Autocad costs that much because Autodesk behaves anti-competitively and has locked firms into their proprietary tooling / file formats / training and the firms have no choice but to keep paying them.

Their predatory behaviour towards the engineering industry is literally why I taught myself programming and switched to software development.

They are a prime example of why you shouldn't build your company around closed source proprietary software, but open source software that can be forked or self hosted in a worst case scenario.

You mean subscribe to them right? You can't buy Jetbrains products to use in perpetuity. I pay for their all products pack. They have a 40% continuity discount after two years, which is nice. I would agree they aren't terribly expensive for commercial software, but they are competing in a space full of free and/or open source alternatives, unlike many production-level commercial softwares.

That being said, their AI integration features are awful across the board, whether it's their own AI or copilot.

And while I much prefer jetbrains stuff to something like vscode, it's way more about UI uniformity for me. VS Code extensions outside the top 20 tend to slap themselves wherever they want, with html/css dialogues that don't fit the UI, and there's often like 6 versions of an extension that's like "this one is deprecated, but also the other one is deprecated, but the new one is made by microsoft but it's actually 3 extensions now." Whereas generally jetbrains extensions fit within my action panel, toolbar items, and can move widgets to different sides of the UI so that version control stuff, code analysis/structure stuff, external integration/database stuff, and project trees all get their own dedicated part of the workspace

True. Doesn't solve the other issue tho. Heck, I work on rust a lot, and rustrover is free

And they get cheaper the longer you hold the license

Yes, if you use some of them, if you use more of them they become more expensive so the toolbox is a good idea. Still expensive, but usually if you need this you either are a power user or you make money on what you are doing.

If your work can’t afford less than $20/seat/month for business-critical software, I’d start looking for a new job because your paychecks are about to dry up, anyway.

Tell your boss that it's even more expensive to have your foot up his ass. And tell it like Red Foreman

Core development tools licenses are too expensive? That's an odd company or from a very low standard country?