6 ms·

What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done. It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some

What an amazing accomplishment JetBrains has done. It's a bootstrapped, European company, doing $400M+ annually in revenue selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay). https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2023/

fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.
peutetre 2y ago
> selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay). All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.
- ozim 2y ago
  Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
  - javajosh 2y ago
    We expect to get paid for satisfying someone else's requirements. We do not expect to get paid to scratch our own itches.
  - izacus 2y ago
    Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.
    - monsieurbanana 2y ago
      I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
    - mnau 2y ago
      The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model. > The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey. Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
      - izacus 2y ago
        The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all? Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
  - desiderantes 2y ago
    Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
- jchw 2y ago
  I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves. Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    > Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.
    - jchw 2y ago
      They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy". As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.
sofixa 2y ago
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.
- arkh 2y ago
  Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.
  - jen20 2y ago
    That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.
  - recursive 2y ago
    My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.
    - sudhirj 2y ago
      This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.
    - 2y ago
qsort 2y ago
> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay Citation very much needed? Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.
- dewey 2y ago
  Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month. Source: Myself
- crop_rotation 2y ago
  No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.
- michaelt 2y ago
  There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free. And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free. Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them. There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  Did they have Russian developers and let them go? Or do you mean the ownership has changed?
  - zorgmonkey 2y ago
    My understanding is they relocated the developers who were in Russia
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Correct, though they also lost some who were not willing to relocate.
      - einpoklum 2y ago
        That's really too bad, and not fair to the Russian developers. More 'collateral damage' from the NATO-Russia conflict.
        lolinder 2y ago
        Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees. His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
        exceptione 2y ago
        Ukraine is not part of Nato, but that would have been a good way to avoid 'conflict'.
pjmlp 2y ago
It is the new Borland, hopefully they won't follow into the Inprise phase.
princevegeta89 2y ago
This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well. Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.
- gspencley 2y ago
  I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode. A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free. I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost. I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    I prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.
    - princevegeta89 2y ago
mattgreenrocks 2y ago
Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.
mirekrusin 2y ago
Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0]. I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently. [0] This is explicitly allowed: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-I-use-my-personal-license-at-work-and-at-home https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Yes, devs are explicitly allowed to use any editor they want. I'm not the only one who brings my own JetBrains, but I'm in a tiny minority.
      - jmb99 2y ago
        This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed
MangoCoffee 2y ago
I do pay for software, even subpar ones like Telerik's controls, for a while. I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself. Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free. I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.
corytheboyd 2y ago
This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top. It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.
mathverse 2y ago
They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.
- SkiFire13 2y ago
  It was founded by russian nationals but the company is formally czech and is more connected to the west than to Russia.
  - mathverse 2y ago
    The majority of employees and C-level are russians. It is a Russian company.
- charkubi 2y ago
  Czech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains
  - mathverse 2y ago
    Majority of employees are russians including the C level
- weaksauce 2y ago
  they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai... > The Czech Republic is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the OECD, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group.
  - mathverse 2y ago
    The company is not czech. Russians are an overwhelming majority of the employees.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago

I'd love to pay for a lot of software and dev stuff. Convincing my job to do so is such a pain that I don't even try. I do pay for WebStorm and DataGrip myself though.

peutetre 2y ago

> selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay). All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.

ozim 2y ago
Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.
- javajosh 2y ago
  We expect to get paid for satisfying someone else's requirements. We do not expect to get paid to scratch our own itches.
- izacus 2y ago
  Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.
  - monsieurbanana 2y ago
    I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.
  - mnau 2y ago
    The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model. > The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey. Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"
    - izacus 2y ago
      The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all? Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?
- desiderantes 2y ago
  Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).
jchw 2y ago
I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves. Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  > Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.
  - jchw 2y ago
    They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy". As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.

sofixa 2y ago

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay And who more often than not get their software imposed on by the orgs they work in, so it's doubly complicated - the developers have to be convinced themselves enough to be willing to convince their IT department/fellow developers to pay for.

arkh 2y ago
Most professional developers in Western countries should have the means to pay for their own license if really needed.
- jen20 2y ago
  That doesn’t make it permissible to run the software on company equipment, necessarily.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    Yeah, specifically it will frequently (1) violate employer policy to use it on emoloyer equipment if not approved and, providing licensing is required, licensed by the employer, and (2) violate the license of the software to use it when it is not licensed to the employer.
- recursive 2y ago
  My employer has a policy forbidding the use of software that I personally paid for. Free software is fine for some reason.
  - sudhirj 2y ago
    This is usually because the software you pay for yourself has licensing terms that don’t allow commercial use or reimbursement. See the JetBrains personal license terms itself. Understandably, the company will find it easier and cheaper to forbid use than hire a lawyer to check each license for each software that each employee wants to use.
  - 2y ago

qsort 2y ago

> who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay Citation very much needed? Unless you're talking about enterprise software specifically, developers are probably among the most willing to shell out cash for software, it's the general public who seems to be fine with ad-ridden spyware freemium nonsense as long as it's free.

dewey 2y ago
Developers regularly underestimate the work required to build something and will spend a lot of time building something themselves vs buying someone else's tool for $5 / month. Source: Myself
crop_rotation 2y ago
No, non developers are more likely to buy software for what they need for their profession (that is why tons of terrible software exists everywhere for such tasks). Ad ridden spyware is mostly for consumption things like games and random websites. On HN every now and then you will see people saying you can do anything with nano and vim/emacs and only recently some of them have started using LSP. Anything that is not totally free and open source gets 100 denials on HN.
michaelt 2y ago
There's a long history of the likes of Redis, MongoDB, Grafana, Terraform etc first releasing their product as free and open source to get adoption, hoping to make money by some indirect means, then relicensing to closed source later on because nobody pays for something they can get for free. And pretty much all major programming languages and libraries are given away for free too. Someone tries to introduce BitKeeper, a commercial version control system, for the Linux kernel? They won't stand for it, some's gotta clone it and give the clone away for free. Hell, I've heard loads of people here on HN complaining when a SaaS company introduces features exclusively useful to large corporations - like single-sign-on integration - then wants to get paid for them. There's a handful of exceptions. For example game developers will pay $$$ for "Unity" and store their assets in "Perforce" and suchlike. And I believe it's possible to pay for Visual Studio.

