Why buy ST2 is so expensive?

[Noxalus]

Hi everyone !

I discovered Sublime Text 2 a few weeks ago, and I love it ! I love it so much that I would like to buy the pro version to cheer on developers, but when I see the price, I totally changed my mind

Why it’s so expensive ?! I don’t work yet, and I haven’t a lot of money, 59$ it’s too much. Althought Sublime Text 2 is an excellent text editor, it’s not an IDE, it’s just a text editor, so why ?

A price between 10$ and 30$ will be more affordable. Do you know Synthesia ? It’s an excellent soft for piano players, and developpers make a really good job like you, and 2 years ago, I bought a license for only 10$.

Thanks you anyway for your work, and keep going like this, the standard version is enough for me

[SeanWcom]

I don’t think it’s expensive at all, but it all just depends on what you do with it. I make a living writing code, and I write a GREAT deal of that code in ST2. So when I compare my salary in a given year versus how much it costs to own Sublime Text, it’s a no-brainer.

Now if you don’t have a job and you just tinker with code, or write stuff for free, then I can see how it would be expensive to you. If this is the case, and you’re good at it - why not earn some money doing it? There are plenty of sites where you can bid on a job (PHP, Javascript, Ruby, etc, etc), complete the job, then get paid.

Also, be sure to think about this from the developer’s perspective. One person wrote the app (correct me if I’m wrong community). If he has sold 5,000 copies for $60 bucks (I have no idea how many have been sold) then he’s made $300,000 in sales. That doesn’t mean he’s made $300k though. I can’t speak for the developer, but I pay taxes that would cut that number down significantly. Then there’s healthcare costs, medicare, 401k (and other retirement funds) to think of. Also, don’t forget that he’s been working on this for years - he may not have made anywhere near that amount of money. I’d be willing to bet that the developer doesn’t get paid much at all when all is said and done.

Last thing to keep in mind is that you can use the free version indefinitely. You just have to put up with the popup. That’s a small price to pay (no price at all) for a great app.

[S0und]

I don’t think it’s expensive at all, but it all just depends on what you do with it. I make a living writing code, and I write a GREAT deal of that code in ST2.

I don’t even write code for living but to make my boring job a hell lot of easier. I don’t know if this even possible, but ST played a major role why am i love programming right now.

[pier]

ST is cheap as chips…

I spend around 50% of my pro time with ST, and the other 50% with Adobe CS6, which costs me 600$ every year. And that can still be considered cheap.

[SilverRubicon]

I write code for a living so maybe my opinion is skewed, but I don’t feel that it’s “so” expensive. $40 may be a better price point but for as much as I use and love it, I’m happy with the $60.

[iamntz]

Here we go again.
Every now and then, there is something complaining about the price…

Do you know Synthesia ? It’s an excellent soft for piano players, and developpers make a really good job like you, and 2 years ago, I bought a license for only 10$.

Awesome. Why don’t you use Synthesia to write some code?

[pier]

Awesome. Why don’t you use Synthesia to write some code?

Even better, why not use Internet Explorer to to write code. It’s a great piece of software and it’s free!!!

[amphetamine]

Also, be sure to think about this from the developer’s perspective. One person wrote the app (correct me if I’m wrong community). If he has sold 5,000 copies for $60 bucks (I have no idea how many have been sold) then he’s made $300,000 in sales. That doesn’t mean he’s made $300k though. I can’t speak for the developer, but I pay taxes that would cut that number down significantly. Then there’s healthcare costs, medicare, 401k (and other retirement funds) to think of. Also, don’t forget that he’s been working on this for years - he may not have made anywhere near that amount of money. I’d be willing to bet that the developer doesn’t get paid much at all when all is said and done.

Don’t be naive, I’d be shocked if he wasn’t making a killing from it.

[quote=“iamntz”]

Do you know Synthesia ? It’s an excellent soft for piano players, and developpers make a really good job like you, and 2 years ago, I bought a license for only 10$.

Awesome. Why don’t you use Synthesia to write some code?[/quote]

I don’t know where he was going with this either but you being a dick about it is just as pointless.

To the OP, yeah, $59 is exorbitant for a text editor, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s not as simple as relativist “I make that much from developing with it in x hours” thinking, the fact of the matter is that within its own marketplace, it’s expensive. If you do want to look at it from a relative perspective then consider, for example, school-age hobbyist coders and countries with a much lower GDP per capita than America (i.e. most of us) where the price is steeper in “real” terms. Even when I was programming for fun during my school years, I would’ve paid for a program like Sublime could I have afforded it.

I can’t personally afford it but fortunately the evaluation model is very generous all things considered so people like me aren’t suffering for it.

[svenax]

To the OP, yeah, $59 is exorbitant for a text editor, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s not as simple as relativist “I make that much from developing with it in x hours” thinking, the fact of the matter is that within its own marketplace, it’s expensive. If you do want to look at it from a relative perspective then consider, for example, school-age hobbyist coders and countries with a much lower GDP per capita than America (i.e. most of us) where the price is steeper in “real” terms. Even when I was programming for fun during my school years, I would’ve paid for a program like Sublime could I have afforded it.

