Hacker News Reader

Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others).

If those developers go from 'IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock' to 'IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy', it may be bad for growth.

Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.

> If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire.

Converted and new ones do, so previously loyal customers who don't want to lose their perpetual license… can't upgrade their editor ever again.

There's a significant attitude difference when you pay for upgrade every year because the product is improving or when you have to pay so the company doesn't pull the killswitch in your tooling.