
JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised - matt2000
https://twitter.com/chetanp/status/1205907182396395525
======
kevindong
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 also get a perpetual
license for that particular version and so on and so forth.

Their FAQ page explains it a lot better than I can:
[https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845-What...](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-)

~~~
thijsvandien
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 for Windows users, who bought licenses (on my
advice, sometimes...) for a thing that realistically speaking never came out
of beta. To have a usable product to begin with, they suddenly needed to pay
for a subscription. There was zero response to my email explaining this, so
there's that. Now I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives.

~~~
jakobegger
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 these awesome apps are all
free. I would pay for all of them, they are much better than Tower.

~~~
jtms
The terminal is the best and only git client you need and it will always be
free. You are doing yourself a disservice as a developer by not learning how
to use your terminal

~~~
hderms
I'm not sure about that in the case of git. I used the terminal UI exclusively
for a long time but it's so bizarrely designed that I've been interested in
using a GUI for a while. There are a lot of reasons a dev should learn to use
a terminal but making git more pleasant to use isn't necessarily one of them.

GUIs aren't super flexible but they are good at taking a common flow users go
through and making it stupid simple to exercise. A lot of the usage of git
should be stupid simple, with only infrequent need for complex interaction.
Obviously there are some people out there for which a GUI will never be
sufficient for their needs, but I'd argue it isn't the common case.

------
hn_throwaway_99
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 better product.

Still, I wonder if they could have been successful without funding if they
were a US or Western European company. Especially in the early days, I'm sure
the much lower salaries in Prague allowed them to be more competitive with a
lower burn rate. My point is I think their VC-less success would have been
much more difficult in a place with higher salaries and cost-of-living.

~~~
hugi
I'm an outsider fan. I've attempted to use IntelliJ on multiple occasions, but
it just can't really compete with Eclipse as far as my requirements are
concerned. But the competition from and innovation in IntelliJ has no doubt
made Eclipse better (and modern Eclipse is kind of awesome and just keeps
getting better).

~~~
chris_j
What is it about your requirements that means that IntelliJ can't compete with
Eclipse?

~~~
hugi
I'm a contractor working on many projects. Using Eclipse, I can keep my entire
universe of all projects I have deployed (about 30 of them), as well as their
dependent libraries, as well as every open source project I use and contribute
to, open at all times.

I almost never close a project and I never open a project. It's just all
there. If I need to use or modify a piece of code, written by me or someone
else, it's all accessible to me at all times with a single keystroke.

No project switching. Close to no context switching. IntelliJ doesn't even
come close to this kind of power.

~~~
zmmmmm
I'm like the parent ... Eclipse provides an omniscient view of all my work
with instant incremental compilation across all my projects, spanning PHP,
JavaScript, Python, Java, Groovy, Kotlin, and more. Run with enough memory it
just becomes like another part of my brain.

When I use IntelliJ I feel like I'm using a nice tool with a lot of sweet
superficial features but lacking the comprehensiveness and the underlying
grunt of Eclipse. It's like driving a Maserati (IntelliJ) vs a SUV (Eclipse).
Yeah, I can drive around town pretty quick in a Maserati but for getting real
heavy duty work done, it's an SUV every time.

~~~
xtracto
Really interesting description, thanks. How does current Eclipse compare to
Netbeans? I currently use vim and VSCode, but in my Java years (10 years ago)
I remember moving from Eclipse to Netbeans mainly for the form builder and
because of performance.

~~~
zmmmmm
It's bean so long since I used NetBeans that I can't make a good comparison
unfortunately. I do know it never surpassed eclipse for me but some of the
reasons for that were probably circumstantial at the time (eg: whole team was
using eclipse, etc).

------
enitihas
Jetbrains products are awesome though. I used to use a heavily customized vim
which was a pretty good setup, but the things a jetbrains ide can do are just
much better than what my custom setup could do. I pay for a personal
subscription and couldn't be happier. I will recommend everyone to atleast
give their products a try. They have a free trial period.

~~~
dehrmann
> a jetbrains ide can do are just much better than what my custom setup could
> do

I get frustrated by people who insist on a complex vi/emacs setup for
something Jetbrains IDEs do better out of the box. Or people who insist
Sublime is good for editing their complex React project.

~~~
edanm
I mainly use vim and occasionally use Jetbrains. My setup in vim is super
complex. I can tell you exactly how I feel about it:

Vim is a better _text editor_ than anything else. By far. Unfortunately, vim
is terrible at basically everything else.

The problem is, once you learn to use vim's text editing capabilities, then
editing code using anything else feels like a pain. I'm not talking about
variable lookups / etc. I'm talking the pure "move the cursor to a certain
place and enter some text" aspect of it. If you don't know vim, then it's hard
to understand how slow editing text feels without it - it's kind of like going
from not knowing how to type properly to being a solid touch typer. (not that
extreme, but that's what it feels like).

Unfortunately, because vim sucks at everything else, my setup _has_ to be
complex to actually get it to do the other things a good IDE does out of the
box. If I could do it the other way around, I would - I'd love to be able to
use vim-like editing inside of an IDE, but every vim-mode I've tried so far
just doesn't work properly (except one - evil mode in Emacs - which is why I
recently switched to Spacemacs, but that's another story).

~~~
wayneftw
> "move the cursor to a certain place and enter some text"

In vscode, I'm usually already looking at the call site of a function I want
to edit. So I move the cursor into the function call and hit F12 which takes
me to the function definition to edit it. Once I'm done, I hit Alt+LEFT to
navigate back to where I was to continue on...

If I didn't start from a call site but I know the file I want to edit - I hit
Ctrl+P, type the name of a file, hit ENTER - now I'm in the file, ready to
edit it.

To jump to a function, I collapse all functions (Ctrl+K,Ctrl+0/1/2/3/4) and
then scroll (or PAGE UP/DN) to find it...then use arrow keys or Ctrl+G to
enter the line number. Now I'm ready to edit the function. I might have to hit
Ctrl+Shift+] to expand the body of the function.

Alternatively, I Ctrl+F and type the name of the function I want to edit,
pressing ENTER to find it...and I'm ready to edit the function.

What do you do in vim that is far easier?

