Sublime Forum

Why buy ST2 is so expensive?

#11

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

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#12

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.

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#13

@SeanWcom

Surely you mean $96, 000 a month right?

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#14

[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.

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#15

Would that blow your mind?

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#16

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

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#17

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.)

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#18

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

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#19

[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. :smile: 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. :smile:

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. :smiley:

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#20

Agreed

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#21

If you are only looking at the number of forum members

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#22

I almost accused you of innumeracy.

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#23

[quote=“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. :smile: 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. :smile:

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. :smiley:[/quote]

If the stats at wbond.net/sublime_packages/community are accurate, there are 838990 users of package control. Granted, not every package control user has paid for ST2, not every paying user use package control and there are many who have paid but have since switched to another editor. But as an exercise lets say that the numbers are totally accurate, that 10% of the Package Control users have paid for a license, that the editor has been in development for exactly 5 years and that it has always cost $59. That gives us (8389900.159)/(5*12) ~= $82500/month

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#24

What Package Control would benefit from is an API method for seeing if Sublime has been registered or not :smile:

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#25

But that is indeed pure speculation… if ST was such a lucrative business I don’t think Jon would keep working as a solo cowboy.

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#26

Unless… he enjoy what he is doing ?

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#27

Hiring people doesn’t mean you don’t get to work anymore… it means you get to finish your ideas faster.

If you choose your team wisely: 3 brains + 30 fingers > 1 brain + 10 fingers

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#28

Man, I wish you were right! Hiring more people usually means managing more people, letting you less time to code.

In theory, your math it’s good. In practice you will see that 3 brains + 30 fingers it’s not always better than 1 brain + 10 fingers. Been there, done that (although with only one brain plus at once :smile: ). Such a team you speak about it’s so rare that i think it’s a myth :mrgreen:

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#29

[quote=“iamntz”]Man, I wish you were right! Hiring more people usually means managing more people, letting you less time to code.

In theory, your math it’s good. In practice you will see that 3 brains + 30 fingers it’s not always better than 1 brain + 10 fingers. Been there, done that (although with only one brain plus at once :smile: ). Such a team you speak about it’s so rare that i think it’s a myth :mrgreen:[/quote]

As I said, it depends on how you choose and manage the team. I agree it’s not always the case, that’s for sure. If the leader is not respected, and if there are conflicts between team mates, then it’s pretty much a fail.

That’s enough off topic for now…

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#30

Sure! Not that the rest of the project was very on topic! :mrgreen: :ugeek:

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