I expect some of the demand is due to the fact that JetBrains releases new major versions of their products 2 or more times a year (ReSharper for example), and conveniently bundle important bug fixes into those versions instead of fixing the bugs in previous releases.

So anyone who's - for example - still using ReSharper 6 will probably leap at this opportunity to finally get fixes for critical bugs in the product. Normally you'd have to pay $100 or more to upgrade just for bug fixes; now it's a rather more reasonable $30 or so.

"More reasonable" points exactly to what I'm talking about.

If the demand for this offer is so intense their servers melt down for hours on end it seems this is pointing to a huge opportunity the rest of the year to reach all those who think 4x the current sales price (whether for the full version or the update) is "unreasonable".

One data point would be myself: as a single developer, spending 100€ on AppCode never felt "reasonable" considering XCode was free. 25€ is an instabuy of course - so it seems to me the "sweet spot" is more around 50-60€ where they'd reach far more than twice as many customers than at 100€...

It's easy to assume that a sale price is a better year-round price, but it doesn't always work that way. Yes, there's pent up demand for the 75% off price, but the people who are buying it are the people who didn't want to buy it at full price. JetBrains has been in business for a while and must have clearly sold a LOT of licenses at full price for them to be releasing new products/versions.

Flash sales like this are used to maximum revenue. They earn full price most of the year and do flash sales to get everyone that doesn't want to pay full price to pay something.

Coupons work the same way. If your price sensitive you'll spend the time to clip coupons and get the better deal. If you're less price sensitive, you won't "waste your time" with coupons and will pay full time. Sales and profits increase for the company.

It's not just people that didn't want to buy at full price. It's also people that would have purchased at full price eventually being compelled to act today by the huge discount.

For example I bought AppCode and PyCharm today instead of waiting until Q1 of next year like I originally planned.

It seems odd to consider 100€ unreasonable for an IDE if you are doing professional development unless it offers you no advantages whatsoever.

No kidding. Appcode paid for itself in the first day of use. Probably the best $100 I've ever spent on software.

Once you get past the initial purchase, upgrades cost 59, which is right in the sweet spot you mentioned. I'm guessing this is not an accident.

There are definitely a good number of people that might not consider the full price worth it, but that's why JetBrains has occasional sales around holidays, back to school, etc.

It is because the offer plays to our human nature. We perceive we are getting something worth 4 times the value but fear that if we do not act now we will lose it forever.

The fact that the servers are going down and people are excited by the offer also means that we will feel left out if we do not do what our fellow humans have validated as a good choice.

If they offered the product at a cheaper price normally, they are devaluing the product, which is not what they want to do. This is a $100 product for $25, not a $50 product for $50.

Yeah but parent is saying that if they had correct pricing they would be able to handle this level of demand.

75% off for your product should create a much larger sales revenue, but within a certain factor. Beyond that just shows that most of your potential customers view your software as being heavily overpriced.

Not really.

If you've got a great product and there's no competition on par in the market, you can charge what ever you like and people will pay (photoshop, maya, resharper, etc).

A sale like this just spikes interest and no doubt drives a lot of chatter which will pull other full price paying customers to the site to buy more stuff.

As a company with shareholders, can you really justify throwing away profits by cutting your prices permanently by 75%?

For this to be a reasonable proposition you need 4x your current customer base that you can prove wont buy your product unless you slash the price.

You'd probably see some rise in volumes, but 500%?

O_o I"m dubious.

(I've always thought the Jetbrains stuff was quite modestly priced; compared to say, Xamarin's offerings)

I think a problem is the difference between the personal and commercial licenses. If they put too much of a price disparity there, it creates a downward pressure on the commercial licenses. Right now the commercial licenses are pretty cheap already, so I don't think they need lowering. At the same time, the personal use licenses are still quite expensive for hobby projects. This deal seems like a good way to bridge the gap.

I'd say it's more complicated than that.

I've been using IntelliJ since version 4 or so and before the free/community edition and commercial edition divide I have to admit I was poor and did use the crack. Then came the free version and I could use IntelliJ without being a pirate and without buying it.

The commercial version has a few niceties (code coverage, dependency structure matrix, better JavaScript support etc.) that I was missing but I wasn't exactly willing to pay 200 Euros for these yet: not that I didn't have the money but more out of lazyness and thinking "bah, I don't really need these, 200 Euros for that is a bit steep".

Now at 47 Euros I'm falling for it.

That's it: after nearly ten years of using IntelliJ (including both years and years using the free version and years and years using cracked version), I'm eventually buying it.

So I don't think it's just appealing to people who've never used it and think: "hey, that's x/4 instead of x, let's buy this thing, it's a bargain" in the same way that women loves "sales".

I think there are quite some people who've always been wanting the additional features but weren't quite willing to put 200 Euros for it.

Plus there's the doomsday thinggy: it's going to be cool to remember that that one software I bought it on what was supposed to be the last day on earth ; )

Another thing a sale like this does is increases future potential revenue. Folks that buy the product at this reduced price could get "hooked" in using the product and therefore see the value they provide and purchase upgrades in the future. Also, after purchasing the products and using them these folks are probably more likely to recommend them to others.

They might also convince their company to buy some full-priced commercial licenses. They could end up with many new customers this way..

At least for me these limited time discounts are things that move my purchase project from "plan" to "execute" -phase.

For me the 75% off mark moves my thought process from

“I'm mainly doing Ruby. Do I want RubyMine? IntelliJ IDEA supports all the Ruby stuff plus other languages too right? Argh, this is complicated. Maybe I'll take another look later if I think I really want/need this.”

to

“Hey 75% off. I think I'll just grab both. Maybe even collect all 6!”

I doubt it, it's the same with anything when there is a sale.

For example, Steam sales. When I see a game that is interesting I will think "cool, but I should finish all of the games I'm currently playing first". If I have 24 hours hours to get it at half price it feels like I am actually saving money in the long run even if I don't play it straight away.

Whether it was worth the initial price or not is almost irrelevant. I imagine if they set their prices to 25% permanently there would still be high demand if they did a further 25% sale.

JetBrains products are far from expensive for this class of software (or for any other software out there).

Considering the awesome support, level of polish and massive value provided by the JetBrains team, their products are actually pretty cheap.

I guess that a lot of people are just exercising their options regardless of actual need for the product.

For me PyCharm has paid itself many times over. Keep up the good work JetBrains!

@JanezStupar thank you for your support! Take good care.

Probably, I've been eyeing the memory/performance profilers for months. Its rare that I need them, but when I do i'm just not in a position to pay the huge prices for them. At this price point, i'm willing to buy them even without an immediate need for them.

The 'buy' part of their site is still down. Sounds like a perfect use case for the cloud...

we're still working hard on getting things running smoothly. thank you for your patience.

Maybe reassuring folks that the 24 hour counter will only start once the site is functioning again would go a long way towards stopping folks from hitting F5 so much...

you can certainly expect fairness. If you are unable to purchase due to the store being down it is fair to expect an extension.

That's good to hear. I submitted an order over an hour ago and have received no email confirmation, license key, download link, whatever :) I emailed your sales department to at least make a paper trail of that. Looking forward to giving your products a real trial now.

Bulk of their customers must be enterprises. I have licenses for many of their products and our team uses TeamCity enterprise. I have never considered buying personal licenses. Now I am.

What you're actually proposing is to infer a distribution from a delta function. Or... something like that.

um no; we all just want to get in on this before the end of days. Who doesn't want to go out with their favorite JetBrains product?!