I looked into buying IDA Pro a while back and the experience was like buying enterprise software in 1997. There's not much of a reason for me to have it but it'd be a fun thing to have and toy with in spare time but I'm not really willing to pay an insane subscription price on a sketchy website.
Sure, but it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends. It's high powered and the industry standard.
I, and many of my colleagues, would gladly play 4 or 5 times the price for IDA and Hex Rays. Though, any decent security company will purchase a subscription for it's employees.
>it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends
I am not so sure I agree. I can take another example, CAD software. There are high powered industry standard softwares which I would love to use on weekends and maybe even use in side projects for profit, but there's no way I can pay $2k/year and justify that. A $2k permanent license? Sure, it's a stretch but I'd probably go for it. 180/month though, whatever I'm doing would have to be really serious before I could justify that.
And I won't ever start at that price so the deal is dead.
There's a parallel in 3d printing. Not so long ago 3d printers were insanely expensive and only accessible to professionals. Now consumer grade machines are starting to replace machines that cost 10-100x more.
It's a frustrating thing about the economy where power tools that could enable a lot of people to do a lot of things are priced so that only a few people who can pay a lot can have access to them. I get that the people making them need to make a livelihood, but the frustration remains.
Oh yes there's plenty of free CAD (for example, FreeCAD), but there are some truly excellent but insanely expensive tools out there too.
I would be happy to spend a large sum of money for a copy, but you can't any more. You have to buy a subscription.
If I can buy something excellent and know that I'll be able to use it, even if outdated, in 10 years, there's real value to an investment like that.
If I'm throwing several dollars a day into a hole for something I'll probably only use sometimes, and at that, perhaps taking years between uses, I can't justify the expense.
Something like how I bought the best cordless drill I could find. Not because I use it every day, or even every month, but because I wanted my drilling experience to be good every time I used it.
If you have good tools you're more likely to do things and do them well.
People give the same advice about guitars. Don't buy a cheap guitar if you want to pick up the skill. It will be difficult to tune, it won't keep a tune, and it won't sound great whatever you do. Buy a good guitar and what you do will sound better and encourage you to keep it up and get better.
A lot of free software tools are the same. They can do what they do, but their flaws discourage use and make failure as a beginner a lot more likely.
There is probably an optimum there. Not so refined as to be too expensive to be accessible to most people and not so rudimentary as to turn away people who try with low success.
> Fusion 360 is free for hobbiests. Not just students.
Fusion is a whole other ball of wax. I was referring to the rest of the Autodesk suite. You can certainly find cracked versions of whatever, but (ab)using the student licensing will at least be some insurance against malware.
The way I look at it (and I'm obviously not a representative of Autodesk in any way, shape, or form): if it's making you money, pay for it. If it's not, don't. If you pirate it to learn how to use it, that's one thing. If you wanted to start selling whatever you're designing that would be the time to pay.
Autodesk, like Adobe, is making a huge push towards subscription licensing. I detest that stuff, but it's at least less of a hit initially unlike IDA.
They won't do unlimited licenses or subscriptions at all, but you can get group licenses (with license server) and support subscriptions. Your three choices are:
a. license server
b. licensed to a specific person
c. licensed to a specific computer
They are indeed pretty unpleasant about the process. They've been burned by license violations.
More than unpleasant. I bought a license, missed the (2 week or something?) deadline to install/activate, and their support ghosted me, leaving my repeated pleas to open another window unanswered. $1k down the drain.
