How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

I'd point out that "software subscriptions" and "software keeps working even if you don't pay" can both be in place.

For something like this, it's not a half-bad business relationship; the incentives are well aligned for everybody.

For something as fundamental as build software, I'd be nervous about committing to anything where whether I can use the software I already have in two years is in somebody else's hands. I really want to be able to squirrel away complete build environments and know I can build the thing I sold two years ago again if I have to release a "my business may die if I don't" update. Remember, in two years, the "somebody else" may not exist to give me permission. Then what?

The incentives here aren't so good if access to the software is actively being removed for non-payment... the vendor is extracting small values from their customers by forcing their customers to take hidden, but actually quite staggeringly enormous, business risks.

Everyone I've talked to wanted a slight pricing model change with JetBrains, myself included, but nobody wanted a subscription service.

It is just that, often you find yourself wanting PHPStorm, and PyCharms, but that's it. A simple buy one-full-price-half-off-second scheme would have got people like me to say, "yeah sure, let's buy up PyCharms this weekend. Why not?"

> How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation?

The delta would be marginal. People just love to complain about change.

I purchase a lot of commercial IntelliJ/WebStorm licenses for my company. Previously, the cost was $499/y for new employees, $299/y for existing employees. Now it looks like it will be a flat $319/y for everyone. Eh, I'm OK with that. Now there's also upfront volume discounts, whereas previously you had to talk to sales. In some ways it's simpler for me, and the pricing is in line with other per-dev SaaS costs we have. Consider what you pay for a software Engineer and the productivity gains, personally it's a no-brainer for me. It's the best Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript etc. IDE by far.

With this change, I hope JetBrains takes the opportunity to switch from the big-bang yearly releases to just a continuous stream of improvements. In some ways they've already been moving in the this direction, they've added some pretty great improvements to point releases this year (React/JSX, TypeScript etc. comes to mind). This will eliminate release timing anxiety on both sides (customers optimizing when the best time to buy is, and JetBrains deciding if releasing major new functionality now vs in the next big-bang release), and lets the company ship improvements as fast as possible.

This isn't even Software-as-a-Service. Most companies that offer SaaS are HOSTING the software and thus incurring ongoing monthly costs. The Service part is that the purchaser doesn't have to install the software on their own machines, pay for nor update servers, etc. Selling rights to use [but not own] software on a monthly basis should be called RtpS - Rent-to-pwned-Software (cause you're pwned, you'll never own it)