I paid JetBrains $100, because their IDE is awesome, and worth every penny. $100 is probably worth more to me since I am third-worlder[1], I earn far less than 6 figures.
>Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is
No - it wasn't about the money for me; I was one of the very vocal critics about that[2]. The subscription was actually worked out cheaper per year! My complaint was that once you stopped paying subscriptions, your IDE would stop working (they have since backtracked). Previously, if your licence expired, you'd be left with a working IDE which you can no longer upgrade/get updates for, but working nonetheless.
It also didn't help that I felt personally betrayed by the decision after recommending JB to my colleagues and coworkers for years.
1. Middle class third-worlder, but $100 is a larger percentage of my income vs. first-wolrd
In this case, I am happy to pay for RubyMine. And happy to pay a little more if I want to update to the latest version. But I don't like the idea of only being able to use it this month as long as I've paid the rent.
On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.
Many developers pay for close-source editors and IDEs, and the companies that support/develop them aren't necessarily going under. Heck BBEdit is still around despite falling out of favour as the de facto MacOS editor years ago.
Just within the Python ecosystem there are 2 or 3 IDEs that cater to Python developers despite the number of Python developers that prefer Vi(m) or Emacs.
The idea that developers don't or won't pay for an editor or that the OpenSource/Free alternatives are the equivalent of developers coding in Notepad on Windows just for save a few bucks is a false premise.
Seriously, it amounts to one or two days' worth of salary for a software engineer. The break-even point is extremely low.
Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is. It's nothing. But devs want to pay for very little. So we get shitty tools. Like vim[1] or atom[2]. Thanks I guess. Seriously can I have a generic text editor that's as good at editing as IntelliJ is at Java?
[1] http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/
[2] https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...