IDEA is Now Enterprisey
It’s official, JetBrains raised the price on IDEA. While they claim they have not raised prices in 5 years, this is not the complete story.
Remember back in the good ol’ days when you could count on a significant personal license discount every Easter? I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen last year.
And speaking of price increases, it used to be true that when you bought IDEA, you got the next major upgrade for free. Then, you had to pay for the version after that. But now it seems like you have to pay for every single upgrade if you wish to stay current.
And finally, upgrades come more frequently than ever before. IDEA is pretty much a yearly subscription service. So while they can say prices have not changed in 5 years, I’m not buying it. (literally)
Sure, you don’t have to buy every upgrade. But when you wish to move to new versions of other tools, like Subversion, you might have little choice but to upgrade IDEA or move to a new IDE. My biggest disappointment is the observation that IDEA is simply out of my reach…I cannot justify the cost. Thus, I still use IDEA 6 at home and work. Upgrading to IDEA 7 (and beyond?) is not an option where I work. Yearly, costly upgrades for every developer in the department will not fly.
Perhaps if I worked at some giant nameless corporation (you know, an “enterprise”), getting upgrades would be easier. Then again, companies like that already pay a lot more for Rational products.
For me, I don’t mind regularly paying the upgrade price of my Personal license. IDEA is a professional tool for me, like a carpenter’s power saws and nail guns. Compared with what the carpenter pays, I’m getting off cheaply. Even more so when you consider the *percentage* of my income that goes toward professional tools.
If IDEA saves me a couple of hours of work during the year or so that each upgrade lasts, it’s paid for itself. I’m convinced that it saves me a whale of a lot more than that.
They didn’t raise the personal license price. I don’t work for a big company and I bought IDEA myself. So, you could always upgrade, and you owe it to yourself if you are serious about Java/Groovy development since it’s the best IDE out there.
How about that?
I’ve owned my hammer since 1985.
My IDEA license is the best money I spend every year. IDEA taught me generics, GWT, groovy and grails, new tag libraries and XML/DB schema’s… it has helped me develop a better understanding of javascript and css since I’ve actually started caring about those technologies… To me, new versions of IDEA aren’t just upgrades of a tool, they are upgrades of my entire process and the universe of technologies which I can quickly develop exposure to and add them to my tool bag (generics, groovy) or not (grails).. That’s not to say I don’t or can’t learn thing outside the IDEA sandbox.. but I’m significantly more likely to check something out when there is a feature (or sometimes a plugin) for it in IDEA.
I like the carpenter/tool analogy too…
“I’ve owned my hammer since 1985.”
http://www.toolbarn.com/product/makita/6834/
http://www.contractorsdirect.com/CST-Berger-Lasermark-MP5
I’ll see your hammer and raise you some modern professional equipment… time is money.
dont be so cheap, you should be happy that your IDE is getting better and more expensive(isnt that the most cool thing about IDEA?)
i think personal license is reasonable.
Just a couple of clarifications.
First, the 50% discount for personal licenses was indeed an Easter only offer a few years ago. Now it’s available all the time. Does this really count as “raising the price”?
Second, I don’t think our upgrade policy ever changed. You get the next version for free if you buy a license a couple of months before the release of the next version. Otherwise you need to buy the upgrade.
Finally, the only time our upgrade cycle was not yearly was the 4.0/4.5/5.0 series of releases which took about 1.5 years. All other major versions were released about a year, or less, after the previous one.
So it’s not really that bad.
I personally think the price of IntelliJ IDEA is worth it - I’ve been a IDEA user, both personally and professionally since the early days of v2.x and IDEA has made me measurably more efficient. So I continue to buy a license for my personal use at home and buy licenses for my development team at work. And so the $100 increase is not that big a deal for a small company to buy - And there are always personal discounts available for upgrades as the newer version get closer to shipping. I have friends that skip every other version of IDEA for their personal use - Maybe that’s an approach that could work.
Not to start a religious war here but I dabble with Eclipse and NetBeans on the side to see how the other half lives and while NetBeans is getting pretty close, IMHO IDEA is still the BEST IDE out there in the market place. Some day NetBeans may catch up - I guess only time will tell. So man-up and get your IDEA upgrade
Your graph is quite misleading. You are charting the value of the dollar going down and the price of IDEA going up, as if they combine. That’s simply not true. Either one by itself is valid, but implying that they combine is not.
As to the price: construction companies provide tools for their employees. Architecture firms provide the design software for their employees. Law firms provide access to legal databases for their employees. Hospitals provide the equipment used by doctors and nurses. Have your employer to buy the upgrade.
Hey now, they’re the ones saying they raised the price because the dollar is weak. The root of my frustration is that my employer will NOT buy upgrades any more due to the cost.
Jetbrains is trying to move upmarket as the Java IDE is more of a commodity than ever. Borland found this out the hard way. TeamCity is another product in a commodity market. So Jetbrains has no choice but to raise prices when demand goes down. This is simple economics. The story about the weak dollar is just that — a story.
Personally, I did purchase IDEA 7 and have found it slow and not worth the upgrade. I find more and more tools do not work (or do not work well) with IDEA, but only Eclipse. I think IDEA peaked at version 5 when it offered a strong value proposition vs. Eclipse.
All the Java work I do today, I do using Eclipse. One, the tool support is there. Two, the native text rendering is far easier on my eyes. And three, it’s free.
You can make IDEA’s fonts look better as described here: http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2007/10/14/howto-configure-idea-fonts/
If I recall correctly, the Easter special price used to be $149
IntelliJ IDEA crowd is becoming more like Mac’s.
They turn into cultists.
I should be happy that IDEA getting better and more expensive?
What a joke!
According to The Wikipedia, JetBrains is a Czech company so the graph is relevant.
The company is enjoying success and probably trying to leverage recent support for Groovy.
IMO, the questions are: is this price gouging, or a monopoly? Clearly, neither.
The Java community is very fortunate to have such a rich competition between free and commercial IDEs.
An interesting question is: how do Java developers convince reluctant employers that Idea is worth the increased price?
http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/02/10/idea-is-now-enterprisey/#comment-6145
why is my comment still “awaiting moderation.” ?
there it is
thanks.
Your comment had two links so WordPress thought it was spam. I rarely check the moderation queue because so few are marked spam. Unfortunately due to the way ReCAPTCHA works, if I turn on the wordpress feature to notify me via email of all comments held in moderation, I get tons of junk mails from comments automatically removed by ReCAPTCHA.