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Comment by johns | Hacker News Reader

For developer tools you use every day, I think $100 is a relatively small amount and in line with what a lot of text editors and IDEs charge for (and less than many of them).

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For a real product, yes. For a product that doesn't exist yet, may turn to vaporware, may be buggy, may end up poorly designed, may be unusably slow, might not be able to operate as well as described, etc etc, $100 might seem a bit steep.

Perhaps, but part of this is demonstrating the demand for a product of this kind. If Chris reaches the goal for funding, but fails to release a product, hopefully the fact he managed to raise that much cash will indicate to someone else - Microsoft, IntelliJ, Eclipse developers - that there is real money to be made in reinventing the IDE.

I don't see it as chipping in $100 for Lighttable itself (which I do want), I see it as showing there is a very real demand for new thinking in IDE-land.

People spend $2 a day for coffee. Two movie tickets in NYC can cost $30, or more. I think $50 is pretty cheap. Even $100 is not that bad. If it saves you an hour a month, it has already paid for itself. The coffee, well, not really.

You say that, but would you forsake coffee for 50 days for an IDE?

It's only 25 days if you can wait until after the beta. :-)

It's only $100 so there's no need to forsake anything. I bought a personal license for IntelliJ IDEA, for example, and I upgrade to every new version. I believe in buying software that makes me more productive.

I find it kind of strange that people in the software business have such a hard time paying for software. I hope this doesn't rub off on the general population.

That's not how you should think about it. A programmer's salary is say 50k. If this IDE makes you 5% more productive, then it is worth paying $200 per MONTH. If anything, this is vastly under-priced.

But this is a beta product. No demo and nothing to base your decision on but a video. $100 is a lot to bet for a v1 tool that you might never wind up using.

And that's the interesting thing about Kickstarter – am I backing it just for the raw value of the product or because I want to see it actually get made? If the latter, am I willing to pay more?

In this case, personally, I am.

Based on how the software world works, I'm not willing to pay that much money to take a risk on a software project. Failure is way too commonplace. There's lots of software projects many people wanted to see made that were a disaster once actually completed. See for example Duke Nukem Forever

And that's a completely fair point of view. In my case, I want this project to be real badly enough that I'm willing to put some money behind it... but I recognize it for what it is. A work in progress and a hope for a good tool.

I agree. The issue is I have no idea if I'd use this everyday, or just once or twice to try it out. I don't see any company I'd work for adopting, but if I knew it would be anywhere near as useful as some of the free tools I use for side projects (Processing, Flashdevelop, etc.), I wouldn't hesitate to back it for $100. I guess that's the risk Kickstarter and being an early adopter in general.

Agree as well, too risky for $100 that there isn't even a alpha to try out. $50 and I may bite.

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