Comment by kevindong

True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse for Windows users, who bought licenses (on my advice, sometimes...) for a thing that realistically speaking never came out of beta. To have a usable product to begin with, they suddenly needed to pay for a subscription. There was zero response to my email explaining this, so there's that. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives.

>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth

This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true.

When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended.

In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version.

For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter.

EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.

I'm amazed you think that way. It's a huge step down, and incredibly customer hostile. I stopped giving JetBrains money when they switched. If there's no perpetual licence, I'm not buying.

In the old world, you bought the latest version, got upgrades for a year - sometimes more, then got a discount on upgrading come a newer version. At any time you stopped paying you kept the latest software, in sync with everyone else. You'd slowly move out of step.

In JetBrain's fabulous con you pay a sub for the latest, and if you decide to stop paying - almost certainly having paid markedly more during the duration of your sub than under the old model - you get shunted to an older version, instantly putting you at least a year out of step with everyone else.

This is a terrible terrible business model despite good intentions. Let me explain... Vast majority of developers who can pay are living in corporate world where you need to approve expenses each time charge is made. Subscription model is especially bad in that world because PO approvals for subscriptions are usually very hard, at least requiring additional justifications + process barriers. Most folks would just rather not do it or find alternatives. I've seen this first hand even when folks are very fond of product.

A far better licencing model is to have one time charge and free upgrades for a year followed by nagging that can be turned off. This would have exact same effect but much easier to have purchase orders pass throughs in big company rule books.

JetBrains have far more potential than $270M. One of the easiest thing they can do is to allow users in same companies to form user groups on their website. They can then approach those companies to buy site licenses with list of all these supportive users at those companies. They can then evangelize to users within same companies who are not yet using their products. This would make sure their subscription churn is lowered due to individual developers.

I understand the business reason for the licensing model so I don't really hold it against them, but after a couple years of 'Oh, you want fixes for these bugs we introduced recently? You'll have to buy another 12 months' where they constantly kept breaking new things when landing important fixes, I got fed up with the treadmill and just stopped using their products (in my case, ReSharper and dotTrace). I'd get problems like "having ReSharper for C# installed breaks VC++ compiles" (yes, really) and very often they'd just close the bugs outright or tell me the fix was only in the upcoming paid version with its own new bugs.

I feel like this is the downside to the subscription license model - if you want to use the product at all you have to keep paying unless the version you've currently got is somehow perfect. And in the case of JetBrains products I've used, it is not. I wish companies like this offered something like an LTS branch where I could pay (subscription even!) for a version that just actually works instead of constantly having to put up with new features/bugs just to get fixes for workflow issues.

Honestly, I don't really have a problem with subscriptions generally if it's a product that I use regularly. (Modulo "reasonable" pricing of course.) Where I have an issue is when I need a product I rarely use any longer to open an existing file or do some once in a blue moon task.

At some point, software stops working with OS upgrades etc. anyway and I can deal with that. But I don't want to pay a subscription for something I use a couple times of year and don't need the latest version of.

You also get loyalty discounts on your subscription!

After year three even their "everything" licence feels affordable for a working dev. (€649 for the first year, €389 by year three: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#commercial?billing=yearly )

I wish more companies did this.

If I remember correctly when they first announced they were moving to a subscription based model a few years ago years ago there was a backlash from customers and they listened to customer complaints and modified the model to be what it is today. Another plus to them in my book for doing that.

Same here. I wish everyone company with a subscription based licensing model did it this way. It should be noted though, when Jetbrains initially decided to move to this type of licensing, it was a bit different and they got a lot of backlash from existing users (including myself), but credit to them for listening and amending it to something better for customers.

I've been a happy customer and Resharper user for many years and it makes my life much better, so it's great to see the company doing well.

Totally agree. I thought Adobe's offer would be just as good until I cancelled early and got bit in the arse. I basically paid more money to cancel than what I would have paid if I left the sub open, and of course I lost access once I did cancel. Total asshole design there.

I go back to JetBrains and now I basically have to use their IDE because my company does, and it's not very easy to get the same kind of experience with Java with Vim or Emacs.

I'm using CLion to help me learn C++ because it knows C++ better than I do (and on a Mac I'm not using Xcode for writing C++, only building it). For £10-£20 a month, that is discounted every 12 months, with full ownership of the last version you had... it's great. They seem to handle it a lot better than Sketch as well, who will force you to find the download page for old versions. IntelliJ just seems to give you what your license allows.

I'd still go back to emacs in a pinch but I'm not proficient enough with C++ or Java and those ecosystems to know how to set my environment up.

JetBrains seem to have a pretty fair and solid strategy and it must be doing well enough for them to expand their IDE-base so far.

I'm curious about the counterfactual here. If they had a VC on their board, they may have been "gently guided" towards a pure subscription model since SaaS valuations are much higher.

But, it sounds like a pure switch to SaaS would have alienated customers and perhaps would have forced more users to seek alternatives, and we might not have seen the business as this scale today.

Wonder if this was the optimal move at the time.

As others have mentioned, the fallback license is for the point releases you have paid 12 months for, not the most recent release during your subscription (which is what your comment suggests).

It’s also worth noting that the requirement is 12 consecutive months. You can’t have any breaks so you need to be actively subscribed to take advantage of this.

It’s not the best solution (I am a fan of pay for a year (prepaid or monthly) and you get 12 months of updates where you keep all of them), but it’s a good compromise in the era of SaaS. And a compromise I’m willing to make for their IDEs.

That didn't happen by what they tried to push. This happened because there was lots of developers threatening to walk over a pure subscription model.

The thing I like is that their stuff makes it easier to develop and is reasonably priced.

If your company won’t pay for it you can buy a personal subscription cheaply.

Also the core of their main product, IntelliJ IDEA, is open source. And it's actually pretty usable for Java and Scala development for example, which is my interest in it.

The Ultimate version comes with bells and whistles, but truth be told I'm only paying for it because of how happy I am with it.

Interesting... the problem with this model is that investors / the market value SaaS revenue way higher than revenue from perpetual licenses, for a variety of reasons. Although I guess that doesn't matter when you're not raising or public :)

I was using their RubyMine editor for a few years and really liked it but then I switched jobs and ended up using vscodium and found it did basically everything I needed but was free.

I think Sketch does this and I agree, it's the way it should be.

That's an absolutely brilliant pricing model. I love it.