I've been an Ultimate subscriber for many years. I started out using ReSharper in Visual Studio, then picked up ReSharper C++ when I began writing C++, and eventually moved to Rider. As I also work with Java and Python, I just went ahead and bought Ultimate. Even though my company provides Visual Studio and other tools, JetBrains has given me a genuinely enjoyable development experience all these years.
These days everyone is coding with Agents, but I still really enjoy writing code by hand. I like implementing features myself and designing architecture. But spending a significant amount of money every year on an Ultimate subscription just to support that hobby no longer makes sense from an ROI perspective. At this point, most of what I'm paying is really just to support JetBrains and to thank you for the enjoyment you've brought me over the years.
My subscription is about to renew again, and I'm still on the fence about whether to continue. It looks likely that I will, but if the ROI keeps declining, I'm not sure what the future holds. It's not that JetBrains' IDEs have changed, it's that the times have changed.
These days everyone is coding with Agents, but I still really enjoy writing code by hand. I like implementing features myself and designing architecture. But spending a significant amount of money every year on an Ultimate subscription just to support that hobby no longer makes sense from an ROI perspective. At this point, most of what I'm paying is really just to support JetBrains and to thank you for the enjoyment you've brought me over the years.
My subscription is about to renew again, and I'm still on the fence about whether to continue. It looks likely that I will, but if the ROI keeps declining, I'm not sure what the future holds. It's not that JetBrains' IDEs have changed, it's that the times have changed.