By squeezing out hobbyists and individuals, they're shooting themselves in the foot over the long term.
The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal license, and play with it in my own time.
Going forward they're going to miss out on this word-of-mouth marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales expansion going forward.
My shop cancelled our IDA licenses last year and forced us all to use Ghidra. The struggle lasted like 2 days. We have all been wildly impressed with Ghidra.
They should probably supplement this "expensive corporate SaaS pricing" model with a "free for personal use" option if they want to have any hope of maintaining their standing.
Maybe it's improved since, but last time I used IDA free the cloud decompiler was buggy and weird and it was overall a mediocre experience. I don't see why anyone would choose to use it instead of Ghidra unless they were explicitly trying to learn IDA because it's the industry standard, and I don't see it holding that position long-term unless they improve their free/cheap offerings.
Not sure if they've changed things because I haven't bought a product from them for almost 10 years, but back then the free option was several releases behind the current offering, and lacking many features. Also, back then there was NO free version of HexRays (a separate product).
As of May of this year, IDA Free is a lot less broken now, so they are making some progress. It's no longer ancient and it has the same "cloud based" Hex-Rays that the Home version does, albeit only for x64.
Home also only comes with the x64 "cloud" decompiler, at least if you buy the x86 version.
Having paid for a home license last year (mostly for the ability to run Python scripts) and discovering the home version has a sabotaged python implementation (can only run scripts individually from the GUI instead of running them from the command line, and you don't get the toolkit to develop scripts/plugins), it seems kind of hilarious that the free version is so close in feature set to Home. What's the difference even? They're both for "non-commercial use only", is the (limited) python script interface the only reason to pay $365 a year now? That, Lumina, and email support?
I mean - script support is a big deal for a lot of use cases. I think the other big thing is that unlike Free, you can buy Home for other architectures (although only some and not all other architectures, another incredible mystery).
I'd buy Home if it came in C167, not because I want to but because $365/year is still a lot less time than I'd spend writing/finishing a C167 module for Ghidra.
Anyway, the pricing model doesn't actually make any sense no matter how you slice it, and this latest announcement is even more bizarre. I really wonder how long for this world Hex-Rays products are, the always glacial development pace is still quite slow and as a new generation of people start by using Ghidra, there will IMO be less drive to buy corporate IDA renewals going forward.
They only lose out in the long term by doing this if you believe they can compete in the long term.
If you're an exec at Hex-rays and you believe that Ghidra will eventually out compete you, then it makes sense to squeeze every penny you can before you're irrelevant.
The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal license, and play with it in my own time.
Going forward they're going to miss out on this word-of-mouth marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales expansion going forward.