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Comment by moyix

10 years ago

Their main competitor is IDA Pro, which goes for $1129 for its "standard" edition. There is a version of IDA Pro that's only $589, but it supports only 32-bit code.

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moyix

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tptacek  10 years ago

It is very easy to make an argument that IDA Pro is so fantastically underpriced that it has killed the market for these kinds of tools by setting a bad price point.

I'm sure there are tons of random people on HN that would love to learn more about RE by tinkering with tools like this, or maybe even that have $50 worth of work to throw at it. But in the real world, most of the market for IDA Pro is made by consultants and in-house security teams, all of whom realize something far closer to $100,000 in value from IDA, annually, than $3999.

Meanwhile, if you want to sell a reversing tool that integrates with IDA --- something like BinNavi or BinDiff --- you have to cope with IDA's $3999 price point. Whatever you sell will inevitably have to be cheaper than that. Result: most of the product talent in this space goes to appliances that sell for $50,000 a pop and only to companies that will buy 6+ boxes in a pilot.

Binary Ninja is cheap. But it's also a labor of love.

  • dsacco  10 years ago

    Seconded. I have a reverse engineering practice with my consultancy. Investing ~$5000 into IDA tooling has returned over $100k for me this year. Granted, it helps that this investment is tax deductible for me.

    People who say that IDA Pro is expensive are not HexRays' primary market, or they have not been professionally reversing software for very long. The product is just phenomenally cheap from a value-added perspective. Open source alternatives are pretty good, and if you're focusing on iOS applications Hopper is nice, but for a one-stop shop on all platforms with excellent support and superlative features, IDA easily kills the competition.

    My reverse engineering practice routinely returns more than my AppSec practice on fewer engagements. That's also just for reverse engineering, not for specialties involving reverse engineering (such as blackbox cryptanalysis, malware analysis, blackbox binary auditing, exploit development, etc).

  • statictype  10 years ago

    Trying to understand as someone who's not a security professional:

    Is IDA like Visual Studio or XCode - you basically need this to do your work - or is it more like Sublime Text or Text Mate or Github - boosts productivity but many people get by without it?

  • tedunangst  10 years ago

    It's not unheard of for a plugin to exceed the base price, is it? Happens with graphics software I believe.

SXX  10 years ago

Cost of IDA is nothing. Actual problem is that you can't really buy it at all if you're not well-known expert or AV company employee. Plenty of people would be happy to buy it, but they can't.

  • dsacco  10 years ago

    >>Actual problem is that you can't really buy it at all if you're not well-known expert or AV company employee. Plenty of people would be happy to buy it, but they can't.

    This is patently false. You can buy all HexRays products online.[1] I've done it myself. I'm confused as to why you're claiming this.

    [1]: https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi

    • delroth  10 years ago

      To add yet another data point: Hex-Rays refused to sell IDA to me at first (I quote: "Please contact us from your corporate email address for verification. We do not deliver to free email accounts."). I had to use my @google.com address to confirm I am a Google employee even though this is a personal license!

    • SXX  10 years ago

      Lucky you then. They simply not selling it to someone who reverse engineer old games for instance. Or anyone who decide to not send them scan of their passport and provide any other weird proof of identify.

      PS: Just in case not everyone live in first world countries or being employee of well known companies. While it's possible to buy almost any software just fine IDA have extremely weird policies.

      2 replies →

  • cynix  10 years ago

    > Actual problem is that you can't really buy it at all if you're not well-known expert or AV company employee.

    I was able to purchase a license for IDA Pro, I'm not an expert in the field and my job is not even remotely related to reverse engineering.