From what I understand, starting with V13 personal licenses will include 1 year free upgrades. I thought V12 licenses younger than 1 year will work with V13, but that's not the case. I like the IDE, but I will stick with v12 for now.

1 year of updates not upgrades. Otherwise you'd only "need" to buy an upgrade every other year.

In the article linked it says "Both personal and commercial licenses now include 1-year upgrade subscription. For more information on the new pricing and licensing options for IntelliJ IDEA, please visit ..."

Go to the Upgrade link: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/index.jsp

It will ask you for your license key when you click the upgrade now and send you the info over email.

It seems to be 180 EUR for new developers.

It's a great IDE and totally worth the money.

Excluding VAT. But, it's well worth the money if you are doing JVM development daily.

Besides that, the community edition is a good place to start if you do not need J2EE, servlet container support, etc.