Hopefully you pay far less than that now: Their prices have come down. But yes, it used to be a $600 product, that was totally worth it to many developers, because of how much better it was than Eclipse. In a world full of boilerplate like Java, IntelliJ's intentions just saved so much time. I remember asking companies that were using Eclipse to please let me use my own license of IntelliJ, because just what alt + tab and alt + insert brought to the table saved more than the price of admission on any given month. I made a similar argument for a second and even third monitor, given the resulutions we had those days.