Comment by mdaniel

Not only the pricing by itself, every story that I've heard about normal people trying to actually give them money is that they actually don't want to sell it to anyone other than big players

That said, depending on ones needs they do actually offer a slimmed down IDA Free: https://hex-rays.com/ida-free

I actually use AUR to more-or-less track its releases https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ida-free