They are free as in free beer. Your “time and money are direct equivalents” argument is nonsense even to the wealthiest people and sheer lunacy to the people who most need free coding tools.
They seem to have nice products but when people compare JetBrains tooling to Vim, Emacs and VSCode everyone seems to leave out the fact that those tools are 100% free. I think it’s important for coding to be open to as many people as possible and the tools are the point of entry.
Given the right circumstances there could be a lucrative market for used underwear. Not mine, but someone’s. Does the same analogy apply to codebases? Probably.
On AWS K8s provisioning a basic 4-node cluster to sit there and do nothing costs over $300 per month. The amount you spend in a year can be used to build an unreasonably powerful cluster in your home or office.
Then you have to pay for cloud processing. Owning your hardware is an investment that pays off more than ever now that things like Kubernetes’ resource provisioning can escalate costs to the stratosphere even when the nodes are not doing any real work.
I think my next Mac will be whatever laptop still has all of its keys and I’ll just keep building machines to run linux with a one-step Kubernetes solution for development clusters. Many people don’t want to assemble machines and that makes a beefy laptop running Minikube the easiest solution to dodge cloud costs outside of production.
Whenever I see Deep Work apps I always see a reference to the Pomodoro technique but nothing about the techniques specific to deep work as it is described by Cal Newport. What about omitting distractions, prioritizing a single daily task or using your down time to do some brief yet satisfying activity to relax between tasks? Many of these deep work apps are just to-do lists with a timer.
Edit: For what it's worth OP's previous post about this project suggests that he/she has these features in mind and they are just not in this version.