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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth

This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

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When you say it like that, it doesn't sound amazing, but you can also phrase it as:

"JetBrains listened to their customers, took feedback on board, and made meaningful changes that addressed the concerns."

In a perfect world, that would the minimum expected behaviour, but in the world we live in, it's kind of surprising when it happens.

Or.. JetBrains went ahead with a disliked move, then took a half-step back. There's still a half-step in the wrong direction remaining, on top of showing that they would have been willing to go the whole way if they could have gotten away with it.

It wasn't amazing. There was a lot of unneccessary effort to change their mind.

You can frame it whatever you want. Fact is, if not the pushback JetBrains would be worse than Adobe

"JetBrains listened to their customers..."

Yes, you can make something sound positive when you leave out material facts. They knew an expiring license would be much less popular than a non-expiring one before they did it. So, just saying they listened to their customers leaves out the very important detail that they ignored their customers the first time around.

Still commendable given how common it is these days for companies to get consumer backlash and just continue to do the same thing while comically trying to publicly convince the customer base that the new model is somehow better for them when any rational person can see it isn't.

Also useful as a guide to show the customer they should go ahead and voice their displeasure when these situations arise, preferably before the product is so entrenched in the given market that they can "pull an Adobe" in this situation ("Don't like the new terms? Fuck you, pay us").

Oh, absolutely. I think they handled this particular change quite gracefully. It's a compromise.

A huge part of the backslash actually happened here on HN when they originally proposed the pure (like Adobe and 90% of other companies) SaaS model.

  So Jetbrains model is an improvement over most other companies but it is not as consumer friendly as the old licensing model.

  I would love to have the old model back(buy now with 12 months of updates) but that ship has sailed.

Sure, it came about due to backlash - but they still listened to their customer base and made changes, quite publicly admitting they had pushed the subscription model too far.

Honestly I’m quite happy with it as a compromise, especially with the All Products Pack - I save money every year than when I used to buy upgrades for IntelliJ and ReSharper stand-alone, and JetBrains has incentive to keep pumping out new features to keep me from deciding to utilize my fallback license.

Google must play InteliJ for the Android Studio License use, right?

I wonder how big is that part of the revenue.

Given that Kotlin now also is first class development language for Android, I think Jetbrains gets plenty of revenue from Android

I don't think Jetbrains gets any money directly by the usage of Kotlin on Android, as Kotlin too is open source, and works very well in IntelliJ Community (also open-source). In fact, I don't think IntelliJ ultimate has any extra Kotlin features.

Regardless, I’m sure they are getting money.

No, but IntelliJ ultimate has more features than Android Studio given there are JetBrains developed plugins that aren’t available in the CE platform.

Guice support, for example. You can live without it, but if you are working on a larger Android codebase and utilize it then it may be useful.

IntelliJ Ultimate has a lot of extra features, yes, but I don't recall any of them being related to Kotlin, or Android, so I don't think the parent comment claiming kotlin usage will result in extra revenue is relevant.

I think android studio uses the community (open source) version of IntelliJ Idea, so it should not be a big part of Jetbrains revenue.

> They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.

I'm missing something. What's the difference between that and what they're doing now? You pay $X, you get a perpetual licence and updates for a limited period.

Now the perpetual licensed version always lags 12 months behind in updates, i.e. you do not have a perpetual license for the past 12 months worth of updates at the time your subscription runs out.

In addition to what michaf mentioned, what we have now is not what they originally proposed.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/18/final-update-on-t... - the perpetual license fallback did not exist under the original proposals and only happened due to backlash.

Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.

> Why does this matter? Yes, their original plan was pure SaaS. But they listened to criticism and changed it once they realized that there was backlash from the community. If anything, that should be admired not criticized.

It's useful context. Yes, it's good that they listened to their customer base - and I've not criticised the current subscription model.

But I still think it's relevant and on-topic to point out that the previous model was more generous and they tried to do full-SaaS when reading the parent comment in isolation sort of suggests they did this out of the goodness of their hearts (and entirely unprompted).

It's matter, because even in this thread you have people prizing jetbrains for beign better than Adobe SaaS, but in reality jetbrains would go even futher than any big predatory corporation out there to vendor lock you into their set of tools.

If you have an option, stick with open tools with strong community support. Just observation: with commercial tools you don't have full control of your own work, nuff said

Your perpetual license is for the oldest version available during your subscription period, not the newest.

Old model: Pay $X.XX and get one year of updates.

New model: Pay $X.XX (spread over 12 months) and you can use all new versions UNTIL the subscription ends. At which point, unless you renew, you have to DOWNGRADE to the one year old version.

Let's face it, downgrading such an import tool is not something developers will be comfortable with (especially since JB products occasionally have show-stopping bugs).

Having said that, I'll admit to liking their products (and support). But the model is not as generous as everyone seems to think.

So that was the original plan but I believe they changed to the “more reasonable” one after the backlash (so you get the current version + 1 year of updates)

The original plan was that you'd lose access completely. The "more reasonable" one was the 1yr downgrade.

IIRC, the price of 2 year subscription is still cheaper than the 1-year update of the old model. They even offered subscription discount when they were transitioning, so the out-of-pocket is still cheaper than the old model.

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