Personally, being somewhat technically inclined I find there is rarely much of a reason to pay for the ongoing use of software. The large majority of software I use is open source and self-hostable. The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them, if programming was my livelihood (and I didn't have an employer to pay for them). But programming is just a hobby for me so I'm not inclined to pay for an IDE. Really the only class of software I occasionally pay for is games, but that is always a once-off payment, I don't subscribe for anything.
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
I understand this is tangential to your point, but..
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.
I think JetBrains is in general a very consumer friendly company. They contribute heavily to open source as well.