from Hacker News

Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model

by qw3rty01 on 12/14/21, 5:37 PM with 119 comments

• by nekitamo on 12/14/21, 6:30 PM

  I've been a customer since ~2010, and have been paying out of my personal pocket the $469 / year support renewal for a standard IDA Pro named license, which I've carried with me through various jobs in my career.

  The new subscription model will almost double my costs ($900 / year), all while I've been getting less and less value with each update. Furthermore if I ever stop paying, I will lose access to the product.

  Whereas if I stop paying now, I will maintain indefinite access to what I currently have.

  I think I simply won't renew next year, and will rely on Ghidra to fill any gaps going forward.

• by PragmaticPulp on 12/14/21, 6:45 PM

  As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter. From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription costs are only a fraction of an annual salary.

  Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind. ~$1K/year isn't out of the realm of what I pay for other tools, but it's really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get 95% of the way there without the subscription model.

  IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes even more developer attention toward improving the open-source alternatives.

• by loves_mangoes on 12/14/21, 6:39 PM

  Taking away the option of perpetual licenses is an interesting business decision. Jetbrains makes the subscription model work, but they also do give you a permanent license to older versions after 1 year of subscription (which is a great incentive to keep people renewing!)

  Historically, IDA Pro's sales and licensing has always been a bit of a headache for customers. I could understand that the OPEX model makes it easier for some companies to keep renewing.

  That just goes to show that I'm not their target market. Even if IDA had a pay-what-you-want option, the 10-20 I'd be willing to pay per month while using a leaked version is clearly completely negligible compared to what they normally charge.

  And I'm happy to just use Ghidra instead of bothering with an IDA leak, so I suspect this announcement might simplify things for their existing corp users, but it'll probably not do a great job of expanding the home userbase.

• by MikeBVaughn on 12/14/21, 8:45 PM

  I really like IdaPro, but this guarantees that I move to Ghidra.

  I think the worst part though is the bit about prohibiting future re-downloads for users who bought perpetual licenses in the past. The sort of company that pulls that nonsense is very precisely not the kind of company I expect to provide a good customer experience in a subscription product/service.

  That is absolutely, 100% a complete deal breaker when it comes to the prospect of me ever doing business with Hex-Rays.

• by jchw on 12/14/21, 6:39 PM

  Dear Hex Rays: I’m not switching to subscription for these prices. Signed, a paying customer with multiple licenses, and future Ghidra user.

• by CoastalCoder on 12/14/21, 6:22 PM

  I'm curious about the interplay of two items from their FAQ:

  > 10. What if I do not renew my subscription? If subscriptions are not renewed, you will lose access to the software on the day that a new subscription should have started. Please note that the software will stop working if not renewed.

  > 13. I have an IDA perpetual license, when do I have to change to a subscription? At the end of your current support period all renewals will be moved to the subscription model. We are offering our existing users an opportunity to pay only your current renewal price for your first year on the subscription plan.

  So maybe I'm mistaken, but it sounds like they're trying to renege on perpetual licenses?

• by marcodiego on 12/14/21, 6:49 PM

  https://ghidra-sre.org/

• by ebeip90 on 12/14/21, 6:30 PM

  This is the dumbest thing they could do.

  “Ah yes, all you hackers and crackers, please take this DRM’ed copy of IDA and please obey the licensing agreement and don’t bypass the DRM.”

• by 0xbadc0de5 on 12/14/21, 7:45 PM

  I had used IDA+HexRays for a few years between 2009 - 2017 but abandoned it entirely in favor of Binary Ninja and Ghidra (and to a lesser extent Hopper and Radare).

  While IDA certainly has the first mover advantage, I've found that Binja and Ghidra in combination are able to achieve full coverage of my targets. If you're just targeting x86, you can probably get away fine with Ghidra. Although I've found for non x86 ISA's, Ghidra and Binja each have better or worse support for certain arch's but the ven diagrams overlap to full coverage.

• by marcodiego on 12/14/21, 6:56 PM

  This is what happens: you've got enough corporate clients dependent on your product; you know they can pay what you're asking and it would be even more expensive for them to invest in alternatives; you also see that alternatives will improve and take youR market in the long run, but when that happens will be already retired.

  I think we've seen this happen with other tools before.

• by TavsiE9s on 12/14/21, 6:20 PM

  I hope Ghidra and alternatives take their customers.

• by rowanG077 on 12/14/21, 6:38 PM

  Another one bites the dust. It's fortunate we have ghidra all though it can't compete yet on feature level. I guess the positive thing is that ghidra development will accelerate now.

• by markus_zhang on 12/14/21, 10:06 PM

  Does anyone know whether it is possible to purchase a legacy license (and don't expect any update once they move to subscription model) for IDA right now? I'm preparing to get into reverse engineering but haven't looked into IDA because I'm still sharpening up my C, assembly and Operating System skills.

  Actually, for a hobbyist, maybe the Home edition is good enough? It does have Pytho scripting capacity, local debugger (I guess I can just use Windbg for windows) and decompiler (although it's cloud based so I'm not sure what does it mean).

  Edit just checked the quote for IDA Pro and it's some 5000+ USD, it's a bit heavy for me.

• by sharklazer on 12/15/21, 2:19 AM

  Oddly, I’ve written my own decompiler stack from scratch for ARM thumb to “dumb” C for embedded systems, based on radare2. I looked at all the existing tooling and said “That would make sense in a professional capacity” before this change. But this is a little ridiculous, given how easy it is to write decompilation and reveng tooling, if you’ve got some compiler know-how and you’re willing to read manuals for those tricky details.

  Also, just to be clear, my tooling only really covered what I needed. It was pretty crude. But amazingly simple to stitches together aside from a few gotchas.

• by livinginfear on 12/14/21, 9:46 PM

  > We have halved the price of our products on this new model and hope that it will allow more users to access the software.

  I love the gall they have to say this.

  When I saw the headline, I thought that a subscription model might provide more amenable pricing than the USD$1800 for IDAPro, and actually give access to more users. At this pricing, they've absolutely ensured that I never pay again. IDAPro is already a product that's diminishing in comparison to the competition year after year.

• by unixhero on 12/14/21, 6:52 PM

  Ah the good old death of good tools.

• by nice_byte on 12/14/21, 7:30 PM

  i liked the old design on their website better. though this one fits better with the whole "software as a service" thing, i suppose.

• by fileoffset on 12/15/21, 12:02 AM

  IDA license has always been a joke.

  Long live Ghidra!