Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devs almost always lack any kind of purchase authority. Any tool that appeals to devs needs to appeal to their management more, either showing some kind of cost savings over existing tools, increased dev productivity, or the new fangled "dev experience" where this tool, by shear awesomeness, will let devs put aside the low salary, process hell, and keep them employed.
I understand that's Kite's perspective (and yours -- "purchasing won't pay for this"), but devs are not paid meager salaries in general, and definitely might care about their code quality when it's put out in 'public' whether that be internal repos, or github. Payscale estimates average engineering salary as having between $3,000 and $7,000 a month more in disposable income over writers -- and I would guess almost ev…
Perhaps an under-appreciated perspective – most of us don't come from families that were paid the sort of salaries we get; and consequently we are more likely to be irrationally stingy about money as a result of having grown up (relatively) poor. I know that $200/year is not a significant cost at my salary; but I do remember a time when that would have been totally out of reach for me.
And also there's the fairness aspect – do I want to be participating in a system where only rich devs can get access to good tools? Yes, I understand that the world is not fair and already works that way, but I should probably not perpetuate that system; and instead, make work pay for it.