~~~
stevelosh
You're talking about how it's easy to move to a function or a file, and then
you're "ready to edit", but edanm is talking about _actually doing the
editing_.

For example: say I jump to this function and want to fix a bug (the `search`
should strip off the first _two_ characters here, not just one). So I need to
change `regex.search(s[1:], ...)` to `regex.search(s[2:], ...)`:

    
    
        def compile_hg_glob(line):
            pat = glob_to_re(line)
        
            # Mercurial ignore globs are quasi-rooted at directory boundaries or the
            # beginning of the pattern.
            pat = '(^|/)' + pat
        
            # Mercurial globs also have to match to the end of the pattern.
            pat = pat + '$'
        
            try:
                regex = re.compile(pat)
                return lambda s: regex.search(s[1:] if s.startswith('./') else s)
            except:
                warn("could not parse hgignore pattern '%s'" % line)
                return lambda s: True
    

If I've just used a fancy shortcut key to jump to this function, my cursor is
probably on the function name. In Vim, I'd do `cinr2:<esc>`. Seven keystrokes.
I could also do `/[<cr><ctrl-a>` which is only four keystrokes, but a little
more awkward to reach. If I tried to do this editing with arrow keys and
backspaces I'd need 12 down keystrokes just to get to the right line.

Or suppose I'm looking at this and want to add a `,` character to the end of
each of the type entries, because I forgot Python likes its commas:

    
    
        result = result | {
            'a': TYPES_ALL
            'e': TYPES_FILE_REAL
            'x': TYPES_FILE_SYMLINK
            'c': TYPES_DIR_REAL
            'y': TYPES_DIR_SYMLINK
            'f': TYPES_FILE
            'd': TYPES_DIR
            'r': TYPES_REAL
            's': TYPES_SYMLINK
        }[c.lower()]
    

In Vim I'd press `j` to get to the first entry, then `A,<esc>` to append the
`,` after the first one, then `j.` to move down and repeat the action. I then
press `j.` a bunch more times (which is really easy to do rapidly with your
index and ring finger on Qwerty) and in 2 seconds I'm done. Vim's `.` to
repeat the last action is _really_ powerful and can save you a ton of time for
small ad-hoc edit repetitions that don't warrant doing a full macro with `q`.

These kinds of things happen _constantly_ , and when you've got Vim burned
into your fingers trying to edit text without it ( _actually edit text_ , not
just jumping to something) feels like typing with oven mitts on.

~~~
manigandham
Or just use the mouse to point and click in the same time. With laptop
mousepads it's just moving a finger. Most devs aren't writing that much code
and all these Vim efficiencies are vastly overstated.

I've seen many Vim/Emacs-only devs being easily beaten in speed by others
using modern IDEs that have tooling and functionality (auto formatting,
refactoring, templating, etc) focused on actually getting things done.

~~~
eloff
Exactly this. I pick type, and I've never found that it feels too slow. I
spend more time thinking about the change I want to make, and reading the code
to plan that, than actually making the change most of the time. My typing
speed wouldn't address the bottleneck. I think vim is the same. Sure you can
edit the text faster, but that's not the bottleneck anyway.

~~~
iLemming
Vim was never about typing efficiency. However, it is indeed the best way to
navigate and edit text. This statement is very subjective because, just like
any tool, it depends on the user. Chainsaw looks ugly, heavy, cumbersome and
dangerous to someone who doesn't know how to use it. But with some practice it
becomes an incredibly efficient tool. People make ice sculptures using
chainsaws.

And I'm not talking about Vim the editor. I'm talking about Vim as an idea.
Which is today implemented for pretty much every single [popular] editor and
IDE in use. That fact alone is pretty illustrative of awesomeness of the idea
of Vim.

And the comment about Emacs is quite disingenuous. I have never been inside a
Formula One cockpit, but I can totally get "the job done" with my Camry,
because it is totally more efficient for parallel parking.

I have used many IDEs, including InteliJ (which I used for about seven years).
Emacs wins solely by its extensibility, no editor/IDE has ever matched its
capabilities. For some people that is not an important factor, just like the
efficient parallel parking might not be important for Formula One pilots. But
when you can automate pretty much anything it feels very empowering and
liberating.

Small example: when I'm about the create a new commit, an emacs-lisp script
can figure out the current ticket I'm working on (based on currently clocked
Org-mode task), generate a branch name based on the ticket description,
generate part of the commit message (in the way that it is in compliance with
git tool like gommit), I would just have to type the rest of the message.

That is not only more efficient, but also reduces frustration. Compare that
with the workflow in any other editor and IDE - most of these steps will have
to be manual. Then someone might say: oh there's actually a plugin for Editor
X that does some of that stuff for Jira. But what if I join a different
company that uses Pivotal Tracker instead? I can extend my emacs-lisp script.
Whereas if that's an InteliJ plugin I would either have to go through daunting
process of forking and modifying the plugin or submit a feature request and
wait for something that may never happen.

------
mmastrac
Every time I see these guys pop up, I'm reminded of the time a decade ago
where they literally copied my .NET profiler (nprof) into their "brand new"
.NET profiling product at the time and just shipped it.

No apologies, no compensation for building a commercial product on something I
had spent a decent amount of time on. Very disappointing of them.

~~~
mshafirov
JetBrains CEO here

At the time, we had a student working on the project and they used a couple of
classes from NProf code for loading the profiler under IIS. This was done
incorrectly as it was not in compliance with the GPL license. This was brought
to our attention on March 18th 2005, and after careful examination we
responded on March 21st 2005, following up by removing said code and rewriting
it. We indicated this resolution to you and you were satisfied and showed
support for JetBrains. We do have reference to the aforementioned interchange
between yourself and JetBrains. Should you require a copy, please let us know.
We'd like to apologise for this mishap which was a complete oversight, and was
remedied as soon as it was brought to our attention.

