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Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

What a great story. Profitable company, great product, simple and honest business model and no VC funding.

It's also pretty consumer-friendly. Every year I get an email from them around November reminding me my subscription will renew in February, and then a couple more reminders along the way.

Agreed- they also did discounts for long term users. I can't beer bothered too switch so pay happily because it's always seemed like fair treatment

I think the total discount on the ‘all products’ pack is now 40% after two years of usage, so I’m paying 15/month for literally all my IDE’s

Pretty good deal if you ask me. Now if only I could do remote development like in VSCode.

> Now if only I could do remote development like in VSCode.

We are working on it, stay tuned :)

Game changer for me and has been one of the reasons to switch to VS. I would love to see it in Jetbrains products :)

The “subscription but keep forever on cancel, sans updates" licence model is just so much more honest than pretending that purchases would be one-time investments and so much less of a risk for the buyer than a hard-stop subscription.

I think it's also good for the product, the right balance between the failure modes of being able to milk existing subscribers even without maintenance for the hard subscription and change for the sake of change that you see with classic one-time licencing where reasons for paid updates have to be invented even when there is nothing to improve (edit: how many great products have been ruined by this?).

The perpetual license fallback saved me when my license expired. Due to the US holidays it took our purchasing department a week or two to renew my license. In the mean time I was able to fall back to an older version, and upgrade once my new license came through. It was very easy and straightforward to do in both directions.

So I agree, it's a very honest business model.

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