Live data from Hacker News

JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

twitter.com

571–580 of 680 posts

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#571

I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you…

True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse…

It’s interesting to see quite a few others in here had the same struggle with upgrading to tower 3 as I had a year (or 2?) ago. Then I moved to vscode with it’s git integration and that works just as good.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#572
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least some of Jetbrains' offerings are open source. If you have security concerns, you may be able to alleviate some of them by your own examination. I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry.

> I'd also encourage you to consider separating your concerns about the Russian government and individuals living in Russia, just as you might other governments and their citizenry. That's a big ask, because the Russian government's relationship with its citizenry is very different from the relationship of a free country's government with its citizens. Namely, I am confident that there is substantially zero risk that…

How quickly you forgot Edward Snowden.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#573
post #41

The single most feature I hate about their products is their reliance on JVM, which makes them memory hungry and slow on older machines. :)

> which makes them memory hungry and slow on older machines I doubt this is even remotely true. The JVM (and the CLR, and every modern runtime) is a very well-tuned machine that performs well. Language services make heavy use of system resources. It's effectively compiling your code as a service whenever you need it, which is a lot.

IDEA Ultimate can definitely be heavy on memory. It's currently using 3.5GB with one project/10 file tabs open. It's literally part of the reason I use a machine with 64GB of RAM (IDEA with a couple of projects open, plus 5-10 VMs = a metric fuck ton of memory used).

But how much of that is specifically because of the JVM and how much is just because of what it is, cannot be compared fairly IMO, because as I said in another sub-thread, theres literally nothing that has the same level of functionality across so many languages and platforms.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#574

I agree with many of the other posters: JetBrains has succeeded because their products are generally awesome, and I am a happy personal subscriber. People should especially remember what the Java IDE landscape looked like when they first came out with IntelliJ: using IntelliJ after using NetBeans or Eclipse was like using Google for the first time after being familiar with AltaVista - it was just a night and day bett…

>remember what the Java IDE landscape looked like when they first came out with IntelliJ: using IntelliJ after using NetBeans or Eclipse was like using Google for the first time after being familiar with AltaVista You're skipping over several commercial Java IDEs available when IntelliJ first came out: Most notably, Borland JBuilder, which was an excellent product. Symantec had Visual Cafe as well, which was not real…

> Most notably, Borland JBuilder, which was an excellent product.

I switched from JBuilder to IntelliJ in 2002 I think.

JBuilder was good but on oh so expensive, if you wanted the full-featured version! IIRC it was 5 or 10 times the price of IntelliJ.

What blew me away when I tried IntelliJ for the first time, in comparison to JBuilder, was the refactoring tools. For the first time I felt I could safely rename classes and methods and move classes without manually searching my codebase.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#575

I'm a big fan of the way JetBrains sells their licenses. Like a lot of software companies nowadays, they only sell licenses on a subscription basis. But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you…

I'm curious about the counterfactual here. If they had a VC on their board, they may have been "gently guided" towards a pure subscription model since SaaS valuations are much higher.

But, it sounds like a pure switch to SaaS would have alienated customers and perhaps would have forced more users to seek alternatives, and we might not have seen the business as this scale today.

Wonder if this was the optimal move at the time.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#576
post #568
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL is GPL. If their thing isn't, they are in violation. They now have deep pockets. For anything that had no license spelled out, they had and have no license to use it at all. To be clear: they appear to have no license to distribute your code today, and owe you damages for all the distribution they have done thus far that was not licensed.

To add, if they are still selling it today then it may reset any statue of limitations. I would recommend that you talk to a lawyer, and get them to draft Jetbrains a letter.

There is no statute of limitations for copyright violation, to my knowledge. I gather Germany imposes some pretty draconian time limits for initiating enforcement, but have not heard of others.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#577
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, tried that. Multiple times. IntelliJ just doesn't handle it performance wise, and it feels awkward because IntelliJ just isn't designed as well for working on multiple projects simultaneously. It's probably great for people working on a single project with some dependencies (modules). IntelliJ really wants you to open a project, work on it, then you close it and open the next project. That doesn't fit me. Doesn…

If the project share code that you want to refactor, then in Intellij's terminology they are modules, not projects Import each one individually as a new module in a root project, and everything will be hunky dory. A "module" in this case is just an atomic closure of some sort. I've got plenty of Intellij projects with >50 modules, each of which are their own git repository, just fine.

You kind of described the exact problem there. You have "plenty of projects with >50 modules". I don't have "plenty of workspaces", just one that contains all my "plenty of projects", almost all of which then depend in some way on a tree of hierarchies also within that workspace.

There are no islands. There's now switching between anything. It's just all my code and dependencies, always open and accessible and instantly available.

Creating a new project in Eclipse then requires no importing of modules on my part, I just create a new project, it's in my workspace and voila—it's now an integral part of my universe of code.

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True; that's the only subscription model I find acceptable for software that hardly changes in meaningful ways. For example, I refuse to upgrade Git Tower to version 3 as a protest against fournova's new licensing. Up to that point, I was a loyal customer and product advocate, basically buying every upgrade anyway, but by my own choice. Instead, I'll be on version 2 "forever", despite all its flaws. It was even worse…

I also switched from Tower when they introduced subscription pricing. My current git setup: - Git Fork for committing, pushing - P4 Merge for resolving conflicts (it's not a pretty app, but the fantastic feature set more than makes up for the non-native look) - GitUp for reordering, editing and splitting commits - Command line for the rare things the GUIs can't do None of those cost money and I don't understand how t…

Cool ! Git fork looks quite like GitX (which is unfortunately not indevelopment anymore) !

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#579
post #454
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, tried that. Multiple times. IntelliJ just doesn't handle it performance wise, and it feels awkward because IntelliJ just isn't designed as well for working on multiple projects simultaneously. It's probably great for people working on a single project with some dependencies (modules). IntelliJ really wants you to open a project, work on it, then you close it and open the next project. That doesn't fit me. Doesn…

I think it’s interesting that this issue was exactly why I switched away from Eclipse years ago. The performance was atrocious. I guess that pushed them to improve ;)

Yeah, "modern Eclipse" is a very different beast from "several years ago Eclipse", that also goes for performance.

As I said in a parent, I'm very certain the competition from IntelliJ got them off their asses :).

Re: JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised

#580
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also tried their CLion and was somewhat disappointed. Slow in places, sometime stalls, bugs here and there. Ended up using CodeLite and Qt designer

One thing I've found with CLion is that you really, really want to edit the JVM settings for the IDE. By default it starts with a 2GB memory limit for the JVM, which even for small projects will severely drag down performance, e.g. my MBP would run very hot, spin the fans and the IDE would get very laggy. Increasing the JVM settings to allocate 8GB completely solved this.

Sorry but I have other uses for RAM then to feed sloppy environments.
Post reply on HN