Your comment comes with a very big assumption that the trivial amount of money you spend really serves your needs and that all marketing material is true and comprehensive. When you buy something and then realize it’s not really solving your problems, then you might apply the same calculation, buy another tool based on some marketing copy, be disappointed and then finally come to a “let me research this space better before throwing money at undeserving people and services” mode. I’m not saying this is how it will always play out. But those who do spend some time researching and trying things out aren’t quite stupid either.

I would also contest your claim that a lot of the HN audience makes $200K a year. I’d wager that it’s a lot lesser.

I think very few people buy things according to such a calculation.

As was pointed out here, though... by pricing at such a point (initially), they find people who do.

And maybe that's the intent.

If you're not Apple, where price insensitive customers beat down your door, then finding them is a non-trivial problem. And not just any customers, but ones who would be interested in your (I assume) follow-on product in a similar space.

If you're living in a Western country as a coder you can afford $90 a year for something that can save you more hours than that unless something is taking most of your money (say alimony or garnished wages from bankruptcy caused by our poor medical system). I prefer emacs and vs code to IDEA editors but that's just me. Even when I was at $50K a year I wouldn't have though twice about $90 for an editor (or other tool) if I thought it would save me time and cussing.

Plenty of successful products appeal to very few people.

I was just offering the way I would approach considering to buy something like this

Personally, I don’t think this tool would make me significantly more productive, but if it could truly save me a few hours a year maybe 120/yr isn’t that bad.

I'm comparing software to software. I want to buy honest software. If I'm paying $100/year for some program, then I'm expecting that another program with similar cost would require similar amount of engineering effort. I'm ready to pay $100/year for operating system. I'm ready to pay $100/year for sophisticated graphical editor like Photoshop.

Paying similar price for simple software? Well, I would expect something like one-time purchase for $10, that's how much I'm paying usually for those kinds of programs.

It might sound a little bit communistic, I know. Sorry.

If I'm making $20k/year, I could pay $10k for Intellij Idea. Because it's essential for my work. But I'm paying $90, because Idea creators put a reasonable price. May be that's because they're in a hard competition with free tools, I don't know.

Size of the market is also important.

Text editor for 30€ is a good business, everyone needs a text editor.

Database client for 30€ is probably a little less profitable, not as many people need that.

Client for a specific database like the protein data bank for 30€ -- well, you might sell two or three copies.

All of these are probably a similar amount of work, but you can't sell them for the same price.

That being said, a menu bar widget has such a huge market that I don't see why they are pricing it so high.

Because they can just lower the price more if it doesn't sell as long as they have enough cash to weather the risk at the higher price.