Ask HN: Why is Sublime Text so expensive and who pays for licenses?

If you use Sublime Text instead of the countless quite usable - if perhaps not as good - text editors out there chances are you use it professionally.

For someone using such a tool professionally and earning good money while doing so $80 already is a ridiculously low price.

There are professionals though who for reasons I never quite seemed to understand aren't willing to pay for the tools they use. Absurdly enough this habit is particularly common with developers and companies making money by selling software.

To them 60 USD less wouldn't make a difference. They would never buy the product anyway. So, lowering the price doesn't make any sense at all.

This particular example is just one instance of a more general, widespread fallacy in the software industry: Because software can essentially be copied and reproduced for free people seem to think that the tools used for creating that software have to be available for free as well (many open source tools indeed coming for free doesn't exactly help in this case either).

Many organisations have no qualms with wasting a huge amount of employee time on meetings or on engineers being less productive because they use inadequate or sub-par tools. Yet at the same time the same organisations often tend to make a huge fuss about buying tools that cost a tiny fraction of that waste of time while helping with eliminating that waste.

> try raising your rates on your next project

That should hardly be necessary! I live on probably 1/10 of the average (OECD) developer salary as I intensely dislike working so minimise it. Yet I'd have no problem paying for ST. For people living on truly minimal salaries in developing countries, I'd say just use it unlicensed and make a genuine mental promise to buy a license if/when you can afford it. It's hard to imagine the ST developer would object.

It's basically force-of-habit. Many of us grew up in the "windows era" where piracy was just the thing that was done.

It takes posts such as yours to get people to snap out of it.

clarifications

question based on premises:

- many people use Sublime for free

- many people don't pay bc the asking price is $80 and bc VS Code and are free

- many people would pay if price was lower

what I'm curious to know:

- for people that do pay, are they paying for personal use or bc their company pays? --> this is what I'm really getting at, whether Sublime's revenue stream comes from corporate or fans of the project

what I'm not assuming

- that $80 is expensive is an absolute sense [as Toast_25 points out, bargin for product value * usage] but rather comparatively expensive (vs. other v good and completely free editors out there)

- that Sublime is making an incorrect business decision (I suspect they'd have more people paying if contributions via Paypal or Patreon were available but also suspect this would have minimal revenue impact, esp. if they maintained the current sales price)

- that Sublime owes a cheaper price to its user based (esp. given that it's providing an awesome product for, again, free)

I use Sublime every day and have for the last year. Before that, I was using free editors that were ok but had some annoying weaknesses. $80 doesn't seem like all that much for a professional tool that I use to help make my living every single day. Compare this to my neighbor, a professional mechanic who has $150k invested in SnapOn tools - and makes less money than I do.