I'm certainly sympathetic to the frustration of having to support every previous version of your software. If upgrades cost money, then people are incentivized to stay on old versions and then complain about bugs that have been fixed since then, and you can't tell them "just upgrade" because they don't want to pay to upgrade. Web companies almost never need to support old versions of the website, for example, and that makes them much easier to manage from an engineering and customer support standpoint.
You are downvoted but I kind of agree. I don't think their IDEs improved a lot / more since the subscriptions. Indexing is still a resource hog, RAM usage out of control etc.
I also dislike their insistence on copying the grey Adobe's UIs.
I think their model is pretty fair. You subscribe and then are entitled to use that version forever, even if you end your subscription. What you gain in the subscription is the right to use newer versions.
For the stuff I really rely on, I feel good knowing there's a reasonable business model behind it. The ultimate version is $500 / year or $149 / year for business and personal respectively. For a lot of use cases, it doesn't need to save you very much time to pay for itself.
I disagree, although when they first switched to this model (a good while back now), I had the same reaction as you.
On reflection, I think it's a fair model, and fair pricing. They even reduce the renewal price if you renew after the 1st and 2nd years (maybe even more, I don't recall exactly).
Fact is that I love JetBrains products, so I want them to stick around - I want to pay using a subscription model, because that will make it a whole lot more likely.
I use Pycharm and it's such a superior product that I'm happy to support them so they can continuing development. plus it's a pretty nominal fee from an enterprise development cost perspective so it's an easy budgetary sell.
As others said, the community edition is free and extremely capable, so I don't see a reason to complain. It's fantastic that I can use my professional job to support development that benefits free users.
