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.
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'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 ; )
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.