TiredOfLife 2y ago

Now they are european. They started as fully Russian company. But they are a truly rare example of a company that actually left russian market. Unlike Apple or LG.

einpoklum 2y ago
Did they have Russian developers and let them go? Or do you mean the ownership has changed?
- zorgmonkey 2y ago
  My understanding is they relocated the developers who were in Russia
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Correct, though they also lost some who were not willing to relocate.
    - einpoklum 2y ago
      That's really too bad, and not fair to the Russian developers. More 'collateral damage' from the NATO-Russia conflict.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Yeah, it sucks that Putin decided to invade a sovereign nation that was home to a bunch of JetBrains employees. His war has turned the world upside down in a lot of ways, and I really do feel for the Russians and Ukrainians who he's dragged down with him. I have coworkers who regularly have to take shelter from his bombing campaigns.
      - exceptione 2y ago
        Ukraine is not part of Nato, but that would have been a good way to avoid 'conflict'.

pjmlp 2y ago

It is the new Borland, hopefully they won't follow into the Inprise phase.

princevegeta89 2y ago

This company has always impressed me from the get-go. I started my journey with IntelliJ, and it was the best IDE I ever put my hands on. And ever since then, I kept using their other IDEs as well. Somehow VS Code tried to swing me away from it, but it just never ever came close to whatever JetBrains could offer. And it's only going to keep getting better. It's great that it's now free for non-commercial usage. And when I really work on projects that make money, I don't mind paying $100 a year anyway.

gspencley 2y ago
I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode. A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free. I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost. I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  I prefer VSCode not mainly directly because it is free, but because a side effect of it being free is that it has support in its exosystem (often, but not always, also free) for everything I want to do, usually well before commercial IDEs. There are some things some commercial IDEs do better for some of the things I do... but none of them have the breadth of functionality in the VSCode ecosystem, and there is value to not switching IDEs for different tasks. And there are plenty of things where the best tool I’ve found is in the VSCode ecosystem, not a commercial IDE.
  - princevegeta89 2y ago

mattgreenrocks 2y ago

Thankfully, most developers aren't like the vocal minority on certain sites (cough) that allege they could write something in a weekend and thus they shouldn't pay for it.

mirekrusin 2y ago

Sadly developers don't have buying power. Microsoft is good example of company which understands it and lobbies its presence through channels that do make those cross company decisions.

lolinder 2y ago
I just pay for a license myself for both work and personal use [0]. I personally have enough buying power to afford it, and it's more than paid for itself over the years by giving me a leg up over coworkers who try to make do with free tools. People I work with think I have some superhuman ability to navigate, understand, and modify huge codebases and don't believe me when I tell them that it's just because I learned how to use JetBrains IDEs fluently. [0] This is explicitly allowed: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-I-use-my-personal-license-at-work-and-at-home https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-...
- mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
  Does your workplace explicitly allow you to use personal software on work equipment, or do you just not mention it and hope nobody notices? Just curious, as not all places would allow this.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yes, devs are explicitly allowed to use any editor they want. I'm not the only one who brings my own JetBrains, but I'm in a tiny minority.
    - jmb99 2y ago
      This is not common, at least from my experience (in western companies). Even if devs have root (not a given), the policy is generally that employees cannot use paid software that the company hasn’t licensed

MangoCoffee 2y ago

I do pay for software, even subpar ones like Telerik's controls, for a while. I used to think I'd just use free open-source software until I became a developer myself. Now, I believe people should be compensated for their work, even open-source developers who contribute their time and skills for free. I think you meant Enterprise software that can cost a lot. a developer can't afford that.

corytheboyd 2y ago

This isn’t a rebuttal, just my complementary $0.02 on top. It’s more complicated than “developers are cheap”. They understand software complexity, and when paying is justified. They know what a clear online grift looks like. They have and make free software. I’m happy to pay the JetBrains subscription because it’s actually good enough to warrant the price. You can’t trick a carpenter into buying a poorly build and/or overpriced cabinet by putting a fancy handle on it.

mathverse 2y ago

They are a russian company. Russians despite their evil empire are smart and capable people.

SkiFire13 2y ago
It was founded by russian nationals but the company is formally czech and is more connected to the west than to Russia.
- mathverse 2y ago
  The majority of employees and C-level are russians. It is a Russian company.
charkubi 2y ago
Czech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains
- mathverse 2y ago
  Majority of employees are russians including the C level
weaksauce 2y ago
they aren't a russian company. they were founded in the czech republic... they may have been a country that was aligned ideologically with the ussr during the cold war but that's not the same as being russian. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai... > The Czech Republic is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the OECD, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Visegrád Group.
- mathverse 2y ago
  The company is not czech. Russians are an overwhelming majority of the employees.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]