Comment by _blk 4 days ago
Why is 20$/month absurd for something that boosts productivity? What does matlab coat nowadays? Sounds like he'd like to be able to improve it further and clients invest in that. Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads.. My opinions.
Agreed. The visualizations are very nice. I'd consider purchasing a copy for $150-$200 if it would give me one year of free updates, but I simply don't do subscription models without any kind of fallback license anymore.
I really dislike the idea of justifying eternal subscription cost models because of "ROI".
Every tool has an ROI, but you don't see photographers paying a monthly fee to use their camera, you don't see electricians paying a monthly fee to use their oscilloscope, you don't see carpenters paying a monthly fee to use their table saw, etc.
And this isn't Kickstarter - I'm not interested in investing in features/upgrades that the application might get at some point in the future, I buy software based on the feature set that it currently has.
I'm with you. I think, it will have to not just boost productivity, but it has to be an improvement over the cheaper, and very good PyCharm. Given the talking points on the home page and here, the visualizations will have to be worth it for a given use case to forego the introspection and refactoring capabilities of PyCharm.
Productivity is a very vague concept, which can't be measured easily in most cases. So it's also hard to justify a steep price. And it's not like there is no competition here. Visualizations aside, this IDE seems very generic and basic in what it offers. So chances are good that you would still use a better tool, to not lose productivity in other areas.
And most important, if you stop paying, you will lose the gain from it. If dev screws up at some point, you might lose the gain from it. It's not really clear how updates are working. Are you forced to always use the newest version? Or can you stay at a specific version for all time? This uncertain factors and other, demand that the gain from a subscription is so immense, that you are willing to take the risk. And this tool here is not there yet, maybe never will; making it hard to justify a sub.
> Absurd is people paying 80$+/month for yt tv so they can watch ads..
Youtube is an external service. You are paying for their running costs, which you create. This IDE is local, and there is no guarantee which updates will come and which benefits they will have for you. So there is no "running cost" you create for them.
Depends. MatLab's pricing structure is kind of all over the place.
That being said, I purchased a copy for personal use almost 6 years ago for around ~200 USD and guess what? I just installed it on a fresh PC a few weeks ago, and it works perfectly. No subscription necessary.
Reasonable question but I think people are just burnt out by the Silicon Valley pricing model that has proliferated everywhere.
* Most consumers now swallow a live service model and associated costs that they don’t want
* Most consumers now swallow the costs of west coast tech culture: cost of living, esoteric architectural choices, fad driven development, and hobby driven development
* Most owners of software businesses expect to get rich in a relatively short time frame
* Software is absurdly high margin if built effectively and distributed at (effectively) zero cost. Where do consumers ever see these savings when cost outpaces inflation?
* Record profits and layoffs being recorded by the broader industry
And specifically to the point of productivity tools inherently justifying nearly any price, this argument is fundamentally flawed because productivity is only measurable if it can be strictly defined and good luck with that one. Salespeople have made billions hawking that fallacy and people eat it up because American work culture fetishizes productivity.
This isn’t a critique of OP I really went down a rabbit hole exploring and appreciating this project and hope it succeeds.
The underlying business model of software is dystopian when compared to what it could be if everyone didn’t bind happiness to being cartoonishly wealthy in Menlo Park.
This in particular looks like a solo project that probably took around a year.
Say OP sells 1000 subscriptions. That's 20 thousand dollars a month. They sell 10k subs, 200k a month.
Or the project fails, and as a closed source tool I can't fork and fix issues. The only options are it becoming a multi million dollar company or abandonware.
I'd be open to it if it was 100$ with one year of free updates. But even then, I think Visual Studio( which is free for hobbyist) is the only closed source IDE I use. Everything else is open source and free.
Maybe I've been traumatized by Unity 3D, but I don't want to use a bunch of closed source tools. What if this becomes my primary dev tool, and OP decides to update the pricing.
If you're justification for a $20 subscription is that oh you're probably making six figures and this is making your job easier, then what's to stop you from pricing it at $50 a month. Why not a hundred .
Open AI has already started this bizarre slide into higher pricing tiers, I can use Deepseek or LLma3 for free, but if I'm using the most up-to-date chat GPT, I'll run into a rate limit and be told it's time to upgrade to a $200 a month service?!
I wonder if this concern could be partly alleviated through a price lock-in strategy. There could be a contract that says because the subscriber has paid for N months, that subscriber is eligible to keep paying the same price for 5-10 years, regardless of the price for other subscribers. This could incentivize people to start their subscription early.
That wouldn't stop the developer from abandoning the project though. I don't like using closed source tools when I can avoid it. Visual studio is a big exception because Microsoft will never abandon it in a million years, it's literally their flagship IDE.
The same argument can be made for the jet brains IDEs. But a closed source tool made by a solo developer just seems too risky for me, even if the OP was giving it away I'd be a little bit reluctant to use it.
I don't want to pay $20/month for something that is probably going to be mostly unchanged after I purchase. That's like paying rent for tooling. I want to own my tools not rent them.