[bluecalm]

I would pay at least 300$/month just for hobby projects. The tools are absolutely amazing at things I am the worst at: getting a good overview on a new field/library/docs, writing boilerplate and first working examples, dealing with dependencies and configurations etc. I would pay that even if they never improve and never help to write any actual business logic or algorithms.

Simple queries like: "Find a good compression library that meets the following requirements: ..." and then "write a working example that takes this data, compresses it and writes it to output buffer" are worth multiple hours I would otherwise need to spend on it.

If I wanted to ship commercial software again I would pay much more.