Comment by 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.
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).
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?
It's more like Visual Studio than Sublime Text.
It's not unheard of for a plugin to exceed the base price, is it? Happens with graphics software I believe.