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Comment by 999900000999

4 days ago

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?!

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hathawsh  4 days ago

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.

  • 999900000999  4 days ago

    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.