The "infinite free trial" model surely helps them indirectly. It expands the user base, which expands the plugin ecosystem, which sells licenses... because when you choose a text editor, you're choosing it for the ecosystem as much as for the editor itself.

There are AFAIK only two full-time employees (Jon Skinner and Will Bond) so they don't need to sell a ton of licenses.

If they sell 6,000 licenses a year that nets them nearly $500K/year in revenue.

Please note that the "6,000" there was totally invented by me. I just estimated how many licenses they need to sell to reach half a mil. I don't know if they sell 1,000 a year or 100,000 a year... I'd be really curious to know how many they sell.

It's cheap. I use it ten hours every day. It costs less than I would charge for an hour of consulting. Ok so I do live in one of the most expensive countries in the world but even in a developing country a developer don't have to work long to pay for this license for a tool they would use a lot every day.

It's not cheap compared to other software, and not cheap compared to most text editors and even most IDEs.

I didn't say it's not worth it, I said it's not cheap. It's not.

Less than one hour working time for the core software used when developing is cheap.

A lot of software is very under priced in terms of value. The App Store and SaaS copycats pricing doesn't reflect the value or the cost of software - you need big volumes and many go bust due to no profits.

I paid for ST2 in 2012. Five years later the upgrade price is only $30. Should have been more.