You're probably looking at the "Businesses and Organizations" pricing, where the org pays £499/yr per user. The personal ("Individual Customers") license is starts at £199, and decreases to £159 then £119 for subsequent years. There's a bunch of groups (e.g. Open Source projects) that qualify for free or heavily discounted licenses too.
You have to buy a personal license yourself, your organization cannot pay for it. I just don't want to pay for work tools, my employer should do that and then it is the higher price.
That's fair. Personally, though I could get the business license and expense it, I choose to pay for it as a personal license because I use it personally as well, and I'd be happy to pay the individual license price either way.
My grandfather was a master carpenter, he had a saying I've always liked "If you use something for more than an hour a day buy the best you can afford".
I've never minded paying for developer tools as long as I could afford them, lots of professionals spend a lot more than we do on tools/professional development.
Offtopic: I would also urge you if you want to solder not to buy a cheap soldering iron from radioshack, etc. If you don't have the money for a weller or hakko soldering station then at the very least buy a chinese temperature controlled hakko 936 clone. The difference between a crap iron and a decent temperature controlled iron is gigantic.
I used to solder a bunch as a kid, using my dad's Weller gun (which was built like a tank and still worked last I heard, even though it was something like 40 years old). When I bought my own cheap soldering iron "pencil" as an adult for one project, I thought I'd forgotten how to solder. It seemed so hard to get good joints with the cheap iron. The Weller gun wasn't even temperature controlled but it worked. The cheapo pencil iron just didn't get hot enough fast enough to be useful.
Then I bought a mid-range Weller station and things got super easy again. It's about ten years old now and still works fine. It's probably a worthwhile investment, even for rare use. I mean, it's only ~$100 to get a pretty good iron, vs. $20 for garbage.
If I ever could get my lazy butt in gear, I want to make a video to prove that you can solder competently with a cheap and crappy soldering iron.
I have a soldering iron that has to be the cheapest of the cheap, that I've had since 1991; I got it when I went to a local votech electronics school fresh from high school.
It's something like a 35 watt pencil iron, and the tip is janky like nobody's business. You have to wait like 15 minutes for it to heat up. The tip is not in the greatest shape.
But I can tin that puppy up and solder perfectly with it. Now, I'm not saying you could do SMT rework using it, but basic thru-hole is no problem at all. I've assembled tons of things with it over the years.
I also have a couple of older temp controlled irons - and they are great tools as well; honestly, I prefer them over my old iron. But I know, at least for myself, that what iron I use doesn't make a difference in the project, but rather the skills I bring to the table.
As the old saying goes, "a poor craftsman blames his tools"...
Sure, I'm a poor craftsman in this regard; I don't solder enough to ever be good at it. But, really, when you've gotta wait 15 minutes for it to heat up, and then after a few joints you have to wait some more because it cooled off in the process...really, is it a good, or even usable, tool?
I merely found it difficult to use the cheap pencil iron to get good results, because good results required a lot more out of me, mostly in the form of patience waiting for it to get hot. Also, I suspect cheap tools have gotten worse since 1991. I have cheap tools I bought in that era that are higher quality than the same brand/model today.
Nonetheless, it's just good advice to use good tools if you do something often. And, sometimes it's good advice to use good tools even if you don't do it often, but expect to do it again in the future (I find myself working on things that require soldering every couple of years, but expect that'll be true for the rest of my life, so I might as well use a decent iron to do it...it's not like they stop working after being stored for a year).
How did he feel about perpetually renting them? Even if the tool is currently perfect, I don't trust that the company's future plans will align with my future needs; I expect that they'll diverge.
edit: I stand corrected; didn't see the asterisk and the separate page specifying that an active subscription isn't necessary to continue using the current version of the software.
If you bother looking at the page you'll know when you buy a yearly subscription (or 12 consecutive monthly) with Jet Brains you automatically get a perpetual license for the current version.
You only need to keep paying if you want to keep getting updates. If you're happy with the current version no one is forcing you to keep paying or keep updating.
I can't speak to all IDEs, but at least with IntelliJ you're not just renting it.
They even give you a helpful info-graphic telling you how to minimize subscription cost if you just want to get a perpetual license for a particular version:
I looked at the page, but didn't read the definition of "perpetual fallback license". Thank you for the clarification.
It still seems bizarre that one standard case is that you pay for a subscription, presumably using version x, and then are pushed down to version x-1 if you didn't subscribe for at least a year under version x.
Thinking about it a bit more yeah, when you stop subscribing you might have to roll back 12 months of updates on your machine, which is pretty odd. Clearly they want to discourage you from doing it.
At least bug fixes are included:
"The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included."
I can understand giving you the major version at the time you bought the subscription but it's a bit stingy to exclude minor version bumps (Y releases).
That's an unrealistically forgiving outlook on this.
You're forced to upgrade when the language you're using upgrades. Or the ecosystem around the product evolves. The IDE doesn't live in a vacuum that will work in perpetuity.
It's realistically much closer to renting than buying as once the updates stop it's not that much longer until the product is no longer usable in a modern environment. Simple example would be if you want to use Kotlin 1.1.4 (latest stable) you must be using Intellij 2016.2 or newer to get the corresponding 1.1.4 kotlin plugin. And if you use an older plugin, the IDE will complain at you and things will be buggy and not work right. Similarly since gradle support is built into the IDE at some point that will fail if your IDE is no longer being updated.
It's not realistic to avoid updating the IDE for long. That's why Jetbrains prominently features subscription and yearly renewals - because you're very nearly forced into it.
That actually happened with IntelliJ - which is one reason why I'm trying to move over to Atom.
It used to be there was a plugin package to allow you to use IntelliJ for C/C++ development, in addition to all the other languages. That changed, though - and they split CLion off the main branch.
So now - if for instance you want to do NodeJS robotics work, and interface to an Arduino (for example), you would need to use regular IntelliJ with the extensions for javascript, and CLion separately for C/C++ development. Essentially dinging you twice for what should be the same damn product.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see them split the javascript portion off into its own editor suite as well.
Atom may not be or have everything that IntelliJ does, but because it is open source, and extensible, and not controlled by a singular entity, I know that I don't have to worry about it changing like that in the future.
Don't get me wrong, though - I like IntelliJ, I think it's a great IDE (started out with PHPStorm). But I think it should have stayed general purpose and extensible, and not lock languages out to move people to another (but essentially the same) IDE. I'd have no problem paying the yearly fee - but I'm not going to pay for it twice.
With all subscriptions 1 year or greater, the JetBrains license grants you an eternal, irrevocable license to whatever version was the latest version at the time your subscription expired (look up perpetual fallback license).
I'm not a fan of their license change either, but calling it perpetual rent is just not correct.
Last time I checked it was the FIRST version you could keep forever. I guess they wanted to avoid having people buying a license every other year. I could be mistaken, though.
I don't know where these numbers come from. I just looked it up and my subscription to all IDEs JetBrains had to offer is $149/year. Given how much time I spend in RubyMine and IntelliJ this is a great price. Even if I wouldn't every once in a while use AppCode and DataGrip as well.
Exactly this, work would pay for it but I didn't ask, I already had a personal subscription and I use it at least as much outside of work as I do at work.
