because developers want to be able to hack on their own tools: fix bugs, add features, whatever. Graphics designers do not have the skills to hack on their own tools, so there isn't a huge population of them sitting around going "damn, I wish I had feature X -- I know, I'll build my own editor and open source it!"
  - PraetorianGourd 4y ago
    Some do. Probably over-represented on HN. Others want to work their hours and spend the rest of their time with non-technical hobbies, or with family, or literally anything else. If that isn’t you, no big deal. But we should not paint all developers with the same brush.
    - capitalsigma 4y ago
      Enough developers want to hack on their own tools that the market is smaller than you would naively expect, counting the number of developers and how many tools they each use. It's a bit like asking "how come we're having so much trouble selling our extended warranty to professional mechanics, even though professional drivers buy extended warranties all the time?"
      - PraetorianGourd 4y ago
        The real reason is that there are free alternatives. For many people, “free and open source” is the same as just “free”. Again, I can fix most things on my car. I can afford the tools needed. But I don’t want to because opportunity cost. One thing I have always found weird is the whole, “hey can you look at my computer? It is all slow” is considered okay to ask anyone in IT, but it (at least in the circles I was raised) inappropriate to ask a mechanic in the family to work on your car, the accountant to do your taxes, the plumber to replace your toilet. And even with mechanics, some like to work on specific cars as a hobby, much like an engineer might want to play around with ML and work on a CRUD app for pay.
        4y ago
- nikkwong 4y ago
  > if you like them. Important caveat here. My only exposure to JetBrains had been through Intellij which was thoroughly unpleasant around 2012-2013. That impression has left me forever sour towards them. Surprised to hear people say that it could be a step up from VSCode. It looks like "Fleet" is their VSCode competitor? I'm not sure if the homepage does a good job at communicating how this improves over of VSCode. First of all VSCode has an enormous ecosystem of tools which seems hard to replicate. In terms of advertised features for Fleet, it seems like the one most highlighted on the page is multiplayer, which would possibly enable others watching me code live? Sounds nerve-wracking. Although I could imagine some helpful scenarios when pair-programming or something. Other items that are advertised don't really encourage me to want to make the leap, especially as something I have to pay for. It sounds like they could host your code, or something like that, which could be nice. An annoying part of my workflow is that I work on the same codebase between multiple machines and every time I hop between machines I have to commit the changes to a private repository that is separate from my team's repository. It seems like it would be somewhat straight-foward to have the same code shared between all machines. Other than that I would be interested to hear on how any Jetbrains products would improve productivity.
  - acchow 4y ago
    Strange. In my experience, IntelliJ from 2012 is a superior experience to VSCode today.
    - realusername 4y ago
      To each their own, I would still continue to use VSCode even if IntelliJ's current version was free. Even Jetbrain themselves realised this since they are creating a VSCode clone called Fleet.
    - nikkwong 4y ago
      Granted; I was very junior then--and I think my issues may have been mostly related to the finnicky nature of java tooling and dependencies rather than the IDE itself.
    - happymellon 4y ago
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I donate to the FSF and subscribe to iTerm2's patreon, FWIW. I have to admit, though, I think the world would be a much more drab and less productive place if open source were completely dominant. We'd all be chiding each other to donate more and pitch in more, while barely scraping by in comparison to the vast wealth sloshing around today. Maybe it would be a BETTER world if it weren't all fueled by addictive mobile games, privacy invasive advertising, etc. But we'd be a lot less rich
- iopq 4y ago
  Because I'm always disappointed with paid proprietary software eventually. Despite some shortcomings, I used Windows 7. Anything after that had a confusing interface with two settings panels, some kind of an attempt to bring a tablet interface to desktop, loss of control over my computer. After installing NixOS, I never actually boot into Windows 10 anymore. Naturally, I never use MS Office or Photoshop anymore. It would feel weird to buy some proprietary software, even if it is good. Why not contribute to an open source effort?
- brabel 4y ago
  I also pay for JB tools. But that's because it's well beyond me or other open source developers to make a product that's competitive with it, and the competition is well behind (VS Code and Eclipse are good, but once you learn IntelliJ more advanced stuff, you feel like a programming God - something worth paying for ;) ). An IDE is insanely complex nowadays. I am not sure what Kite had in mind, but to me, what they were proposing would be "just" an IntelliJ Plugin. And I don't pay, and can't see myself paying, for any plugin.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > 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. Ability to find someone willing to pay XYZ for foobar does not imply that I am willing to pay the same amount of money for something similar. In fact, by doing this exact transactions it means that I find such transaction advantageous for me. Also, I had enough stories of lock-in and losing access to proprietary systems that I prefer vastly inferior open source. Also, I am not aware of paid systems worth paying for. I use primarily Linux (Lubuntu), git, Codium, Python, Kotlin, pgsql, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox, uBlock Origin, Leechblock, sqlite. For what I can pay that makes it worth it? For contributing back, I prefer working on code over donations (due to geoeconomical situation and ability too direct my effort precisely where I care about things over donations often being wasted)
- H1Supreme 4y ago
  Designers have to spend money on their tools. There's no other option. Developer's don't. Plus, developers can make their own tools if they need to.
- adql 4y ago
  Graphics designers don't have much choice because even if they decide they are entirely fine with free program, the graphics design world runs on Adobe file formats. Not the case for programming
- eadmund 4y ago
  I am glad to pay for software, but I want it to be free as in freedom: I insist on being able to modify, fix, extend and share it. So all of my tools I rely on are AGPL, GPL or BSD-licensed.

