In general, I believe most Developers always tend to look for using Free or Open Source Tools.

And the fact is, thanks to the amazing community of Open Source Developers, you can have all the essential development tools for free!

A personal fact, and maybe it´s something that comes with the age or experience, and by getting a better understanding of how valuable development time is, I am realizing that I am more open than ever to pay a fair price for top quality software, sponsoring other Devs, etc.

So I decided to write this article, to open the discussion: What paid software do you use on a daily basis that you can´t live without?

It doesn't need to be a Software per se, can be some site template you bought, for example. Some resource or tool that you gladly paid for it, that makes your life as Dev much easier.

I can start naming a few:

Jetbrains IDEs

While there are awesome Open Source Code Editors like VS Code, JetBrains IDEs are very popular and powerful.

Some of the features I highlight are the powerful refactoring tools and much more reliable and faster code completion.

I use a mix of VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs (Goland, PHPStorm, WebStorm) but for more "serious" and complex projects, I tend to prefer Jetbrains IDEs.

VSCode is closing the gap and has many more contributions in terms of Extensions and I would love to use it fully, but there are some tasks that Jetbrains is still far superior.

It´s definitely a very powerful software that you might be willing to pay for.

Cacher

Cacher is a Code Snippets management tool that helps to organize your snippets library with labels and a powerful search engine and everything is Synced to GitHub Gist.

It´s cross-platform and also provides deep integration with the most popular Editors like VS Code, Jetbrains, Atom, and Sublime.

I couldn´t find anything free with this level of quality and features.

With the usage I am giving to, the personal plan of 6$/month is completely worth it.

Tailwind UI

TailwindUI is not an application but I think it deserves a mention here.

It is a blessing for backend developers like me who suck at design.

It provides a high-quality set of all kinds of components for building any kind of Web UI, from an application to marketing and landing pages.
The components are pure HTML with Tailwind CSS.

You can see what is included here

The price range from $149 to 249$ one-time payment.

It can look expensive but believe me, it´s an amazing toolkit for building good looking websites and you can see the amount of work put on it.

If you want to build a web application but suck at design, it´s a great investment.

Now, I want to hear from you!

And also start streaming your micro-payments. Let´s see how this Web Monetization thingy really works. 😛