I happily would pay 10x that for a good editor; thankfully, I use Emacs and don't have to. But skimping on tools is the falsest of economies.

If you use sublime as your main editor and your job is software development then $70 is really not much at all considering it's a core part of your livelihood

Such considerations aside, it's quite possible that they'd make more money if they priced it lower. I would think the potential market for a $20 or $30 editor is much larger than that of a $70 editor.

Then again, I assume they considered this carefully and made an informed decision when they set their price point. I'm definitely in the "I'd buy it if it were cheaper" club, though.

Agree with this. If it's the best tool it's not that much money. But the other argument is: is $70 worth the change in productivity compared to other similar products? In that sense, comparatively, it could be considered overpaying. But to each their own, and I'm sure for some that answer is "yes".

That's the thing people feign to ignore: SublimeText might be the rage these days, but TextMate was the bee's knees a few years ago and has now been replaced. The reason for that is that despite being expensive, there was no guarantee that the maintainer would put the effort needed to make it a world-class editor fully capable of competing against the big boys.

SublimeText seems to be the same kind of editor: you pay for it (a hefty price), it brings you features, but it's still very young, non-standard, non-ubiquitous and seems to be going at too fast a pace for its own good.

My bet is that as good as it is and as much as it wants to be the new vim or emacs, those editors will still be around in 20 years from now, because they've been thoroughly tested, augmented, improved upon, they're free in all sense of the word and they benefit from HUGE ecosystems of plugin developers, sane choices of underlying language support for scripting and customization (vim less so than emacs but you get the point), i.e. they deliver HUGE value.

>$70 for a ST2 license is obscene

Oh come on. I think that's a very fair price if it's a tool you'd use daily (especially in a professional capacity).

same thing you could say for a better, but more expensive IDE... it will pay off pretty quickly

Whether or not that price is reasonable is not dependant on how often I use the tool, it depends on how much value I gain. If the tool is a tiny improvement to my life vs a free editor, then I will only pay a tiny amount to use it. With sublime I don't see anything it offers to make my life better/easier at all compared to say, notepad++. So why would I pay $70 for it?

How much value do you expect for $70?

$70 worth? It is pretty hard to put into words, but if I am paying $70 for an editor, it needs to be $70 better than the free options. As far as I can tell, sublime is $0 better.

Kid, when Double Dragon came out for Nintendo in 1987 it cost $54.95 (I remember because premium games up to that point were usually $49.99). That's $112.30 in 2013 dollars. You can afford to pay $70 for your bread and butter tool for a job that typically pays $50-$100k.

That popup, which I only see twice a day, is not annoying enough for me to upgrade from the free version. If they really wanted people paying for it, they would have premium features, not a lower price point.

Sure, and I'd like Tesla Roadster at a lower price point too.

I'm a carpenter and it's obscene that my lathe wasn't free.

I can't afford it right now, but when the day comes that I'm making $70 per hour using it, I'll have no problem paying for that license.

It's like 6 hours of your work if you are really bad paid, I use my license for 2 years already, it paid off on the first day.

think about any other profession and think about saying that you refuse to buy the tools you need at a 70$ price point. Even if you wait tables, you would likely have 70$ in clothes you would need to buy and wouldn't think twice about it.

I can't think of any other job where you could even try the tools for free, much less complain about them being 70$.

The problem with this job is that there are tools which would do essentially the same job, but completely for free.

Probably because many can get by on cheaper / free tools. I used Sublime for X days and loved it but still can't justify spending $70 for it. It's a nice-to-have.

But what if you could pick up other clothes for free, but they weren't your favourite colour?

sure, then you would, but would you then go to the gap and complain about their prices? Also, the difference is that they are using the 70$ tool, which is obviously better than the free or cheaper price points, but complaining that the price is obscene.

How much do you think is good?