I also pay for JB tools. But that's because it's well beyond me or other open source developers to make a product that's competitive with it, and the competition is well behind (VS Code and Eclipse are good, but once you learn IntelliJ more advanced stuff, you feel like a programming God - something worth paying for ;) ). An IDE is insanely complex nowadays. I am not sure what Kite had in mind, but to me, what they were proposing would be "just" an IntelliJ Plugin. And I don't pay, and can't see myself paying, for any plugin.