I am having trouble understanding this viewpoint. For my position, I buy PyCharm Professional license, paying about $50 for each one year license. I plan to keep buying that license every year to get upgrades. To me, I end up paying the same price every year. If I want to try a tool for a month I can pay a few dollars for it, then let it go. To me, that's an advantage.

I am curious about "JetBrains now controls pricing". Haven't they always? If they raised their price outrageously for yearly upgrade model, they would lose customers, so that's true of new and old system. I have control of whether I pay their price or not, but they get to control the price, as always.

I understand to some degree that losing access to a tool is an inconvenience, but it doesn't strike me as a terrible burden. It's all just a view into the code, there's nothing irreplaceable about it. So renting compared to having guaranteed permanent access is a loss, but it doesn't seem that awful - but that's very different person to person.

Anyway, I am legitimately curious to hear more about this viewpoint. I kind of get it but don't have the strong visceral reaction to it as many others on here. Is it a use case difference, of people who skip upgrades versus those who don't and pay every year? Or is it fundamentally a philosophical stance on own versus rent?

If you are on the subscription and jetbrains sudenly hikes the price beyond your pain point, then you lose the tool completly, you cant even run the out of date versions. Under the old scheme you could just stop paying the upgrade and not get any new versions, but still carry on using the product.

> If you are on the subscription and jetbrains sudenly hikes the price beyond your pain point

Certainly a reasonable concern, it'd be nice if they implemented some kind of pricing guarantee. It sure wouldn't alleviate the concerns of everyone, but I think it'd go a long way towards showing goodwill.

> JetBrains doesn't need to worry about whether you'll renew year-to-year if they don't produce upgrades that make your renewal worthwhile.

Sure they do: the languages JetBrains IDEs support are also supported by other IDEs, free and paid. If your renewal doesn't leave you in a better position than the other alternatives on the market, you'll leave for some other tool.

This is a very good explanation of why this is bad for consumers.