Feel free to reach me out if you have any further questions

~~~
mmastrac
Thanks for the (second) apology. It looks like some details got fuzzy over 15
years.

Apologies on my end for mis-remembering that I already received an apology
from the VP of product development at the time.

That would be great - I no longer have the email in question as I lost access
to that account and virtually all email records from the early 2000s
(mmastrac@canada.com, I'm assuming). If you could forward that to
matthew@mastracci.com I can have that for my records so I don't forget the
details again.

------
geophile
JetBrains is completely awesome, in all ways.

\- The best IDEs by far. There is nothing remotely close. I have been a
dedicated Emacs user for over 30 years. But there is so much Intellij does
that just isn't available in Emacs, that I started moving more of my dev work
to IDE, maybe 10 years ago. I still escape to Emacs sometimes (from the IDE),
but if I'm coding in Java, Python, or sometimes C/C++, JetBrains tools are my
main environment.

\- The products keep getting better with every release.

\- Excellent support. They are always fast and address my exact problem.

\- Reasonable licensing.

\- The free versions of their products are usable. I got by on free versions
for years.

I am thankful that they remain independent. I fear than an acquisition would
dilute their focus and kill their many-years long streak of stellar
accomplishment.

~~~
cies
Recently they've create the (arguably) best language on the JVM thus far:
Kotlin. Now Google supports it for Android.

Just to add one to that list of awesomeness.

~~~
otachack
Kotlin was a breath of fresh air from Java. Highly impressed at how easy it
was to transition, as well.

------
rvz
I'm absolutely pleased with these numbers. This gives confidence that
JetBrains has products that are used by a market of paying customers who are
developers from companies big and small. Not even raising capital is
impressive since these days, we have news of startups / companies with zero
profit raising cash every 6 months and on each funding round, they forfeit
control of their companies.

With these numbers, this confirms that 'developers' are the new customers.

~~~
aseipp
I think it's a generally frugal market even if some of us are flush with a bit
of cash. There's a lot you can get done for free with various FOSS stacks, and
outside of highly specialized tools that aren't easy to replicate in
features/availability/guarantees, I think it's a hard market to get a foot in,
because the power of NIH is so strong. Things like IDEs, or security services,
that take either a very slow burn or a lot of programming/design power are
possibly the exception, and even then you can spoil it. A lot of people on
here got upset when JetBrains moved from permanent licenses to a subscription
service -- but in hindsight, I think it was the right move and it probably
paid off! Think about that: you have a tool that is used in-and-out, like
bread and butter, every day, like 30 hours a week -- and _maybe_ , _if_ you're
lucky, a developer who makes 6 figures will say "ok I'll pay $200 a year i
guess" or whatever. It's kind of incredible! Of course corporate accounts do
not bat an eye at this; in fact they like continuous support, renewals, and
services. It keeps things regular.

It's very easy to look at JetBrains and say it can obviously work, just the
same way people look at RedHat (or other outliers) and say it can work.
They're a standout company in this space, and have high reputation, and it
didn't come from nowhere. They almost make it look easy -- just sell a great
product, boom! But it depends on a lot of factors like when they entered the
market, how they grew over time, etc. It's possible they wouldn't be able to
get off the ground today if they tried this whole thing again.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if JetBrains existence, happening before the
whole VC craze, has in fact influenced the market itself, today: even with
millions of dollars of VC funny money, it would probably be very difficult to
compete with them on their turf in 2019, when they have extremely high
reputation and a big array of products, in a market that is a very "small
world". They're the 900lb gorilla in the room, in a sense, but they did it on
their own.

JetBrains products are amazing though, without a doubt, and they deserve their
success. I wish them all the best.

~~~
toyg
_> It's possible they wouldn't be able to get off the ground today if they
tried this whole thing again._

I think that's unkind. The product they had when they started (IDEA) was so
much better than the competition, that it felt like magic. Yes, they rode the
Java wave, but there have been other waves since then (Ruby, Python...) and
nobody really managed to replicate for those markets the same experience of
productivity jump that JetBrains managed back then.

Meanwhile, JetBrains have done it again with PyCharm, which is _the_ Python
IDE and has been consistently ahead of the competition literally from day 1.
They entered a market where others had been for more than a decade, and ran
away with it. That's just skill, not timing. By the time Python exploded in
popularity, they were the obvious choice already. The fact that they can even
field competitive products in the Microsoft space, where the gold-standard of
IDEs has existed for 25+ years, is testament to their talent.

They've also legitimized a subscription-based approach to software-development
tools, which will make it much easier for anyone to compete with them. A "new
JetBrains" would find it much easier to develop an IDE today and get paid for
it, which wasn't the case 20 years ago. The problem is really that very few
people seem to think they can deliver a jump in developer productivity of the
sort we've seen with IDEA back then.

~~~
pdpi
PyCharm’s success also has to do with the fact that they already had IntelliJ
— both in terms of marketing and in terms of having lots of tech already in
place.

~~~
robocat
Yet plenty of other popular IDEs don’t ever get popular for other languages -
JetBrain are winning on hard mode.

------
foobarbecue
I love IntelliJ but I am constantly switching between PyCharm and WebStorm,
which is quite annoying since I end up doing python and javascript in both. I
wish they one modular product instead of many, many slightly different
products.

Edit: I'm learning in the comments below that IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate gives you
the capabilities of the other products all together. This sounds great! I'm
going to try it.

~~~
thsowers
If you use their flagship offering, IntelliJ, it includes language support for
Python, Javascript, and many other languages either directly or via a plugin
that replaces most of the respective functionality of Webstorm, Pycharm and
Rubymine. Just some niche features (like a C debugger only found in CLion) are
unique to the other IDEs IIRC

~~~
seanclayton
I write F# and Scala (among other various languages). Unfortunately I have to
own Rider and Intellij to do all of those things in the JetBrains ecosystem :\

~~~
thsowers
I too have run into this recently at work. IntelliJ for Rust, Dart, JS/TS, PHP
etc but I break out Rider for C#. Would be a dream if one day these were
combined so IntelliJ would be a true polygot IDE

------
Waterluvian
I badly want to use intellij for Rust and other languages. But the issue I
smash up against is that years of Vscode + my customizations has made using
any other editor terribly clunky.

