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

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

#131

Post by Latty »

gdulli wrote: post #123

Personally, they had lost my goodwill already with their old upgrade policy. If you bought a license on 01/2014, it expired on 12/2014, and you didn't need the product again until 04/2015, the upgrade you purchase in April begins on 01/2015, retroactively beginning after the end of the previous license. So you don't get the full 12 months they charge you for. When I realized that it was the end of my support for them…

Why would it work another way? You are paying to extend your old license, of course it carries on from when it finished. If you want a year from the present moment, that's not an extension, it's a new purchase. Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.

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

#132

Post by andylei »

zeveb wrote: post #126

What I don't get is why a developer would ever use proprietary software in the first place. I code—it's what I do. I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing them where they aren't, but I want to be able to improve them for my use cases. Who else in the world is as capable at knowing what I need as…me? If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the…

sometimes the proprietary software is better at what it does, which outweighs other drawbacks

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

#133

Post by radicalbyte »

It looks like they're going to review the changes:

http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/04/we-are-listening

Personally I would find the pricing more reasonable if the "individual developer" licenses could be used by small businesses and freelancers.

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

#134

Post by trebor »

My first reaction to this is gritting my teeth. But I went and looked and did the math. And I noticed that current users with a perpetual license (the "old" licensing model) can upgrade to the new pricing for the old renewal cost. EG:

    PHPStorm renewal $49 (personal)
    PHPStorm SaaS $49/year (from existing license, doesn't change)
    PHPStorm SaaS $79/year (promo)
    PHPStorm SaaS $99/year (after Jan 31st 2016)
> Yearly plan special offer for customers who have purchased a perpetual license. Offer to be redeemed no later than Jan 1, 2017.

For the terms of that upgrade: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204249752-What...

> 1. The offer is available to customers with or without upgrade subscriptions regardless of the subscription status, provided a customer switches their existing licenses to the new model before January 1, 2017

> 2. The offer only applies to switching existing licenses to the new model. Purchases for additional users will fall under the standard pricing

> 3. Once the offer is used, the special price is available indefinitely until payments are canceled or paused.

Emphasis mine.

Looks like an irritating change, perhaps, but for existing customers you can lock your price in at its current renewal rate for the smaller products. The downside is that you will be renewing yearly, because if you pause the payment your rate might change.

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

#135

Post by manigandham »

zeveb wrote: post #126

What I don't get is why a developer would ever use proprietary software in the first place. I code—it's what I do. I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing them where they aren't, but I want to be able to improve them for my use cases. Who else in the world is as capable at knowing what I need as…me? If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the…

Please... some of us need to get work done and are perfectly happy to pay someone else to give us good quality products.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's worth doing yourself.

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

#136

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

nadams wrote: post #112
mikeash wrote: post #66

What bugs me about this is when I asked them about the change on Twitter and they kept trying to blow smoke up my butt about how it's better for everyone. Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices? Then they said it's better because you can jump in and out at will. Only need Product X for a month? Only pay for a month. Which is fi…

> Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices? Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan) (All renewal at current license price) PHPStorm - $129 PyCharm - $99 ReSharper Ultimate - $600 (no renewal price) If I were to purchase that with their old license it would cost me $828, with the new pl…

In that example, you have someone working regularly enough in PHP, Python and .Net (Resharper) to appreciate the JetBrains tools. I'm sure it happens, but it doesn't seem to be the usual case to me.

edit But looking at the pricing page ( https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/ ), a pure C# dev could just get "ReSharper Ultimate" for £79 Per year, or "ReSharper" for £71 per year, which I think is not much different from the current price?

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

#137

Post by cool-RR »

I see a lot of whining in this thread. If you think that an increase of $100/year in the price of a tool that you use every day, for, say, at least 5 hours daily as part of your job as software developer as a meaningful price increase, than the cost of your IDE is not close to being your biggest problem.

Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.

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

#138

Post by Rezo »

jrs235 wrote: post #109

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…

JetBrains produces a continuous stream of improvements to all of their tools, previously they would have to artificially hold some of the bigger changes back to justify the next big yearly version number increase. With subscriptions, this is no longer necessary, everyone can have the latest and greatest right away.

And I do hope the next logical step is to offer an optional fully hosted service that has feature parity with something like WebStorm. There's cloud IDEs out there, but they're lacking when compared to JetBrain's tools.

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

#139

Post by malka »

cool-RR wrote: post #137

I see a lot of whining in this thread. If you think that an increase of $100/year in the price of a tool that you use every day, for, say, at least 5 hours daily as part of your job as software developer as a meaningful price increase, than the cost of your IDE is not close to being your biggest problem. Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software de…

The price is not the problem. I simply do not want to rent the tools I use. I want to buy them.
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