I've been paying for the subscription for years, so "first" isn't quite right either, because for me that would be some very old version.

Years ago, there was a company that made a refactoring engine for C, I believe I paid >100$ for it in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was a standalone server that could communicate with Emacs (I wasn't an Emacs user). For a consulting engagement, I bought this tool and learned Emacs. I printed out a poster that I put on the wall that show the workflow for the most common tasks I needed to accomplish. I could not have completed it without it.

I discussed this with other programmers at the time, and they were somewhat incredulous that I bought software instead of spending 10x the time to complete the task. Knowing when to buy tools is a skill in and of itself.

No need for a mouse and on-the-fly macro recording and replaying? How many first-born do they want?

now OSS https://github.com/thoni56/c-xrefactory

I happily pay this every year myself, but I think it's important to note it's not really a subscription. You pay for software, and you keep that software forever. If you stop paying, you still get to keep what you paid for. What you pay for every year are the updates.

I know it's a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one to make. Again, I happily pay every where, and it acts very much like a subscription, but it's not like a Creative Suite subscription. If you stop paying, you an always just stay on the software you paid for.

It’s a bit odd. I wish I was paying for 1 year of updates.