>I think command line utilities are in a worse financial position than GUI utilities, because people are accustomed to paying for GUI apps, but aren’t accustomed to paying for things in the shell at all.
I think that's because command line tools are more appealing to technical people. For convenience sake and ease of use, most average computer users will use GUI tools or applications.
I'm specifically talking about developer utilities. Even developers are accustomed to paying for GUI apps but not command line stuff. To be fair I've never seen anyone selling a local (non-SaaS) command line only tool either.
I think that's because command line tools are more appealing to technical people. For convenience sake and ease of use, most average computer users will use GUI tools or applications.