I can spend hours customizing the controls and UI but I still feel like
someone handed me the keys to some old car made in a country that doesn't
exist anymore.

This in part revealed to me the cost associated with all the editor
customizations I make. Default settings are nice that way.

~~~
braindongle
Can anyone comment on the state of Vim emulation in Vscode? I'm in Android
Studio largely because of its support for my .vimrc, without which I can not
live. But I see[1] that there have been recent commits related to this in
Vscode. How good is it? Other thoughtful comparisons between life in JetBrains
world vs Vscode welcome as well.

[1]
[https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/commit/3158194561fa2fba921b...](https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/commit/3158194561fa2fba921be4bd420acda4322316b4)

~~~
chrisseaton
> my .vimrc, without which I can not live

How did you become unable to do basic text editing without a specific editor
setup? Why do people become so dependent on tools?

~~~
zenhack
I've been using vim for roughly half my life at this point. What I've found is
that actually using the editor is so thoroughly muscle memory at this point
that using another editor, where I actually have to consciously think about
how to do something, is incredibly distracting.

It's not like the difference in input speed is really meaningful; as you'll
see someone point out in any discussion about this stuff, the bottleneck in
programming is _thinking_.

But what I find will often happen is:

1\. I settle on a course of action. 2\. I go to actually do it. 3\. The editor
doesn't do what I expect, because it's not vim. 4\. I am momentarily confused,
and have to think for a minute about how to do what I want. 5\. I lose my
train of thought entirely. 6\. Rinse, repeat.

So for me it's not so much about any specific thing the editor does to make me
productive. I do have opinions about some things, but what's important is that
it just fades into the background and lets me think about the problem I'm
trying to solve.

Beyond just being "different," I tend to eschew IDEs for much the same reason
-- while many of the advanced features seem useful, I find them too
distracting to be worth the trouble. Just me and the code, please.

------
michaelfeathers
The thing I love about JetBrains is their ethic.

\- Started by making refactoring plugins for IDEs. Became irritated by those
IDEs. Wrote their own IDE.

\- Supported various programming languages. Became irritated by those
languages. Made their own programming language.

~~~
stoicShell
Indeed! Love the spirit, work your way bottom-up as you encounter problems,
remain practical yet keep that 10,000 ft view. All compounded by splendid
execution, to the point that you are elevated 'upstream' so to speak by the
master[1].

[1]: parent is talking about Kotlin: \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_\(programming_language\))

while I'm referring to Google supporting Kotlin on Android as a first-class
("native") language as of May 17, 2017:

\- [https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/05/kotlin-on-
android-...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/05/kotlin-on-android-now-
official/)

(There might also incentive for Google to move away from anything even
remotely touched by Oracle; case in point being Java, despite the open sdk for
that).

------
judge2020
If you're wondering, the "6M users / 405k customers" comes from the Community
editions of PyCharm and IntellJ (maybe also Android Studio) and their free-
for-students offer[0] ( which I would imagine is a big part of getting
companies who hire college grads to license JB products).

0: [https://www.jetbrains.com/student/](https://www.jetbrains.com/student/)

~~~
bonestamp2
> I would imagine is a big part of getting companies who hire college grads to
> license JB products

It's a good idea because, at least in our company, all of the young kids who
are fresh out of school use VS Code while most of the seasoned people use
IntelliJ (obviously there is one senior person using VIM as required by
developer stereotypes).

------
donarb
They are a sponsor of PyCon and their booth is always a hub of activity. Last
year they held mini tutorial sessions with prominent Python developers who
demonstrated PyCharm with various programming examples (like Flask, virtual
environments and Jupyter notebooks).

I was able to talk directly with the PyCharm developers to figure out a
problem I was having when starting new projects. Their developers are friendly
and very knowledgeable.

I have no hesitation renewing my PyCharm subscription knowing that these guys
are building a great product that makes my work easier.

------
mythz
Happy to see them succeed as a successful bootstrapped company who are
operating on a sustainable business model that allows them to continue
iterating and improving their already best-of-class products better with each
release.

Jet Brains offers the best value for any commercial (i.e. non-free) dev
products I've ever used. Currently an active user of Rider, ReSharper,
dotPeek, dotTrace, dotMemory, IntelliJ, Android Studio, DataGrip, WebStorm and
TeamCity [1] - all world class tools available at a comically cheap price with
their "All Products Pack" \- even cheaper with their loyalty discount.

I'm normally not fond of subscription-based products but as their product
suite offers so much value I count myself as a happy multi-year subscriber
that in all likelihood will remain one until I retire from programming.

[1] TeamCity has separate licensing, used to pay for but now comfortably fit
within their generous (100 projects / 3 build agents) free-tier limits

------
planetzero
I love Datagrip. I started using it last year and never went back. It works on
both Linux and Windows with no issues.

------
ordx
They are registered in Prague, but it's mostly Russian company. Depending on
your line of business, this may or may not be an issue.

~~~
slenk
Do you have some proof? Otherwise it seems you are just posting to cause
controversy.

I feel this goes against a lot of the guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

edit: my apologies for the assumptions and most likely breaking the guidelines
myself

~~~
greenyoda
The guidelines also say: _" Please respond to the strongest plausible
interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
criticize. Assume good faith."_

In this case, assuming good faith would be assuming that @ordx is stating a
fact that they're aware of, not trying to stir up controversy. If you were
interested in finding out how they knew that, you could politely ask them what
their source of information was, without implying that they have ulterior
motives.

