It's also our employers. They don't like to spend money on dev tools because the suits don't see the benefit. There's no glossy Gartner magic quadrant BS for every niche development usecase so they think they're throwing money into the fire.

If you think you get more productive with $10/month or something that most dev tools cost, why don’t you buy it on your own. After all even if it increases your salary hike by 1%, it will be worth it. I have seen designers buying Adobe tools which cost much more than dev tools, and their salary is on average lower.

I don't know where you work but in our place using tools without internal approval or certification is really frowned upon. And in the case of this particular product we were talking about, it's really an infrastructure thing. You can't implement this on your own because then your colleagues' work won't connect to yours anymore.

But also, the company should just supply the tools.

> glossy Gartner magic quadrant BS

The phrase is gold. I understand from this that companies which provide tools and infrastructure for professional developers must not only attract the devs themselves, but also (and maybe more importantly) market/advertise and sell to the "suits", their managers and employers.

Not sure if that's what you intended, but I'm now seeing the value of glossy Gartner magic quadrant BS, and thinking how to apply it in my own projects.

I am calling it that because I often see solutions being marked at the top that are actually worst in capability. I don't understand how they make these quadrants but I guess money has a lot more to do with it than technical capabilities.

Also, there are some tools where you could convince someone up the chain to spend money, until they see the offer from the vendor.

I would have loved to have HashiCorp Vault Enterprise for instance, but the math just wasn't working out to get a feature you can get by... just running more of them.

I'm not surprised. Software is an attractive hobby to the miserly because it requires little investment. And eventually those hobbies become careers.

If spending was our thing perhaps we'd have gotten into woodworking, or photography, or whatever it is that can take a good chunk of change to get into deeply instead.

Anything but a FOSS license makes my life as an employed software engineer harder if I don't want to completely disregard compliance rules. So usually I don't bother.

Also, some developer tools want outrageous prices that are in no way proportionate to their value if you compare them to some standard paid tool (i.e. a JetBrains IDE)