I've found that I pay much more attention to the terms of use for projects supported by smaller teams -- it's hard to feel like I'm ripping off a giant company like Adobe, but I have a hard time telling a small shop basically "HA! Thanks for trusting me stupid, good luck developing your great product with no money."
I buy every piece of software that I find I love and use almost everyday. For me this has become JetBrains and Atlassian products. I love their stuff.
In response to the post topic, I don't use Sublime. It's really good, definitely prefer a real native application over Atom. I do wish it was open source and the author still sold it. I hate using software where there's a sole author and if he gets hit by a bus, it's up in the air what happens next.
I use PyCharm and Vi in my workflow. I've always found I use two editors. One more focused on my programming at hand, and another for general files to reference, notes and so forth.
So when I remote into a server, it's Vi again. I like PyCharm because it has a Vi mode and everything just works. If you're using Python at least, it's a top tier environment to work in.
That's reasonable, but particularly in a business context, if Photoshop is helping you make money then Adobe deserves your money as much as anyone else.
Not to mention that if you're a startup and you plan to grow into a large company or get bought by a large company (i.e. all startups) you are going to have to get your house in order at some point.