~~~
slenk
Good point

------
eman_resu
282 comments and I'll be the first person to mention AppCode. This makes me
wonder whether AppCode is really a niche product for JetBrains compared to
their other wildly successful IDEs. AppCode used to be hands down best IDE for
iOS development in times of Objective-C, but after introduction of Swift, it's
downhill in terms of quality. One of projects I'm working on doesn't even
compile (multiple frameworks and app in monolith codebase). 2019.3 was
supposed to improve symbol caching, building module maps and code assistance
and it makes little difference for me - I'm still getting freezes for multiple
seconds and code completion occasionally becomes available with such delay
that I'm done typing what could have been autocompleted for me. In 2 months my
subscription expires and I'm really sad to give up on this product.

Sorry for venting dear HN community, but it's not all roses in JetBrains land.

~~~
dmitriid
My feeling is that they have too many projects going at once, and they can't
keep an eye on all of them.

They still manage to add new features, and fix the worst bugs, but I don't
think they have everything entirely under control.

------
_bxg1
I used Eclipse at a Java shop for about a year, and then they bought me an
IntelliJ license.

It was night and day. IntelliJ was a dream. And not just because of features;
it was smoother and it had an Apple level of cohesive, thoughtful user design.

~~~
on_and_off
I remember when I was able to make the switch from Eclipse to the first beta
of Android Studio.

This was night and day as well !

Sadly, I feel that the experience has degraded a LOT since then.

IntelliJ did not technically get worse, the typical Android build just grew in
complexity way faster than IntelliJ optimizations could follow.

Same thing with Gradle actually. It has been getting significantly faster. But
if during the 6 months you spent in order to speed up gradle by 30 % the
typical build complexity has increased by 50%; sadly it means that you are
losing.

~~~
_bxg1
In fairness my case was not Android

------
pkos98
Their company philosophy is "everybody codes", which results in much less
management (and possibly more freedom for the employee :). They have an office
in Munich.

~~~
nafest
Just looked that up. They have a 7 step application process and offer only 25
days of paid leave (30 days is basically the norm in Germany).

~~~
lonelappde
Is that inclusive of vacation, holidays, and sick, or what?

~~~
a254613e
Only vacation. I think 20 is the legal minimum on full work day vacations that
the company must give if you work 5 days a week. On top of that there are 14
national holidays. Normally companies in Germany give their employees 28 to 30
days, so 25 isn't that great.

Sick leave does not count towards any of those, if you're sick then you don't
go to work and you still get paid - as simple as that. If you get sick while
on vacation those days then count as sick leave and not vacation.

------
croh
I am a big fan of Intellij. But the single most feature I hate about their
products is keyboard shortcuts. If they follow standard unix shortcuts along
with standard browser shortcuts, it will be more productive.

~~~
folkhack
I'm with you that the defaults aren't my favorite... but as a heavy Sublime
user I was able to migrate the bindings over that made sense to me... Intellij
products are insanely configurable.

Also - I would either use their cloud sync and/or VCS to back-up your
customizations. It sucks switching to a new computer and losing a day re-
configuring your IDE back to baseline =|

~~~
owl57
Is it easy to use VCS for that? Last time I checked it wasn't [1]. In fact,
that is maybe the main thing keeping me from learning IntelliJ tools more: I'm
not comfortable with programs that I know I will want to customize but can't
just git add the customizations to the dotfiles repo.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37776684/which-
intellij-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37776684/which-intellij-
config-files-should-i-save-in-my-dotfiles)

~~~
folkhack
I've done it in the past but I'll admit it's been years since I've used it.
The cloud sync thing works just fine for me and fits well with the
subscription model etc.

Looks like they may have gone off the deep-end with the configuration files -
I remember the ability to export to a MUCH smaller file but this was probably
4 years ago at this point.

------
eitland
I really like IntelliJ and recommend everyone try them even if my favorites
are NetBeans, Eclipse and VS Code.

This seems to be just some weird preference that my brain has and since
Jetbrains is such a nice company and has a sustainable funding model I'm happy
to send people their way

~~~
dclusin
For me its because they do a really good job of keeping the UI snappy and
responsive. This is pretty impressive considering:

1) Its a java app

2) Continuously running compilers/interpreters in the background

3) Running builds and tests can be bursty and its pretty good about not
hanging when that happens.

~~~
wirrbel
snappy and responsive is not what comes to my mind when thinking about
JetBrains products.

I do think they have really good products, just a little ... slow.

~~~
sooheon
FWIW I find IDEA more responsive (fewer random lags while typing) than my
pretty minimal emacs setup. Text editors like vim, kakoune, or xi are snappy,
are not IDEs.

------
stevehiehn
Nice, Intellij (avec GoPlugin) is the only dev tool I pay for out of pocket.

The vast majority of the company I'm at uses VSCode (for mostly GoLang &
Typescript). So I don't want to make the case to have them pay for it. But
40hrs/w of my existance is spent in a IDE/editor and IMO its totally worth it
to pay for the one I feel most productive with.

~~~
conradfr
I have a tiny Go program that I very rarely touch and was quite happy with the
go plugin ... until they launched their full blown Go IDE and disabled the
plugin in their other IDEs.

I understand why but I'm still a bit sour.

And that's how I finally tried VSCode.

~~~
toyg
_> disabled the plugin in their other IDEs_

Wut? The plugin is there. I installed it in IDEA without any problems just two
weeks ago. Then again, I have an Ultimate subscription, I don't know if the
free versions are held back.

~~~
vips7L
Yeah typically the plugins are only available for ultimate after they launch a
paid version.

------
keymone
It’s hard for me to praise Jetbrains, every time I start using Idea I have
amazing experience, I feel like it’s totally one of the best IDEs out there
and then couple days and non-trivial plugins later I have noticeable lags when
_typing text_. I immediately give up and switch back to my previous setup. Why
can’t IDEs prioritize reducing typing latency? That’s like one of the most
important parts of text editing.

Anybody else had similar experience?

Edit: not trying to rain on Jetbrains parade here, I’m genuinely happy they
have a business model that works and products that sell well.