kyawzazaw 4y ago

Disagree on this example though.

arcticfox 4y ago
Me too - I would, on the other hand, pay to use VS Code instead of Intellij if I had to.

hsuduebc2 4y ago

It is very cheap compared to what developers usually earns.

ChrisRR 4y ago
Depends on your country

mythz 4y ago

JetBrains IDE's is the most notable exception of dev tools I personally pay for, insane value and productivity makes it a no-brainer purchase given its instant ROI from time saved. Life's too short to not maximize your productivity for a few $'s.

qwerty456127 4y ago
JetBrains is a great example. People pay them because the product is by far the best and the cost is reasonably humble. I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price.
- lgas 4y ago
  > I think it wouldn't make the same total revenue if they were selling it for twice the price. To be fair, that's true of almost everything.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Most software sales are more elastic and would sell closer to half the number of units at twice the price, not meaningfully increasing revenue. (This can be good or bad, depending on the industry and the competition.)
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Also, even though it's "expensive" for an individual user, you own a full version forever!!! That makes the several hundred dollar price tag much less of an issue.
  - skrtskrt 4y ago
    And the price goes down every year you renew for like four years I think? By year 4 you’re getting the all products pack for like $150/ year
    - 4y ago

OOPMan 4y ago

I pay for IntelliJ myself so I always have my preferred tool no matter where I work. When GitHub Copilot decided they wanted to charge $10 a month after the beta was over I noped out. For what it does, it sure as shit isn't worth paying more than my yearly subscription to IntelliJ...

number6 4y ago

I am in charge of the Software Team and do have financial support from the company e.g. if I deem a tool necessary it will be purchased – no, or little questions asked. It was insanly hard for met to justify, untill I saw the stuff marketing buys. Best decision to get the tool for our team

vjust 4y ago

Call me biased because I hate java. Oddly if a person hates Java, they should love intelliJ. I hated PyCharm because of its Java-centric heritage. I am a CLI guy. The closest I've come to loving an IDE is VSCode.

izacus 4y ago

IntelliJ suite is like 120$ a year, is that too much out of developer pay?

snorremd 4y ago
For someone working out of Silicon Valley? No. For someone working out of Bangalore, maybe?

cfn 4y ago

I have been paying for Resharper (and now Rider and DataGrip) for over fifteen years. Some companies where I worked paid for it other didn't but it didn't matter. It improves the quality of my code and I believe it gives me a competitive edge. It also helps keeping me sane as I work with a lot of legacy code. I see it like a construction worker that uses his own tools instead of the broken down ones of the site. It makes good business sense that I can work faster and better when I use better tools. I also pay for other tools such as dbForge and SmartSvn/Git but Jetbrains' tools have been the longest running ones (I hope this does not sound like I am a fanboy or something).

yellow_lead 4y ago
Resharper is really great for VS, and I would probably be willing to pay for it if the performance were a bit better. Some of this is probably VS' fault. I'm excited to try CLion again once my project supports it, but from what I remember the debugging experience is not so good.

ChrisRR 4y ago

As a C dev I pay for CLion out of my own pocket. Partially because it's a great quality tool, and partially because there's not enough good quality tools for working in C on the market so I like to support the ones that do

jasmer 4y ago

You may want to reconsider, or rather, consider the value of your own time. If you value your time just even a little bit, consider how many of those tools are multipliers. Obviously not 'JIRA' for a single dev, but in many cases JetBrains is worth it. Would you wear Basketabll sneakers out for a jog? Well you could, but if you're going to run buy a pair of running shoes. Probably once a year. Costs about the same as Jetbrains for a year - as a very crude analogy. At least in some cases.

adql 4y ago

One big refactor paid for mine in saved time... Would be silly for corpo to not buy it for developers

dotancohen 4y ago

As a software developer with my own business, Jetbrains was the only piece of software that I paid for. Everything else was open source.