Being a software developer sometimes plays against you as a regular user. When you understand the software development “kitchen” from inside you become very biased evaluating prices for software. Why $35? Why £120? Why 1800RUB? “I bloody know that it cannot cost that figure!!!“. Obviously, the question is a bit more complex than that visible tiny tip of the iceberg, even for the experienced eye of the software developer.

And you know what, after joining the “dark side” army of Apple users, particularly with Macbook Air, I become much more tolerant paying for software. And the main reason is, you guess?, the easiness of a purchase. With AppStore you just “click-click”, and an application jumps into your Applications in a few seconds. Purchasing directly on web sites is usually simple and smooth as well, especially if you pay using PayPal or Google Wallet.

Moving even further, I listed some apps which I am happy to pay for.

• MacKeeper. In my view this is the number one app for OSX.
• iStat. This is the “must have” number two.
• Sublime. You are a programmer and looking for a text editor? This is the option you won’t regret about.
• Hopper Disassembler. By nature I’m a lower level hacker, so this is the tool I need. I had fallen in love with this app because of the unprecedented feature/price ratio comparing to IDA, its “big brother”.

Now a couple of apps which I also pay for but only because there are no adequate alternatives. I’m more or less happy with functionality but I don’t like their pricing (in short – too much in my view).

• Parallels. Of course, I use VirtualBox as well, but Parallels is so bloody good on OSX.
• ORFO. I’m Russian and always will, so I need a spell and grammar checker integrated into the OS, and ORFO does it pretty well.

However, there is an app, which I’m not willing to pay. Its price is ridiculous. This is the Microsoft Office. Fortunately, the company I work for provided me a license for this product, so I can work with working documents on Mac. When it gets stopped I’ll switch to the Apple alternatives (Pages, Numbers and Keynotes).

And finally, there is an app called Radare. It is free and opensource, and I donated some amount to support this great project (I hope not last time).

P.S.

Of course, there are tons of other free apps (iTerm, 7z, muCommander, Skype, VirtualBox, GitHub, DOSBox, KeePassX, etc.), which I also use but this is a different story.