~~~
erokar
I agree. It's sluggish and very resource hungry. It runs on the JVM and it
shows. I've switched to VS Code, also for Java coding.

~~~
keymone
But java isn’t slow and sluggishness is definitely not only due to GC pauses.
It’s all about input handling subsystem.

~~~
coldtea
The sluggineshness you describe should definitely be mainly GC pauses.

IDEA has done extra work on the "input handling subsystem" to the point where
they are faster than most anything out there:

See: [https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-
la...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-latency-
typing-in-intellij-idea-15-eap/)

And: [https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-
la...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-latency-
typing-in-intellij-idea-15-eap/) (which is now standard)

~~~
coldtea
Sorry, the first link was meant to be:

[https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-
with-pleasure/)

------
bdcravens
Haven't used their IDEs for some time, but I really like DataGrip. While
someone always knows of an open source alternative, it's the best full-
featured cross-database tool I've found.

~~~
m3Lith
I really liked HeidiSQL when I was working on Windows, but after switching to
Linux I struggled to find anything with similar UI and workflow. DataGrip was
a really nice discovery, though I still haven't gotten fully comfortable with
the UI, it's quite a bit more complex.

------
friedman23
I love jet brains but I'll say this. Their software is part of the reason I
paid for 32 GB of ram on my new macbook pro.

~~~
sysbin
How great is the 32 GB of ram? I have a 2017 macbook pro. I don't ever develop
on a desktop machine to be able to know what I'm missing out on by only having
16 GB.

~~~
lucb1e
I run on 16GB at work and 8 at home. At home I run into issues with large
Factorio factories or if I have too many browser tabs open (tbh that's an
issue with me, not with my system, but more RAM would be a workaround for it),
but at work the amount feels quite luxurious. I never got close to running out
even with multiple VMs running at the same time, so I don't really see the
need for more than 16. Maybe specialized applications need it like machine
learning or so? Though that would seem like something you'd do on a server
instead of your local laptop.

Unless you're running close to full most of the time, I also don't think the
extra disk caching more RAM allows for is generally worth it. I have a few GB
free most of the time (both at home and at work) and that seems to suffice to
cache whatever files I'm currently working with.

~~~
iudqnolq
If you keep tabs open for days and don't open them, like me, you might want to
try a tab suspending extension. There's noticable lag when I open a tab I
haven't opened in hours, but my FF on Ubuntu is fine with ~100 open tabs.

~~~
lucb1e
I did already, but nevertheless thanks for the tip!

------
The_rationalist
They clearly are the state of the art of IDEs for most mainstream languages
nowadays.

It's easy for young developers to overlook the power of intellij IDES, and to
use the "sexier" vscode. But clearly for any medium to large project, learning
to master intellijs are one of the highest ROI that a developer can get.

Of course, it should be mixed with ideaVim.

~~~
kilburn
I generally prefer JetBrains' IDEs over vscode. However, vscode's remote
editing capabilities just tipped the scale for me.

Not too long ago I bought a "powerful" laptop (expensive!). It still chocked
frequently when running multiple vm's, docker machines and/or multiple "auto-
compile watchers".

Then I tried vscode remote editing. I just run the browser & vscode in the
laptop, and everything else on the desktop. It makes for a much, much nicer
experience overall.

JetBrains, if this somehow gets to you: please copy vscode's remoting
abilities and I'll be back. Until then... I had a great time with you.

~~~
b5n
[https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview](https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview)

~~~
detaro
What's the point of, in a vscode vs jetbrains comparison, dropping a "oh, oh,
Emacs can do it too!" comment?

~~~
iLemming
What's the point of tribalism? It's a natural human tendency to be protective
of what's close to your heart and reject things you're unfamiliar with.

Every single HN post about either Emacs, IntelliJ, Vim, VSCode, or Atom always
gets riddled with disingenuous comments of people who liked one thing more
than other things. Things they either haven't tried or had some cursory
experience with them.

These tools are very individual [just like toothbrushes], for someone Emacs
offers something that IntelliJ or VSCode can't, for others - nothing is better
than Vim.

To truly achieve mastery, one has to try and learn them all and choose a tool
that works well for the situation or the one they like (for objective and
subjective reasons). Some might say: "that's a waste of time", try saying that
to musicians. Go tell James Hetfield of Metallica that he shouldn't be trying
all sorts of different guitars because Gibson is hands-down the best.

------
agluszak
Ctrl+Shift+A to find ANY action in the whole IDE + ability to customize almost
everything is the peak performance of UX. Everybody should learn from
JetBrains. Tools made for developers by developers <3

------
Lazare
I'm a really big fan of JetBrains. The pricing is reasonable, the pricing
_model_ is reasonable, and the products are moving forward quickly.

There's a lot of products I am either reluctant to pay for, or pay for only
begrudgingly, because I feel like I have to, even though the value proposition
isn't really there. JetBrains isn't like that!

------
gatherhunterer
They seem to have nice products but when people compare JetBrains tooling to
Vim, Emacs and VSCode everyone seems to leave out the fact that those tools
are 100% free. I think it’s important for coding to be open to as many people
as possible and the tools are the point of entry.

~~~
rco8786
JetBrains does have a free tier, fwiw. It’s quite powerful too (I say this as
an avid vim user)

~~~
marsrover
I didn’t think Jetbrains had a free tier other than for IntelliJ. Everything
else has a trial but no community edition (as far as I’m aware).

~~~
rsynnott
IntelliJ is a big part of it, tho. JVM languages, plus all supported languages
that they don’t have a variant for (it has a decent first party Rust plugin,
for instance).

------
Railsify
They also still give away their entire suite of products to students at no
cost!