Let me tell you otherwise. We can compare to other text editors on the market:

• $299 (single user, single platform) - SlickEdit

• $250 - Lugaru’s Epsilon (a purely text based editor with almost no graphical GUI)

• $100 - UltraEdit multi platform

• $60 - UltraEdit single platform

• $50 - BBEdit

Most of these have considerably less features than Sublime. Sure, Sublime could be cheaper, it could even be free. That would make some people happy. But still I can not understand why people are quibbling about $10-15 for a product they use every day for many years.

[iamntz]

I’m not a dick, but don’t expect logic response when you compare apples with apricots…

You don’t afford this editor? You could use it as evaluation (forever!) or switch to other.
There are a LOT of cheap or free editors out there. You could go with Vim, Netbeans, Aptana, Notepad++, hell, even with good old Notepad!

Is THAT simple!

To the OP, yeah, $59 is exorbitant for a text editor, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

vs

To the OP, yeah, $59 it’s a good price for a text editor, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

See how $59 went from a bad price to a good price?

[pier]

• $299 (single user, single platform) - SlickEdit

• $250 - Lugaru’s Epsilon (a purely text based editor with almost no graphical GUI)

• $100 - UltraEdit multi platform

• $60 - UltraEdit single platform

• $50 - BBEdit

I’d like to add some other editors to the list

• $399 Dreamweaver (yeah lots of people still use that… thing)

• $99 Coda 2 (which is nowhere close to ST in text editing features)

• $75 Espresso

• $50 TextMate (that is for the good old version v1…)

• $49 Chocolat

[SeanWcom]

Don’t be naive, I’d be shocked if he wasn’t making a killing from it.

What’s your definition of a killing?

This forum has 8,586 members. That doesn’t mean the software has been purchased that many times, but lets just say 8,000 people have paid for ST2, and they all paid $60 bucks (I’m not sure if the price has ever been different). That comes out to $480,000. But lets keep in mind that ST2 has been in development for five years now. Nov 12 2007 was the first blog post and there’s no telling how long it was in development prior to that, but we’ll stick with five years. We have no way of telling how many copies have been sold in a given year, but taking that number above and dividing by five gives you $96,000 per year. I’m no tax expert, but here in the states, you can expect at least a third of that to go to the government leaving you with $64,000 per year (not taking into account any other expenses that would eat into profit). For a professional developer here in the states, that’s NOT great money. It’s a decent living to be sure, but with the skills that Jon obviously has, that’s not great money.

Now, all that assumes that 8,000 people out of the 8,586 members have bought the software. I’m guessing it’s nowhere near that number. To be fair, I don’t remember the purchasing process - I suppose it’s possible that you can buy ST2 and not create a forum account, which makes this whole argument pointless. But the overall point I’m trying to make is that there’s not great money in this for Jon unless he’s selling tens of thousands of copies.

[sublimator]

@SeanWcom

Surely you mean $96, 000 a month right?

[pete340]

[quote=“castles_made_of_sand”]@SeanWcom

Surely you mean $96, 000 a month right?[/quote]

Surely not. That’s over $1,000,000 a year.

[sublimator]

Would that blow your mind?

[pete340]

Would that blow your mind?

Given the initial estimate of $480,000 for five years, that would require some rather creative accounting.

[kumori]

When mentioning the price point in an office environment, the usual reaction you get is:
“What? Nooo! That can’t be a real editor. We can’t use some garage-built software. After all, we already paid $1299 for Adobe Creative suite, so we’d better stick to that.”

($399 for Dreamweaver only if you think that compassion is more fair.)

[sublimator]

Ah, I see. You concluded I was correcting his math with some wildly off base number.

[SeanWcom]

[quote=“castles_made_of_sand”]@SeanWcom

Surely you mean $96, 000 a month right?[/quote]

Hey, if he WERE making that much money, more power to him. I’m all about getting paid for hard work. But, $96,000 per month would mean that he’s selling 1,600 copies of ST2 per month. That’s over 50 licenses per day. I’m not saying he isn’t - but that does seem like a bit much.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. The issue at hand is the cost of the editor. I don’t think it’s expensive but as someone else pointed out, it’s all relative, so we’re in the world of opinion which we could argue about all day. Here’s a thought: Call of Duty Black Ops 2 raked in over 500 million in 24 hours (at $60 bucks for the standard, non-collector’s edition). That’s over 8.3 million copies sold in 24 hours. That’s 8.3 million people who don’t think $60 bucks is a lot to spend on a game. Why should it be a lot to spend on any other software? And we’re back to opinion.

I do want to mention that I’m not intending to criticize anyone for their opinion, so I apologize if I came off that way.

[sublimator]

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. The issue at hand is the cost of the editor.

Agreed