Honestly, it's time we all put our money where our mouths are. A hobbyist/individual license for Mathematica's desktop version is $170/year (or $335 for a forever license to the current version). If we really value our time, convenience and happiness, paying for software which we consider awesome should be a no-brainer. Heck, that's not even 1% of annual rent for someone living in the Bay Area. Of course, this comment is overly broad, and doesn't apply directly to people living in areas with lower cost of living or purchasing power (I grew up in India, so I understand the disparity).

I think Mathematica is quite fantastic (took me some time to understand it's patterns). I don't use it currently because 1) A lot of my current work is numerical and not symbolic -- for which Mathematica isn't great; so I use Python/Julia 2) From a long term perspective, I wouldn't want to invest a large fraction of my personal computing efforts into a proprietary single point of failure.

TBH, with regards to paying for software, my psychological motivation is still a work in progress (so the comments above are directed at myself as much as at others), but I'm trying to build a habit of doing it more -- especially to support free software. I care about computing too much -- I would hate to look back on this twenty years later and rue the loss of computing freedom because we were too stingy to invest a hundred bucks a year in the appropriate places.

Aren't there two seperate discussions? 1. Paying something for the contribution of others that offer their product for free (OSS) and 2. Paying for and using proprietary software according to the licenses as offered by the licensee. Mathematica falls under 2 and is obviously totally allowed to pursue any pricing scheme they find acceptable. We just happen to think that leads to a lower than optimal rate of acceptance, which is a societal loss but Wolframs good right. Given Wolframs love of I and there being two I's in prIcIng, he must have written about his motivations somewhere.

Same experience here. Mathematica is incredibly powerful. Manipulate[] is so far ahead of anything else alone. Plus the symbolic math, the insane amount of built-in functions, the stunning visualizations... But the pricing is insane. Not in a thousand years would it be possible to afford Mathematica professionally or as a hobby. I had great fun with my student license for a year though.

Well, there is a free tier in Wolfram Cloud, which shares the same language...

Mathematica is free on any Raspberry Pi.

I know. There's quite the lack of computing power on the RPi though for professional use. And thus no use in investing the time in learning Mathematica. (The BOFHs would fall over laughing if you tried to bring a RPi for BYOD.)

My point was to combine a compliment (it's a truly awesome set of tools) with a gripe (the pricing is so prohibitive, even decision makers in pretty cost-oblivious organisations cringe when hearing the fees).

I dare say any financial organisation could replace the multilanguaged hell that is user built software by Mathematica and leap forward. It's the licensing cost that make Mathematica a niche product. Microsoft could buy Mathematica and integrate it with Excel (again, partly in jest).

The new Pi 3+ revisions are... adequate if you’re a hobbyist. I have used Mathematica on and off since the NeXT era, and still play around with it whenever I want to get a feel for some new concept or revisit old materials.

>multi-day course in Mathematica left me in awe

Out of curiosity, what did you do? Symbolic analysis?