~~~
rvz
Several students tell me that it is only the full-version for free for a year,
then it is subscription-based at a discount.

~~~
detaro
If you are still a student at the end of the year, you just need to verify
your student status again to get another one. Once you're not a student
anymore, there's the discount offer.

------
gravypod
I love jetbrains products but I hate their product segmentation. I wish I
could use one IDE (smoothly) for all of their supported languages.

It's one of the best editor experiences I've ever had though.

------
KorematsuFred
Also remember that despite of what their balance-sheet and financials say
(which are impressive no doubt) they built a simple but solid product. Simple
in a sense they did not run after the buzzwords of deep learning, in the cloud
and all that stuff. It was a replacement for Eclipse and Netbeans which have
been around for decades but a far far superior product.

Their revenue might look like just $270M but the value they have added by
sheer gain in developer productivity across the world will run into several
billions.

------
ehnto
One of my favourite dev tools, and a personal sweetheart company as well. The
way they handled the subscription transition was very amicable and gave me a
lot of respect for them. They could have easily gone the way of Adobe.

The software is worth every penny, and having tried many alternatives, I'm
hoping I will never have to give it up. Even if they go out of business, so
long as I have a matching JRE for my OS it should be useful to me until I no
longer need or can write software.

------
benibela
By the way, what is the difference between IDEA and Android Studio?

When you want to do Android and non-Android development, do you need both
IDEs, or can one fully replace the other?

~~~
Semaphor
Android Studio is a special build of IDEA focusing on Android. It’s like
PyCharm. You get IDEA with some features removed and certain plugins pre-
installed and defaults set. Personally I like using their specific IDE’s for
their tasks, but I could imagine that you can easily replace Android Studio
with IDEA and not have any difference (besides more features being available).

------
PaulWaldman
A great example of "During the gold rush it’s a good time to be in the pick
and shovel business."

Increasing productivity of expensive developers is a great selling point.

------
princevegeta89
Can't imagine writing software without their life saving intuitive IDEs. The
keyboard shortcuts and powerful navigation features along with the excellent
integration they have pushes them out of the league. I automatically start to
hate other development platforms like XCode which is so backward. Only for
small edits will I use VS Code or Sublime which in my POV never caught up to
Jetbrains and probably never will.

------
throw_away
I want to like JetBrains and paid for an ultimate subscription for years, but
this four-year-old bug renders their products pretty much unusable on macs
with a 5k display:
[https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526)
. Thus, I've canceled my subscription and moved to vscode for most
development.

~~~
dancek
Really? I use IntelliJ on an external 4k display every day at work with a 2016
MBP. I seem to recall having some issues in early 2017 (when I started at
$company), but nowadays it works fine.

EDIT: I'm quite sure I have scaled resolution but can't check.

~~~
throw_away
Is yours a 13" or a 15"? Mine is a 2015 13" mbp and the key latency and cpu
churn on idle is unbearable.

------
brbrodude
I'm always amazed by how a complex software as IDEA seems so crisp, I'm always
thinking the internal structure must be very well pieced together, there are a
lot of small things and small features that you'd think would not have polish
but then it's all working flawlessly. Really want to study their code one
day(although it's been years I'm saying that) :t

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

~~~
coliveira
Agreed. I hate using Java apps on the desktop. It is OK if your target is java
itself, but I wouldn't start a java app to develop Python or some other
language.

~~~
stephenr
I used to think the same, but I’ve literally never found an IDE as feature
complete (both built in/first party plugins and via 3rd party plugins) as
IDEA.

Those that come close are not “native” either. Trading the jvm for
xul/scintilla (Komodo) or fucking electron, to get worse productivity and say
“it isn’t jvm” is stupid IMO.

------
CodeWriter23
IMO it’s a no-brainer to pay $20 a month for PHPStorm. I easily save $20 a day
in time through the easy class/use resolution, function parameter display and
the semantic “spell” checking that highlights missing braces, semicolons, etc.
And then there’s the whole xdebug works over ssh tunnels thing I couldn’t ever
get to work with vscode + plugin.

------
aldanor
JetBrains makes one of the best free IDEs for Rust, been happily using it for
a while now (free PyCharm CE + intellij-rust).

------
lowercased
With this much revenue... can they eventually divert some to providing a 'live
share' service like vscode offers? I would think it would be a service they
could possibly even uncharge for - I would pay a few $ more for a 'plus'
version which offers 'share my project with other jetbrains users for
pairing'.

------
tony2016
While Rider might be a nice IDE, it can't use Visual Studio extensions. I use
some commercial ones which increase my productivity. I can't see myself not
using Visual Studio. I use the Enterprise version of VS. There's no other IDE
with all the features I have.

------
ksputana
There are many companies making a lot of money without raising any money.
Raising money is not the only way to do business!

------
kayoone
I love their products, my only gripe is that the performance is somewhat
sluggish on my 2018 13" Macbook Pro.

~~~
iamcreasy
I second this. Sometimes I fire up VS code just because it would take a few
minutes longer to test the same code in IntellijIDEA.

------
newguy1234
A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially
wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount of
VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company which
got $0 funding and became a success.

~~~
ardy42
> A good example of why the status quo of VC funding companies is essentially
> wrong IMO. This year we have stories about startups getting massive amount
> of VC funding and turn into a flop (wework) and then we have this company
> which got $0 funding and became a success.

From what I understand, the VC funding model is toxic for sustainable,
profitable businesses that successfully sell products in some niche. VCs
either want your business to have a 0.1% chance of being the next Facebook or
be something that a FAANG might want to buy out, and if your business isn't
one of those things, they'll make you "pivot" and turn it into one.

JetBrains is a good example of the kind of technology companies we need more
of.

------
mulmen
I subscribe to several JetBrains products personally and also at work. Their
pricing is reasonable in both situations and the products work well. It’s a
refreshing experience all around. I’m happy to see this simple, reasonable
approach find success.

------
JeremyMorgan
I don't have much to add here other than to say I've been a JB customer since
2012. They've always provided excellent products with sensible licensing and
I'm hoping they don't abandon their current business model.

------
dbrgn
I wonder what would have happened if they had gone the typical silicon valley
VC route. Probably something less customer friendly with more invasive
tracking, in order to "properly monetize their userbase".

