You do not have to pay for a subscription for their IDEs. You can pay just once and get that version of the IDE forever plus a period of updates. Or, use the community edition and pay nothing.
The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost.
You can also use the offline-only mode, which is 100% free and just runs on your machine.
I hate the "everything as a subscription" model with a passion, but JetBrains is one company that does appear to do it the "right" way where you're paying for continued development, not continued access to the same version.
> Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement
It was in the changenotes with a huge section, it was in the newsletter, and the blog.
JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have, so you can choose to slim down the IDE or replace functionality with 3rd party stuff (like copilot).
The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost.
You can also use the offline-only mode, which is 100% free and just runs on your machine.
I hate the "everything as a subscription" model with a passion, but JetBrains is one company that does appear to do it the "right" way where you're paying for continued development, not continued access to the same version.
> Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement
It was in the changenotes with a huge section, it was in the newsletter, and the blog.
JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have, so you can choose to slim down the IDE or replace functionality with 3rd party stuff (like copilot).