

Ask HN: Is sublime text making any money? - yuashizuki

I know sublime text is not open source and its not free either. But most people still use the unpaid version, so how does sublime text support itself ?
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coldtea
Who said most people still use the unpaid version?

Tons of people (from forums etc) use v3, which means they paid for v2 (or
pirated it). I have paid for v2 and use v3 myself.

He also hired an extra guy during v2 development, which means he made enough
money to have that. And in general, it's a hugely succesful project with
Windows and OS X users.

If John saw that the unpaid version was an issue, he'd just cancel it.

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0942v8653
It seems that you no longer need to have paid anything to use v3.
[http://www.sublimetext.com/3](http://www.sublimetext.com/3)

I never downloaded or paid anything for v2, but I did download v3 (the
official build, from the official site) to give it a try. I didn't end up
sticking to it, but I was definitely able to run it without buying a license,
albeit with occasional popups.

~~~
coldtea
If so, it wasn't the case a year or so ago with v3.

If he was hurt financially with people using the free+popups version, does it
make sense that he would open it this way?

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cabirum
> most people still use the unpaid version [citation needed]

Sublime text v3 requires a license to work. Unpaid version means you have to
use older software _and_ to suffer frequent popups.

~~~
yuashizuki
I have never paid for it, so I assumed most people like around 80% would be
using it free. What would be your estimate of people actually paying for the
product.

~~~
cabirum
I don't have any meaningful data to estimate. Sublimetext is used in countless
videos/webcasts, some of them by Google or Microsoft.

A quick google search brings the post
[[http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/01/leanpub-ebook-sales-guest-
po...](http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/01/leanpub-ebook-sales-guest-post.html)]
with sales numbers of a book about Sublime text I never even heard of. 1000
sales of a book about a text editor! My best guess would be that the text
editor itself sold about a couple orders of magnitude more copies.

