Once in a blue moon I use Mathematica as an overpowered calculator. I keep it around partly for nostalgia, and partly because it makes me feel like a true computer scientist.

Every time I use it, I have this mental image of using a 500 ton press to crack a walnut. It's ludicrous overkill, but it brings a certain satisfaction to be able to use arbitrary precision maths when I don't need to, and use nonlinear fits for graphs where nobody looking at the result will even begin to appreciate the difference it makes.

This is the problem -- there is a "long tail" of people like me that have used Mathematica at university that are loathe to let go, but can't really justify the ongoing price.

This is why there are free editions of many paid tools. IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio have free "community editions", for example. More importantly, the build tools are generally free.

Even eye-wateringly expensive enterprise products with "call us" pricing have free editions! For example, VMware ESXi, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server all do.

Wolfram is one of the last all-proprietary, no-free option, no open-source holdouts, especially in the space of "general purpose languages".