Those are outliers, and even then most people I know with a GitHub account are using it for free. Same with IntelliJ - most of us at Google were using the Community Edition.
Andy Gocke put it on twitter better than I've ever seen it anywhere else:
'Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth.'
I mean, as a hobbyist, and for side projects, I would use my teeth.
But for the company I work for, I don't care. I would recommend my employer the fastest and easiest tool. And my employer usually don't want to spend engineering time on reinventing wheels.
If I were to launch a business in this market, the targeted customers can't be individual developers, more likely other businesses.
Like gihub, individual developers who only use their free account are part of github's marketing team.
I chuckled a bit, but you and I know that devs are not savages :)
I'd probably word it differently:
Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to make their own shovels to dig for gold (because it is often cheaper than buying).
