It is very difficult to get developers to buy dev tools.
As somebody who can code reasonably well, and has a tonne of experience building products and software, I find it very hard to pay for software products.
It's a bit like having a restaurant yourself and then going and eating in somebody else's restaurant. You will find too many faults in their food, and you will find it very expensive.
As a developer, if you actually want to spend money on something, the product has to be really, really good and should be solving the problem extremely well.
I can count on one hand the tools I've paid for in 20+ years:
- TextMate (~2004) - I bought a Mac just to use this editor
- Google OneDrive (~2018) - reluctantly, because I wanted to build my own solution but sanity prevailed
- Claude Code Pro (~May 2025) - upgraded to Max within a week
- And most recently... something that solved a constraint I didn't even realize was holding me back
As you can see, I remember almost every single tool I bought because there aren't many. Every other thing is either free, open source, or provided by the companies I worked for.
When I do pay for something as a developer, it means the product has crossed an incredibly high bar. It's not just good—it has to be exceptional and solve the problem extremely well.
Recently, I found another tool that made the cut. In my next post, I'll share the two constraints we face when working with AI—and how this tool solves one of them.
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