------
xyst
Not surprising. Their ide suite is just that amazing. Been using them since I
was offered an edu license (all products for free if you had an edu addy) some
years ago and have since converted to a personal license.

------
hmart
Jet Brains is another example that OpenSource doesn’t kill industries or
companies. JB won over Eclipse and Netbeans with great products, great
customer service and fair licensing options and prices.

------
i_am_nomad
JetBrains products are excellent, I have both personal and work subscriptions.
I wish MPS would catch on, though; it’s really exciting technology that way
too few people are using, for some reason.

~~~
sooheon
What does MPS stand for?

~~~
myroon5
[https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/](https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/)

------
barcoder
Makes me wonder if we'll start to more investments at earlier stages because
startups usually need to prove their business plan before they see outside
cash

------
TimTheTinker
While we’re at it...

Esri: $1.1B revenue, 300k customers, $0 raised (2016 numbers)

Anyone else?

------
kelsolaar
Their Open Source support model is fantastic, we have been running on PyCharm
Professional for half a decade thanks to it!

------
rb808
Do they ever have discount codes available? I assumed yes, waited for black
Friday for nothing and now not sure what to do.

~~~
nolok
If you use them for professional purpose they're already extremely cheap so I
guess it doesn't make too much sense for them

------
servercobra
I just picked up WebStorm again. I love VS Code, but WebStorm feels just a
little more polished.

------
laurentb
very interesting numbers!

I always wondered how much money Microsoft generates out of their proper dev
tools like Visual studio, would be interested in seeing those...

or perhaps someone can point me to some market research in this space?

------
lukasb
ARPU of $667? I guess there must be other revenue sources ...

------
29athrowaway
They got there shipping great products that people trust.

------
somid3
This is so inspirational

------
asimpletune
I love IntelliJ! (but I wish they would add static analysis support for Scala)

------
hailhash
JetBrains makes money out of ShitBrains

~~~
hailhash
Here are list of free and better things existed and will continue to exist
long after JetBrains run out of fuel

Eclipse vim VS Code

------
herova
Prague based company. Aha, yeap.

~~~
detaro
?

~~~
herova
Just look at open positions count in different jetbrains offices. Main r&d
place is St Petersburg Russia. Second one is Munich.

~~~
detaro
Wasn't clear what you were aiming at with your comment. (And typically, I'd
read "X-based" as "has HQ in X", nothing more. Normal in this industry for
companies to be widely spread)

------
crimsonalucard
If they improve this one thing then they are solid. They need to move to
natively compiled apps. The JVM can get really slow.

I still use their products despite the slowness but many people don't make the
switch because of how heavy the IDE is.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Still waiting on that “IDEA in Rust blog post”...

~~~
crimsonalucard
If they can't get away from the jvm then it just needs to be less bloated.

------
TeamMCS
Shame they had to sell out with their bullshit subscription model

~~~
conradfr
You are downvoted but I kind of agree. I don't think their IDEs improved a lot
/ more since the subscriptions. Indexing is still a resource hog, RAM usage
out of control etc.

I also dislike their insistence on copying the grey Adobe's UIs.

~~~
criddell
I think their model is pretty fair. You subscribe and then are entitled to use
that version forever, even if you end your subscription. What you gain in the
subscription is the right to use newer versions.

For the stuff I really rely on, I feel good knowing there's a reasonable
business model behind it. The ultimate version is $500 / year or $149 / year
for business and personal respectively. For a lot of use cases, it doesn't
need to save you very much time to pay for itself.

------
mlthoughts2018
I can’t tell you how many times my use of very vanilla Emacs with zero jedi /
autocomplete / search features has saved me in my career.

It’s so critical to use text editors for software development and extract all
other functionality to separate shell tools.

If a mix of very simple vim or Emacs + grep / git grep / silver searcher + CLI
tools for automatic linting, test cases, etc., isn’t efficient for you, and
motivates you to bring all these things into one consolidated IDE, I urge you
to consider that this is a type of bad code smell and bad workflow smell, the
all-in-one IDE is not actually helping productivity but hurting it in the long
run, and you should invest right away in the learning curve & barriers you
perceive are blocking you from a purely shell command-line workflow that
separates code management & search into isolated utilities in separate
interfaces.

I do grant there are a very small number of use cases where the IDE approach
is useful: helping students who are literally just starting out, helping
developers with atypical accessibility constraints that can be assisted with
the IDE, probably a few more.

But general code search, linter/test integration, and embedded features like
autocomplete, pop-up signatures or docs, etc., are disastrously bad things
hands down for regular development.

It’s such a shame that a whole generation of programmers are tricked into
believing those things are good for them.

It reminds me of people tricked into becoming reliant on MATLAB or Jupyter
notebooks, and then retroactively trying to defend those tools as
productivity-enhancing when they are, from first principles, productivity
destroyers.

~~~
fossuser
Comments like this were part of the reason I wasted a lot of time earlier in
my career trying to use emacs or vim on large code bases instead of an IDE.

I suspect this is some tribal identity thing about being a “real” programmer
that I fell victim too.

The IDEs are extremely powerful and much better out of the box for working in
a large code base. They allow you to navigate a lot more easily and focus on
the code itself rather than constantly having to deal with your setup.

Don’t let comments like the parent scare you away from them.

~~~
ProfSarkov
I know a couple of people holding the same opinion as OP. Can't say they are
more productive.

The percentage of people that are hard to work with is higher in this group
though.

And I know, what I'm talking about here. Started with a Commodore 64 in 1982,
first Linux 1994. Did everything in emacs, calculated mode lines, Unix was my
IDE, you name it.

I'm a very happy user of CLion and IntelliJ IDEA now. Wouldn't want to go back
to the dark ages.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “I know a couple of people holding the same opinion as OP. Can't say they
> are more productive. The percentage of people that are hard to work with is
> higher in this group though.”

This seems more telling about your attitude towards this subject, and perhaps
also lesser skill in assessing or understanding those productivity
differences.

