The price is not the problem.
I simply do not want to rent the tools I use. I want to buy them.
A modest increase, with a discount for moving to a subscription model (like they're trying to do) would have appealed to all camps, imo. Professionals recognize these are good tools, and want to support them, but not necessarily in a 'one size fits all' SaaS model.
Instead of $199 intellij ultimate license, saying "Buy a perpetual license for $229, or a SaaS model for $149/year"... I would probably still opt for perpetual (at least some of their products), but having the option is important, imo.
I don't want to open the travel laptop I keep stored for when I'm away from home in an airplane or the middle of nowhere and be interrupted because I can't contact a licensing server or whatever such bullshit.
If they want to raise prices, that's fine. But renting tools that are not hosted on the web, for myself and lot of other people, is just a big no-no.
But really, you can't blame software providers. In the old days they'd all do the one-off purchasing model, and then they would all starve to death because people don't want to pay for software. So it's no wonder they're going for a model which is actually proven to work, which is a subscription.
I want shit that works, unconditionally. If JetBrains can't give me that, I'll start looking elsewhere.
(Or... How many people pay for WinRAR?)
Having the tool ping a server every week doesn't make the tool any harder to crack, and cracked versions obviously don't ping the server, so there's no reason whatever to be draconian about what happens when the check doesn't go through.
At least that's the approach they took at Adobe. IIRC the tool worked normally for up to a month without pinging the server, and after that showed warnings but kept working for a while. The times may have changed but idea was to err as far as possible on the side of lenience, because anyone using a version that pings the server is by definition a paying customer and not a pirate.
Just keep the option for a perpetual license thanks. Even if it means increasing the cost, I am fine with that. I just don't want to rent my tools as a professional.
With subscriptions, they don't have to improve the software; it's guaranteed revenue as long as one wants to use the tool. Eventually a competitor might step in and create something better, but until then you're stuck paying whether or not the software is improving.