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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

#161

Post by balabaster »

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…

Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...

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

#162

Post by toyg »

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…

A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.

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

#163

Post by microtonal »

fastball wrote: post #86
microtonal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum. That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their pro…

How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch .

If you want to stay on a perpetual licenses for a little longer (to see how everything pans out), you now have to buy it within two months and not at your planned upgrade term, otherwise you lose that option.

Another benefit of more time would be that in a corporation where purchases are not as simple as pulling the trigger, you have some time to do the paperwork to get the subscription approved, while still continuing in the current update scheme until then.

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

#164

Post by estefan »

estefan wrote: post #146
fastball wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contractors that work with different clients using different languages? You've never heard of someone that works with different languages at different times? Huh.

Why not just use IDEA ultimate and install different plugins per language?

@toyg (not sure why I can't reply to you so I'll reply to me instead) - really? I've never tried them. I thought Intellij was the same with the appropriate language plugin. Maybe I'll give some of them a go...

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

#165

Post by foobarbecue »

They gave me a free version of WebStorm because I'm a hobbyist open source developer. I love it, but I'm obviously not going to pay $80 a year. Does anyone know if they're going to continue having some kind of free option for non-corporate use?

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

#166

Post by kailuowang »

JetBrian used to have to improve the product significantly every major release so that people would pay for the new version. Just want to point out that by changing to the new subscription model, they no longer have that drive.

Of course there are still other reasons for innovating their product, it's just one less.

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

#167

Post by acdha »

tobltobs wrote: post #68
mkozlows wrote: post #40

I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want. For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they'll never need to b…

The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.

Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.

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

#169

Post by bbatha »

balabaster wrote: post #161
nadams wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...

Resharper ultimate is $11.99 a month or $119 a year.

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

#170

Post by balabaster »

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…

An increase of $120 is a 100% increase in what we were already paying. Perhaps $120 wasn't reasonable... and given the amount of functionality it adds to Visual Studio that it now seems like I can't live without, perhaps that's a fair assumption, but a 100% increase in cost with such little warning... that's not cool at all!
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