I agree with your point here, but I think the discussion is usually more nuanced. The things you use every day for quite a bit plus one time purchase - sure.

I agree with your point here, but I think the discussion is usually more nuanced. The things you use every day for quite a bit plus one time purchase - sure. But let's take some hypothetical note-taking tool I access 2 times per day for one minute. Am I willing to pay a subscription for 60 minutes of use per month? nope. And the same is true for development tools I purely use for my fun projects. I kinda like IDEA but 170€ per year? No way, I regularly don't need an IDE for months at a time. Their one-time purchase (was it like 300?) wasn't much better. I don't personally like Sublime, but if I did, 99€ one time sounds absolutely fair. The problem arises when there are a dozen tools. So yeah, my main gripe is with subscriptions, but no, I can't simply justify those purchases to feel more productive in my spare time. I don't really care if I theoretically would need twice as much time to code a feature for a few hours a week. Games are fun, and sometimes art - I enjoy them and so I am willing to pay. In work settings I'm mostly a tool developer myself, so it might sound weird, but I wouldn't want to work for a company that sells a product to end users that does something I can get done 90% with FLOSS tools and fix the bugs I encounter.