A lifetime license for Microsoft’s latest IDE is only $30 right now

TL;DR: Visual Studio Professional 2026 is Microsoft’s full IDE, and a lifetime license is on sale for $30 through October 11.

Professional IDEs usually have a recurring license fee, and you keep paying it as long as you write code. Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2026 is the full 64-bit version of the IDE for Windows, but you don’t need to pay a recurring fee to use it. During this limited-time sale, you can get a lifetime license for just $29.97.

Because Visual Studio Pro 2026 is a 64-bit IDE, it can handle large solutions and heavy workloads without slowing down. You can build mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI, write web interfaces in C# with Blazor, and build and debug .NET and C++ apps for Windows, Linux, and containers. Hot reload updates a running app right away, so you don’t have to restart after every change.