Ask HN: Why is Sublime Text so expensive and who pays for licenses? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by tedmiston » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 3:49 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #18

Kepler-431c wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-dont-use-software-that-cost... In the Windows culture there is also the MSDN factor where once you get an MSDN subscription you have licenses for an insane number of Microsoft product so your SQL Server and Visual Studio and ... are all covered under one price. You are paying for it, but not for an application at a time, so why go with some vendor that wants more money?

And for students, MSDNAA covers it all (except Office) for free.

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

#22

Post by meekins » Fri, Oct 06, 2017, 10:44 AM UTC

zJayv wrote: post #17

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…

My employer pays for my tools. Sublime is however one of the few paid tools that I use also on my spare time so I actually paid the price from my own pocket to ensure the license isn't tied to my employer in case I switch jobs. I consider it well worth the price and feel I have actually "bought" something that I can have forever instead of shelling out money to some subscription sinkhole.

IMO if you want to get paid for building an editor it's an excellent business decision to set the price above "peanuts" level - it's still good value for money as a professional tool that you have had months to evaluate for free. Recurring subscription fees might make both corporate users and hobbyists hesitate. For corporate users the problem is wasted money for underutilized subscriptions and license management hell, for hobbyists it's the fact that some people (like me) might go several months without hacking on a side project and when an user suspends a subscription it's always a risk the user won't come back.

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

#23

Post by 1123581321 » Sun, Oct 08, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

No, the price needs to be high enough that sales support the developer. $50-100 is appropriate for a tool like Sublime. (I paid when it was $70 and previously paid $50 for Textmate.)

Lowering the cost to $5-20 would convert hardly any of the tire kickers and make people who would have paid $80 nervous about the longevity of the company supporting the product.