- The yearly cost is purely for updates. Meaning you could just pay one time, get updates for a year and then continue using whatever version you have. - For small teams they offer a 50% discount (less than 10 people, in business less than 5 years) - If this is perhaps an open source project you can get it for free.
I got sucked into the Jetbrains family because of just how good their PhpStorm is. Especially in regards to refactoring and debugging tools.
I only wish their Javascript tools were anywhere near as good as their Php tools.