Today an individual license costs $60.
Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
Siegel still manages it (I don't know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.
I finally paid for my v15 upgrade ~2 weeks ago, so I wish I could take the credit for the v16 release. But given their long standing, generous policy of giving an updated license if you bought in the last N months (Nov 1st 2025 this time!), I'm actually in great shape and the meme falls very flat.
Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.
My first experience with BBEdit was around 2020, and I have had a copy of it ever since on a Mac for light editing. My main dev home is JetBrains IDEs, but I find VS Code too heavy for quick text edits. That, and Shell Worksheets are enough of a game changer that it justifies the whole price.
Honestly, this alone might be worth the upgrade price. I use BBEdit all day every day, and untitled docs tend to proliferate. I use the scratchpad a lot but still end up with lots of untitled docs.
And still no multiple cursor support :|
much love for them sticking with it for so long
[dead]
[dead]
I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.
BBEdit has been my never-fail backup editor, especially for Mac-specific tasks. It's been a little awkward because of my Vim muscle memory. Glad to see they're adding Vi/Vim keybindings, which I've wanted for a long time.
Happily paid for every update for years, even when I used Emacs, I kept BBedit in reach. For quick text edits/transformations (because Regex in Emacs is hard to use). But with LLMs + nvim I hardly start bbedit anymore.
So now with LLMs, I tell them what I need and they write a shell/Perl/Python script to make the craziest transformations.
In BBEdit's case, I could see adding all your new tools as text filters to have a standard way for executing them, either through scripting or in a text window.
People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.
They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.
And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".
Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.
It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.
But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.
This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.
There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".
BBEdit, Sublime et al. are beacons of what software quality, distribution and pricing ought to be.
three quarters of the saas industry is built around such made-up needs. Not much to be proud of there with a handful of exceptions.
as for price, it feels 100% fair to bleed your enterprise customers to subsidize individual customers.
[dead]
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.
If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.
This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.
Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.
Choices!
As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
Blacksmithing, metal working?
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
The app is most useful, when you can point it at any file in the system, and sandboxed apps can’t see certain directories.
This resulted in an awkward “two-tiered” approach, for a short time, then BareBones just abandoned the App Store.
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576
[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
You'll never hear me speak evil on Emacs. It's one of mankind's greatest software accomplishments. But I spend most of my days and nights on a Mac, and when in Rome...
These days I use emacs for most of that stuff, but I have such a fondness for BBEdit, and still drop into it for regex stuff enough, that I'm buying the update.
This isn’t objectively better or worse. They have features BBEdit doesn’t. It has features they don’t. The rest largely comes down to taste.
None of those things imply that it's broken or unusable. Still, it means it's going to feel like a dated app and that's not fun.
[0]https://www.barebones.com/support/yojimbo/archived_notes.htm...
Barebones is great!
I'm not familiar with macOS: Why would an application need to be updated for any of these? Were the existing APIs insufficient to integrate these?
For instance, an app can't start using Apple Intelligence if it's compiled with an older version of the SDK that doesn't know that such a thing exists. There are some UI exceptions, such as if the OS starts rendering high-level requests like "draw a button" in a newer style. Lots of other things take specific application support, though. MacOS 14 added desktop widgets. Unless an app adds code to configure and deploy widgets, that's not something the OS can do for it. That means that Yojimbo couldn't possibly offer widgets showing, say, the 5 most recently added documents.
If you're OK with not needing or wanting the newer features, and it doesn't rely on some old API that Apple deprecated, then sure, continue to use it! It's still a fine app. But each passing year means that all its updated competitors can do new things that it can't.
[1]: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit15.html#:~:t...
Regarding your last point, there's plenty of software offering both options ($$$ lifetime vs $ monthly). I don't have the data but I bet they see a TON more sales for $ monthly.
E.g. Final Cut Pro for macOS is available as a one-time purchase for $299.99. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Apple Creator Studio for $12.99/month or $129/year
I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.
Let me update the comment.
If you buy it that way, then there is a single setting which authorises access to the sandboxed directories.
They don’t mention it on the site, though, so I guess they aren’t eager to share their money with Apple.
Thanks!
That's not true, it became available in all NSTextViews by default, although with a bit different look.