Is it true that if you start writing in C# you will have to pay (for example, IDE, Unity, or something else)?

Question

Mono

In many sites they write that if you want to write in C # - PAY (It was on Habré, I don’t remember what the article is called). While reading about the pros or cons of C#, I came across this minus --->
*The majority of the C# development community uses Microsoft products which are not all free and open-source. As you get into the enterprise level of some of these products and subscriptions, the expense is multiple factors of 10 greater.
While you can use a fully open-source and free C# environment, the community around that is much smaller. While this can be said for other languages ​​as well, the majority of C# falls into the for-pay Microsoft realm.*

Answer 1

Not true, there are free versions of the IDE and their capabilities are more than enough for full-fledged development.
As for unity, you will have to pay if your game is commercially successful.

Answer 2

After MS moved many key components of dotnet to open source (not all of course, but much better than nothing at all), you need to pay about the same as everywhere else - for advanced IDE features that help YOU earn money. If you have jobs for more than 5-10 developers, and accordingly it brings you enough money to pay them and keep yourself, then you will be happy to pay for these opportunities - all the same, the time of specialists is certainly more expensive.
And if not, then you don't need it. In the same Community studio, the debugger is also available, and even the profiler can already be used. There are just no chips that are convenient when you need to save expensive time or debug nasty hard-to-reproduce bugs. In any case, such a tough vendor-lock as it was 10 years ago, when only Mono competed with the .net framework, is no longer there.

Answer 3

Quite simply - with an annual turnover of less than a million dollars - you can work for free. More - there are already moments, but with a million dollars in turnover - completely different issues will be taken care of.

Answer 4

Right.
But this is true for any stack (Go, PHP, JS, Ruby, Python, Java, etc.) if you want to use efficient tools.
And this efficiency will pay off.