Essentially what you're saying is that the realities of running a business is the equivalent of a millionaire going to the local soup kitchen/food bank and taking as much food as possible and then complaining about the food.
I agree, at minimum, the its free but seeking sponsorship model is making it hard.
Looking at their Sponsorship options on GitHub [1] I see there's a useful perk at the $2,000/month price point, a Support Tier.
It would be interesting to investigate offering "Paid support" for $50-100/month (something easier to put on a development team's corporate credit card), that gives you "priority" in response to GitHub Issues.
Something tangible that the company gets back.
$500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
For IntelliJ; their other tools are $200 a year. And I suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending than a random JS fullstack devsecops person.
Engineers get discretionary spending? I haven't ever had a dollar discretionary. My last job paid for an ergo mouse for me (Logitech Vertical) at hire time and I was so ecstatic at the park and got myself a jumbo mousepad to go with it.
Is there a norm I'm not aware of?
Maybe?
Everywhere I've worked in the US, I always had some level of discretionary spend--even as a lowly summer intern at a behemoth like IBM. It could be software; it could be books; it could be training; it could be computer hardware; it could be lab equipment; it could be groceries or office supplies.
As an intern, I bought some of the first O'Reilly books (mostly about X11) at the Cucumber Book Shop in Bethesda, Maryland courtesy of IBM. As someone way more senior, I once put a T3 line card (about $15K at the time) on my credit card in order to break a budgetary logjam between two feuding departments (and made BOTH of them angry at me--it was beautiful).
Obviously, the more junior I was--the less the value of that spend was. And it went up as I became more senior. And I always had to provide receipts and maybe a bit of justification.
But I've always had some level of discretionary cash spending at even the crappiest companies I've worked for.
Just paid three days ago too.
You're right is very difficult. It feels like there needs to be a product version of these tools, I can definitely explain to my partners that we need this tool and it costs £xxx. But to explain that we should pay for free tools when we might be one of a very few that are is going to be a hard sell.
I can and do make the case for spending a lot of money on SaaS products and hiring people. But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of company leadership and ask for money to spend on something that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with the realities of running a business and the request would be roundly shouted down.
If there's some value I can get then it's a much easier sell. For example, if there is a Babel job board then I can choose to use that over alternatives when I next hire. Jed Watson proposed https://budgetforopensource.org/, which puts this type of thing in the employee perk category so that I can justify it using hiring as a goal. These are things where I can make a business case for spending real dollars, rather than a philosophical argument.