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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

Wow… incredibly expensive… at minimum another 26€ a month. Wolfram really enjoy milking their customers dry (and I’m a customer). I think this is highway robbery.

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With a bit of creativity you can run something similar for free. It's worth noting Raspberry Pi comes with a free Wolfram license. The assistant part can come from something like Perplexity, which in my experience is decent at writing Mathematica code.

I also have a Mathematica license which I think is worth paying for. One of the few closed software that has no good equivalent in the libre world. Nonetheless, I wish Wolfram had come up with a different business model that made Mathematica more mainstream, as I feel it has not realized its potential in certain areas.

Totally agree that they have unrealized potential. It was amazing when I was in grad school. Then when I started running a corporate data science team, I struggled to find a use case to recommend it for purchase. There are so many other tools that are better at loading a messy dataset, cleaning it, doing EDA, building a model, and productionizing and monitoring the model, which is the process we spend a lot of time doing.

It's still the very best for symbolic math. But it has fallen behind on other domains.

And even in the symbolic math niche, I am afraid that Python and Julia will slowly erode its market-share.

It’s only expensive if you’re getting less than 50$/month of value from it, at which point don’t subscribe. This isn’t something I’d pay for right now, but when I was doing this kind of work regularly it would have been an easy purchase.

Subscription models don’t mesh well with casual users. However, if it’s going to save you hours of work every month then it’s a perfectly reasonable price point.

Would you sub for $50 if you were getting $51 per month of value?:)

Any alternative where you pay $10 for $15 value or you pay $100 for $150 value will beat this

> Would you sub for $50 if you whee getting $51

Personally no, 50$/month of value covers not just 30$/month, but also the overhead of yet another subscription.

So paying 10 for 15 doesn’t make much sense IMO, but $100 for $150 does.

Yep. It is not black and white

That’s like two Starbucks visits.

(Wolfram customer since 1988 too, so I think it’s helpful to change units, in this cost evaluation!)

For me, it's like days, weeks, or months of distraction trying to get the license renewed, through the multiple bureaucracies that are involved: IT, purchasing, and accounting, to name a few. And a second license for the lab, or a site license, or one for home use? That's crazy talk. And now that software is sold by subscription, it's an annual headache, per app.

I get it that "single user at single computer" is the majority of use cases, so I'm not asking for accommodation. But for me, free means free site license, and I do like to have my tools installed on every computer that I touch.

Sure, there are work-arounds, but it's hard to keep using the proprietary stuff when the free stuff is so easy to deal with.

Disclosure: Wolfram user from 1993 to 1997. Also, when colleagues want to use proprietary software tools, I always go to bat for them, to get the expense approved, because I believe that people should have a choice.

Yeah i totally do understand what you're saying. I miss having mathematica available on any machine for instance on a campus site license, which i used for years overlapping yours too!

I wouldn't call that "incredibly expensive". Certainly for what it does, there are many other software packages that cost more.

For somebody who uses Wolfram Home, it’s incredibly expensive.

Because of what logic actually?

Are they forcing you to use it?

Or do you expect them to run expensive GOUs for you for free?

Are you actually using wa? Because if it's helpful as an assistant and it only costs 26 Dollar, shouldn't you be happy about this?

Yes I do use Mathematica. 26€ a month is pricing like a freakin’ luxury.

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